Happen-quotes
Today is: 9/8/2010
Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was to keep swinging.
-- Hank Aaron --
Business without profit is not business any more than a pickle is candy.
-- Charles F. Abbott --
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
-- Sheik Abd-al-Kadir --
If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders.
-- Hal Abelson --
The best cure for hypochondria is to forget about your body and get interested in somebody else's.
-- Goodman Ace --
Politics makes estranged bedfellows.
-- Goodman Ace --
I will undoubtedly have to seek what is happily known as gainful employment, which I am glad to say does not describe holding public office.
-- Dean Acheson --
Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, but no one can agree on what it is.
-- Diane Ackerman --
I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
-- Diane Ackerman --
I'd rather be a host than a guest. As Beerbohm observed, a happy host is a sad guest.
-- Harold Acton --
I will never consent to have our sex considered in an inferior point of light. Let each planet shine in their own orbit. God and nature designed it so - if man is Lord, women is Lordess - that is what I contend for.
-- Abigail Adams --
We have too many high-sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.
-- Abigail Adams --
Justice, humanity, and benevolence are the duties you owe to society in general. To your country the same duties are incumbent upon you with the additional obligation of sacrificing ease, pleasure, wealth, and life itself for its defense and security.
-- Abigail Adams --
Yosemite valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.
-- Ansel Adams --
A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.
-- Ansel Adams --
All right, so I spend money. Can you name one other extravagance I have?
-- Cindy Adams --
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
-- Douglas Adams --
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
-- Douglas Adams --
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
-- Douglas Adams --
I hate the pollyanna pest who says all is for the best.
-- Franklin P. Adams --
The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are purely imaginary.
-- Franklin P. Adams --
Anybody who finds it easy to make money on the horses is probably in the dog food business.
-- Franklin P. Adams --
Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.
-- Franklin P. Adams --
Health is the thing that makes you feel that now is the best time of the year.
-- Franklin P. Adams --
In the order named, these are the hardest to control: wine, women, and song.
-- Franklin P. Adams --
I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.
-- Franklin P. Adams --
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
-- Henry Adams --
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
-- Henry Brooks Adams --
It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.
-- Henry B. Adams --
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
-- Henry Adams --
No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
-- Henry Brooks Adams --
A man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind.
-- James Adams --
May all your troubles last as long as your New Year's resolutions.
-- Joey Adams --
The most popular labor saving device today is still a husband with money.
-- Joey Adams --
If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security.
-- John Adams --
Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.
-- John Adams --
I can scarcely recollect a single instance of success to anything that I ever undertook. Yet, with fervent gratitude to God, I confess that my life has been equally marked by great and signal success which I neither aimed at nor anticipated.
-- John Quincy Adams --
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
-- John Quincy Adams --
Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear, and obstacles vanish into air.
-- John Quincy Adams --
The great crises of life are not, I think, necessarily those which are in themselves the hardest to bear, but those for which we are least prepared.
-- Mary Adams --
Nature tops the list of potent tranquilizers and stress reducers. The mere sound of moving water has been shown to lower blood pressure.
-- Patch Adams --
Who looks after the psychoanalyst's wife while the psychoanalyst is away being psychoanalyzed?
-- Scarritt Adams --
Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
-- Scott Adams --
Justice discards party, friendship, kindred, and is always, therefore, represented as blind.
-- Joseph Addison --
A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer.
-- Joseph Addison --
We are growing serious, and, let me tell you, that's the very next step to being dull.
-- Joseph Addison --
It is ridiculous for any man to criticize the works of another if he has not distinguished himself by his own performances.
-- Joseph Addison --
Silence never shows itself to so great advantage as when it is made the reply to calumny and defamation.
-- Joseph Addison --
Our disputants put me in mind of the cuttlefish, that when he is unable to extricate himself, blackens all the water about him, till he becomes invisible.
-- Joseph Addison --
We are always doing things for posterity, but I would gladly see posterity do something for us.
-- Joseph Addison --
What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. They are but trifles, to be sure; but, scattered along life's pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.
-- Joseph Addison --
A cloudy day, or a little sunshine, have as great an influence on many constitutions as the most real blessings or misfortunes.
-- Joseph Addison --
Tis pride, rank pride, and haughtiness of soul; I think the Romans call it stoicism.
-- Joseph Addison --
A man's first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart.
-- Joseph Addison --
Early to bed and early to rise is a bad rule for anyone who wishes to become acquainted with our most prominent and influential people.
-- George Ade --
For parlor use, the vague generality is a lifesaver.
-- George Ade --
A friend who is near and dear may in time become as useless as a relative.
-- George Ade --
Tradition is what you resort to when you don't have the time and money to do it right.
-- Kurt H. Adler --
It is always easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
-- Alfred Adler --
The hero is the one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for men to see by. The saint is the man who walks through the dark paths of the world, himself a light.
-- Felix Adler --
There is no point in our ancestors speaking to us unless we know how to listen.
-- Mortimer Adler --
Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.
-- Stella Adler --
The theater was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation.
-- Stella Adler --
Real giving had its joy in imagining the joy of the receiver. It means choosing, expending time, going out of one's way, thinking of the other as a subject: the opposite of distraction.
-- Thodor W. Adorno --
Human prosperity never rests but always craves more, till blown up with pride it totters and falls. From the opulent mansions pointed at by all passers-by none warns it away, none cries, "Let no more riches enter!"
-- Aeschylus --
A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.
-- Aesop --
Every truth has two sides; it is well to look at both sides before we commiit ourselves to either.
-- Aesop's Fables --
Make sure of the bear before you sell his skin.
-- Aesop's Fables --
He who always gives way to others will end in having no principles of his own.
-- Aesop --
It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds.
-- Aesop, The Jay and the Peacock --
Self-conceit may lead to self-destruction.
-- Aesop --
What a splendid head, yet no brain.
-- Aesop --
The shaft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagle's own plumes. We often give our enemies the means of our destruction.
-- Aesop --
The smaller the mind the greater the conceit.
-- Aesop --
It is with our passions, as it is with fire and water, they are good servants but bad masters.
-- Aesop --
Never trust the advice of a man in difficulties.
-- Aesop --
The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.
-- Herbert Agar --
I wonder what it is in the New York air that enables me to sit up till all hours of the night in an atmosphere which in London would make a horse dizzy, but here merely clears the brain.
-- James Agate --
A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn't feel like it. An amateur is a man who can't do his job when he does feel like it.
-- James Agate --
I have views on most matters, and I am as willing as a politician to change most of them.
-- James Agate --
New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
-- James Agate --
In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and of no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again.
-- James Agee --
At the present time there exist problems beyond our ability to solve, not because of theoretical difficulties, but because of insufficient means of mechanical computation.
-- Howard Aiken --
If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
-- Howard Aiken --
If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.
-- Catherine Aird --
Set your expectations high; find men and women whose integrity and values you respect; get their agreement on a course of action; and give them your ultimate trust.
-- John Akers --
In human intimacy there is a secret boundary; neither the experience of being in love nor passion can cross it, though lips be joined together in awful silence, and the heart break asunder with love.
-- Anna Akhmatova --
Life on the farm is a school of patience: you can't hurry the crops or make an ox in two days.
-- Henri Alain --
Posy and pearls, amethyst and gold, forever you and I, our precious love to hold.
-- Astrid Alauda --
He slept beneath the moon, he basked in the sun; he lived a life of going-to-do, and died with nothing done.
-- James Albery --
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
-- Herm Albright --
Only in America could a refugee girl from Europe become secretary of state.
-- Madeline Albright --
There is virtue in country houses, in gardens and orchards, in fields, streams, and groves, in rustic recreations and plain manners, that neither cities nor universities enjoy.
-- Amos Bronson Alcott --
That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with delight and profit.
-- A. B. Alcott --
The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.
-- Amos Bronson Alcott --
Devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very remarkable felicities of expression.
-- Bronson Alcott --
First find the man in yourself if you will inspire manliness in others.
-- Amos Bronson Alcott --
Keep your sense of humor. There's enough stress in the rest of your life to let bad shots ruin a game you're supposed to enjoy.
-- Amy Strum Alcott --
My definition of a philosopher is of a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down.
-- Louisa May Alcott --
I had a pleasant time with my mind, for it was happy.
-- Louisa May Alcott --
I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.
-- Louisa May Alcott --
I don't think secrets agree with me; I feel rumpled up in my mind since you told me that.
-- Louisa May Alcott --
It isn't necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It's only necessary to be rich.
-- Alan Alda --
Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart.
-- Alan Alda --
There is not enough darkness in all the world to put out the light of even one small candle.
-- Robert Alden --
Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.
-- Brian Aldiss --
What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, stardust, or sea foam, flower or winged air.
-- Thomas Bailey Aldrich --
How great are the dangers I face to win a good name in Athens.
-- Alexander the Great --
Harold (Robbins) could be the best conversationalist in the world - if he ever found anyone he thought worth talking to.
-- H. Alexander --
Letters are expectation packed in an envelope.
-- Shana Alexander --
A handwritten, personal letter has become a genuine modern-day luxury, like a child's pony ride.
-- Shana Alexander --
Providence sees to it that no man gets happiness out of crime.
-- Vittorio Alfieri --
If a problem is too difficult to solve, one cannot claim that it is solved by pointing at all the efforts made to solve it.
-- Hannes Alfven --
The flower we do not pluck is the only which never loses its beauty or its fragrance.
-- W. R. Alger --
The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.
-- Nelson Algren --
I have said I am the greatest. Ain't nobody ever heard me say I was the smartest.
-- Muhammad Ali --
Advice to a young man: Stay in college, get the knowledge. And stay there until you're through. If they can make penicillin out of moldy bread, they sure can make something out of you.
-- Muhammad Ali --
The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.
-- Muhammad Ali --
To be a great champion, you must believe you are the best. If you're not, pretend you are.
-- Muhammad Ali --
I am the astronaut of boxing. Joe Louis and Dempsey were just jet pilots. I'm in a world of my own.
-- Muhammad Ali --
Art, as far as it is able, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master; thus your art must be, as it were, God's grandchild.
-- Dante Alighieri --
The penguin flies backwards because he doesn't care to see where he's going, but wants to see where he's been.
-- Fred Allen --
I learned law so well, the day I graduated I sued the college, won the case and got my tuition back.
-- Fred Allen --
Was she old? When they lit the candles on her birthday cake, six people were overcome by the heat.
-- Fred Allen --
I like long walks. Especially when they're taken by people who annoy me.
-- Fred Allen --
If I could get my membership fee back, I'd resign from the human race.
-- Fred Allen --
Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.
-- Fred Allen --
He writes so well he makes me feel like putting my quill back in the goose.
-- Fred Allen --
An associate producer is the only guy in Hollywood who will associate with a producer.
-- Fred Allen --
A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide nothing can be done.
-- Fred Allen --
The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.
-- Fred Allen --
I always have trouble remembering three things: faces, names, and - I can’t remember what the third thing is.
-- Fred Allen --
His hobby is collecting old echoes.
-- Fred Allen --
I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.
-- Fred Allen --
Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for movie stars.
-- Fred Allen --
The head of our advertising agency suffered from claustrophobia so he had to stay out of Rhode Island.
-- Fred Allen --
An advertising agency is eighty-five percent confusion and fifteen percent commission.
-- Fred Allen --
Jumping at several small opportunities may get us there more quickly than waiting for the big one to come along.
-- Hugh Allen --
If I can't blow up the world in the first ten seconds, then the show is a flop.
-- Irwin Allen --
You will become as small as your controlling desire, as great as your dominant aspiration.
-- James Allen --
Work joyfully and peacefully, knowing that right thoughts and right efforts will bring about right results.
-- James L. Allen --
Many an optimist has become rich by buying out a pessimist.
-- Robert Allen --
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
-- Woody Allen --
Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once.
-- Woody Allen --
I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens.
-- Woody Allen --
How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?
-- Woody Allen --
There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?
-- Woody Allen --
If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
-- Woody Allen --
They reside with my father - who polishes them. Well, I'm certainly not going to put Oscars in my house.
-- Woody Allen --
I'm astounded by people who want to "know" the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.
-- Woody Allen --
It is impossible to experience one's death objectively and still carry a tune.
-- Woody Allen --
My education was dismal. I went to a series of schools for mentally disturbed teachers.
-- Woody Allen --
Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.
-- Woody Allen --
Sex without love is an empty experience, but, as empty experiences go, it's one of the best.
-- Woody Allen --
How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given my waist and shirt size?
-- Woody Allen --
I tended to place my wife under a pedestal.
-- Woody Allen --
Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.
-- Woody Allen --
My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.
-- Woody Allen --
His mistaken belief in his own superiority cuts him off from reality as completely as if he were living in a colored glass jar.
-- Margery Allingham --
There is a story of an Oxford student who once remarked, "I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didn't like."
-- Gordon Allport --
There's a kind of blackmail that only the family can exercise over you and it is more powerful than anything the whole of society can do to you.
-- Pedro Almodovar --
We begin by fooling others and end by fooling ourselves.
-- Eric Alterman --
If this was adulthood, the only improvement she could detect in her situation was that she could now eat dessert without eating her vegetables.
-- Lisa Alther --
I've about had it - the agencies, the winking, the networks, the ratings. Anyone who thinks TV is an art medium is crazy - it's an advertising medium.
-- Robert Altman --
Look around the table. If you don't see a sucker, get up, because you're the sucker.
-- Amarillo Slim --
No man can be a sound lawyer who is not well-read in the laws of Moses.
-- Fisher Ames --
Every life is a profession of faith, and exercises an inevitable and silent propaganda. As far as lies in its power, it tends to transform the universe and humanity into its own image.
-- Henri Amiel --
Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.
-- Henri Frederic Amiel --
Blessed be childhood which brings down something of heaven into the midst of our rough earthliness.
-- Henri F. Amiel --
There is only one way of not hating those who do us wrong, and that is by doing them good.
-- Henri Amiel --
Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires but according to our powers.
-- Amiel --
Learn to be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not.
-- Henri Frederic Amiel --
Action and faith enslave thought, both of them in order not to be troubled or inconvenienced by reflection, criticism, and doubt.
-- Henri Frederic Amiel --
The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides. Accept life, and you must accept regret.
-- Henri Amiel --
Life is short, and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh, be swift to live, make haste to be kind!
-- Henri Frederic Amiel --
Music is harmony; Harmony is perfection; Perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.
-- Henri Frederic Amiel --
An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains.
-- Henri Amiel --
If you can't annoy somebody with what you write, I think there's little point in writing.
-- Kingsley Amis --
A bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn't allow it to spoil your lunch.
-- Kingsley Amis --
Just living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower.
-- Hans Christian Andersen --
I go about looking at horses and cattle. They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young. I am sick with envy of them.
-- Sherwood Andersen --
Tattoo - what a loaded word it is, rife with associations to goons, goofs, bikers, tribal warriors, carnival artists, drunken sailors and floozies.
-- Jon Anderson --
My greatest enemy is reality. I have fought it successfully for thirty years.
-- Margaret Anderson --
The interest in the lives of others, the high evaluation of these lives, what are they but the overflow of the interest he finds in himself, the values he attributes to his own being?
-- Sherwood Anderson --
It's a mystery. All I did was wear this bikini in "Dr. No" - not even a small one - and whoosh! Overnight I've made it.
-- Ursula Andress --
You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right.
-- Maya Angelou --
I always knew that fury was my natural enemy. It clotted my blood and clogged my pores. It literally blinded me so that I lost my peripheral vision.
-- Maya Angelou --
Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.
-- Maya Angelou --
The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.
-- Maya Angelou --
There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.
-- Maya Angelou --
Nothing will work unless you do.
-- Maya Angelou --
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
-- Maya Angelou --
The greater your capacity to love, the greater your capacity to feel the pain.
-- Jennifer Aniston --
Oh, love is real enough, you will find it some day but it has one archenemy, and that is life.
-- Jean Anouilh --
Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.
-- Jean Anouilh --
Everything ends this way in France. Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindlings. affairs of state - everything is a pretext for a good dinner.
-- Jean Anouith --
Some people are willing to work only if they can start at the top and work up.
-- Dr. Robert Anthony --
If you are honest because honesty is the best policy, then your honesty is corrupt.
-- Dr. Robert Anthony --
If you are honest because honesty is the best policy, then your honesty is corrupt.
-- Dr. Robert Anthony --
Your enemy might become your friend, if you allow him to become who he is.
-- Dr. Robert Anthony --
Others can stop you temporarily. Only you can do it permanently.
-- Dr. Robert Anthony --
Your interpretation of what you see and hear is just that - your interpretation.
-- Dr. Robert Anthony --
Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.
-- Susan B. Anthony --
Nature and certainty are very hard to come at, and infallibility is mere vanity and pretense.
-- Marcus Antoninus --
I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.
-- Sir Edward Appleton --
He who is dying of hunger must be fed rather than taught.
-- Thomas Aquinas --
Dear, never forget one little point. It's my business. You just work here.
-- Elizabeth Arden, To Her Husband --
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.
-- Hannah Arendt --
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
-- Hannah Arendt --
It is well known that the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.
-- Hannah Arendt --
Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
-- Hannah Arendt --
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.
-- Hannah Arendt --
He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled.
-- Aristotle --
So poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history.
-- Aristotle --
Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow-ripening fruit.
-- Aristotle --
Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them.
-- Aristotle --
Wit is educated insolence.
-- Aristotle --
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but the inward significance.
-- Aristotle --
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
-- Aristotle --
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
-- Aristotle --
Young people have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things.
-- Aristotle --
He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
-- Aristotle --
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.
-- Aristotle --
The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.
-- Aristotle --
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
-- Aristotle --
Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication, because youth is sweet and they are growing.
-- Aristotle --
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.
-- Aristotle --
Most people would rather get than give affection.
-- Aristotle --
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
-- Aristotle --
We make war that we may live in peace.
-- Aristotle --
Education is the best provision for the journey to old age.
-- Aristotle --
It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.
-- Aristotle --
It is amazing how nice people are to you when they know you are going away.
-- Michael Arlen --
Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.
-- Dick Armey --
Three groups spend other people's money: children, thieves, politicians. All three need supervision.
-- Dick Armey --
Hard labor: a redundancy, like "working mother."
-- Joyce Armor --
There may be luck in getting a job, but there's no luck in keeping it.
-- Ogden Armour --
Here is where people, 0ne frequently finds, Lower their voices And raise their minds.
-- Richard Armour, "Library" --
When it comes to eating, you can sometimes help yourself more by helping yourself less.
-- Richard Armour --
The conscience is a built-in feature / That haunts the sinner, helps the preacher. / Some sins it makes us turn and run from, / But most it simply takes the fun from.
-- Richard Armour --
I keep the telephone of my mind open to peace, harmony, health, love, and abundance. Then, whenever doubt, anxiety or fear try to call me, they keep getting a busy signal - and soon they'll forget my number.
-- Edith Armstrong --
Toil and be strong. By toil the flaccid nerves grow firm, and gain a more compacted tone.
-- J. Armstrong --
Houston, tranquility base here. The "Eagle" has landed.
-- Neil A. Armstrong --
A cat refuses to be the object of sentimentality - If she doesn't want to be cuddled. that's it.
-- Samantha Armstrong --
I am convinced that the Muses and the Graces never thought of having breakfast anywhere but in bed.
-- Mary Arnim --
The worst bankrupt in the world is the person who has lost his enthusiasm.
-- H. W. Arnold --
France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.
-- Mathew Arnold --
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
-- Matthew Arnold --
Culture is "to know the best that has been said and thought in the world."
-- Matthew Arnold --
The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
-- Matthew Arnold --
We do not what we ought; What we ought not, we do; And lean upon the thought, that chance will bring us through.
-- Matthew Arnold --
I never had a huge need to be a big movie star or a billionaire.
-- Patricia Arquette --
The best way you can surprise a woman with an anniversary gift is to give her just what she wanted.
-- Arbuth Arundale --
Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.
-- Sholem Asch --
There is no such whetstone, to sharpen a good wit and encourage a will to learning, as is praise.
-- Roger Ascham --
Through politics men can learn to use ballots instead of bullets, symbols instead of weapons.
-- M. Ascoli --
Sandwich every bit of criticism between two heavy layers of praise.
-- Mary Kay Ash --
If you think you can, you're right. And if you think you can't, you're right.
-- Mary Kay Ash --
True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to server others at whatever cost.
-- Arthur Ashe --
I learned to play tennis because the tennis courts were the closest athletic facility to my house.
-- Arthur Ashe --
In a great romance, each person basically plays a part that the other really likes.
-- Elizabeth Ashley --
People pay all that money to sit in a chair in the theater mainly because it is a respectable way to see and experience things they cannot see and experience in their own lives.
-- Elizabeth Ashley --
We must find methods of maintaining a healthy ecological balance on earth. If there is any spare effort left over from these absolute necessities, we can put them into other projects - otherwise not.
-- Isaac Asimov --
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
-- Isaac Asimov --
Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.
-- Herbert Henry Asquith --
She tells enough white lies to ice a wedding cake.
-- Margot Asquith --
He's very clever, but sometimes his brains go to his head.
-- Margot Asquith --
Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you've got to start young.
-- Fred Astaire --
Fetters of gold are still fetters, and the softest lining can never make them so easy as liberty.
-- Mary Astell --
In a story, the craftsmanship is fully exposed. A novel is like charity; it covers a multitude of faults.
-- Thea Astley --
From the American newspapers you'd think America was populated solely by naked women and cinema stars.
-- Lady Astor --
It isn't the common man at all who is important; it's the uncommon man.
-- Lady Nancy Astor --
We women do talk too much, but even then we don't tell half of what we know.
-- Nancy Astor --
I refuse to admit that I am more than fifty-two, even if that does make my sons illegitimate.
-- Lady Astor --
It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.
-- Brooks Atkinson --
This nation was built by men who took risks - pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness, business men who were not afraid of failure, scientists who were not afraid of the truth, thinkers who were not afraid of progress, dreamers who were not afraid of action.
-- Brooks Atkinson --
In every age "the good old days" were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.
-- Brooks Atkinson --
Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.
-- Clement Attlee --
LSD? Nothing much happened, but I did get the distinct impression that some birds were trying to communicate with me.
-- W. H. Auden --
Dance till the stars come down from the rafters Dance, Dance, Dance till you drop.
-- W. H. Auden --
When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
-- W. H. Auden --
Your cameraman might enjoy himself, because my face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.
-- W. H. Auden --
And make us as Newton was, who in his garden watching the apple falling towards England, became aware between himself and her of an eternal tie.
-- W. H. Auden --
Among those whom I like, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
-- W. H. Auden --
No opera plot can be sensible, for in sensible situations people do not sing.
-- W. H. Auden --
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar, and is shocked by the unexpected: the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel, and is bored by repetition.
-- W. H. Auden --
It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.
-- W. H. Auden --
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.
-- W. H. Auden --
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
-- W. H. Auden --
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
-- W. H. Auden --
God brings men into deep waters, not to drown them, but to cleanse them.
-- John Aughey --
He who is good is free, even if he is a slave. He who is evil is a slave, even if he is a king.
-- Augustine of Hippo --
Bulls do not win bullfights. People do. People do not win people fights. Lawyers do.
-- Norman R. Augustine --
The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.
-- Marcus Aurelius --
Nothing is so conducive to greatness of mind as the ability to examine systematically and honestly everything that meets us in life.
-- Marcus Aurelius --
Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.
-- Marcus Aurelius --
A man does not sin by commission only, but often by omission
-- Marcus Aurelius --
Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. be one.
-- Marcus Aurelius --
Everything that happens, happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so.
-- Marcus Aurelius --
A man makes no noise over a good deed, but passes on to another.
-- Marcus Aurelius --
Nothing more detestable does the earth produce than an ungrateful man.
-- Ausonius --
There is not one in a hundred of either sex who is not taken in when they marry... It is, of all transactions, the one in which people expect most from others, and are least honest themselves.
-- Jane Austen --
Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply.
-- Jane Austen --
One man's way may be as good as another, but we all like our own best.
-- Jane Austen --
The younger brother must help to pay for the pleasures of the elder.
-- Jane Austen --
He and I should not in the least agree of course, in our ideas of nobels and heroines; pictures of perfection as you know make me sick and wicked.
-- Jane Austen --
A woman is not to marry a man merely because she is asked, or because he is attached to her, and can write a tolerable letter.
-- Jane Austen --
Ah! There is nothing like staying at home, for real comfort.
-- Jane Austen --
One cannot always be laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.
-- Jane Austen --
We met Dr. Hall in such very deep mourning that either his mother, his wife, or himself must be dead.
-- Jane Austen --
Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!
-- Jane Austen --
I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them.
-- Jane Austen --
She was not a woman of many words: for, unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas.
-- Jane Austen --
One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
-- Jane Austen, "Emma" --
Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.
-- Jane Austen, "Mansfield Park" --
Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.
-- Jane Austen, "Emma" --
One of the conditions of being human is that, even if we're surrounded by others, we essentially live our lives alone: Real life takes place inside us.
-- Paul Auster --
There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.
-- Alfred Austin --
This is when we say "words fail" and mean this literally. We should need new words. The old ones just would not fit. They aren't meant to cover this kind of case.
-- John Austin, on Kafka's "Metamorphosis" --
People would be surprised to know how much I learned about prayer from playing poker.
-- Mary Austin --
I should like my epitaph to say, “He helped people see God in the ordinary things of life, and he made children laugh.”
-- Rev. W. Awdry --
I honestly don't think you possibly share a small tent for any length of time with someone who's ebullient.
-- Alan Ayckbourn --
Our business in life is not to get ahead of other people, but to get ahead of ourselves.
-- M. D. Babcock --
Better to lose count while naming your blessings than to lose your blessings to counting your troubles.
-- Maltbie D. Babcock --
Let him who would enjoy a good future waste none of his present.
-- Roger Babson --
I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.
-- Lauren Bacall --
Your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.
-- Lauren Bacall --
What I learned from Mr. Bogart - I learned from a master, and that, God knows, has stood me in very good stead.
-- Lauren Bacall --
There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
-- Bach --
The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
-- Richard Bach --
What the student calls a tragedy, the master calls a butterfly.
-- Richard Bach --
The questions are diamonds you hold in the light. Study a lifetime and you see different colors from the same jewel. The same questions, asked again, bring you just the answers you need just the minute you need them.
-- Richard Bach --
Take only pictures and leave only footprints.
-- The Backpacker's Code --
Many a man owes his success to his first wife and his second wife to his success.
-- Jim Backus --
As the births of living creatures, at first, are ill-shapen: so are all innovations, which are the birth of time.
-- Francis Bacon --
I've been a film star so long that I don't know what it would feel like not to be one.
-- Kevin Bacon --
Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt.
-- Roger Bacon --
Suspicions amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds; they ever fly by twilight.
-- Francis Bacon --
In taking revenge a man is equal to his enemy, but in passing it over he is his superior.
-- Bacon --
Philosophy, when superficially studied, excites doubt; when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.
-- Francis Bacon --
The sun, though it passes through dirty places, yet remains as pure as before.
-- Francis Bacon --
A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal.
-- Francis Bacon --
I knew one that when he wrote a letter he would put that which was most material in the postscript, as if it had been a bymatter.
-- Francis Bacon --
It is in life as it is in ways. The shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.
-- Francis Bacon --
The genius, wit, and spirit of a nation are discovered in its proverbs.
-- Francis Bacon --
Knowledge itself is power.
-- Francis Bacon --
The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.
-- Francis Bacon --
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
-- Francis Bacon --
Love can find an entrance, not only into an open heart, but also into a heart well fortified, if watch be not well kept.
-- Francis Bacon --
Praise from the common people is generally false, and rather follows the vain than the virtuous.
-- Sir Francis Bacon --
A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
-- Sir Francis Bacon --
He of whom many are afraid ought to fear many.
-- Sir Francis Bacon --
Discretion in speech is more than eloquence.
-- Sir Francis Bacon --
Without friends, the world is but a wilderness.
-- Francis Bacon --
Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man's nature runs to the more ought law to weed it out.
-- Sir Francis Bacon --
Alimony is like buying oats for a dead horse.
-- Arthur Baer --
A newspaper is a circulating library with high blood pressure.
-- Arthur "Bugs" Baer --
A good neighbor is a fellow who smiles at you over the back fence but doesn't climb over it.
-- Arthur "Bugs" Baer --
You can take a boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy.
-- Arthur "Bugs" Baer --
The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.
-- Joan Baez --
Public opinion requires us to think other men's thought, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.
-- Walter Bagehot --
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
-- Walter Bagehot --
The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.
-- Walter Bagehot --
An inability to stay quiet is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.
-- Walter Bagehot --
Poverty is an anomaly to rich people; it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.
-- Walter Bagehot --
Why do birds sing in the morning? It's the triumphant shout: “We got through another night.”
-- Enid Bagnold --
The fear is worse than the pain.
-- Shannon Bahr --
The origin of civilization is man's determination to do nothing for himself which he can get done for him.
-- H. C. Bailey --
Any young man with good health and a poor appetite can save up money.
-- J. Bailey --
What the world really needs is more love and less paperwork.
-- Pearl Bailey --
There are two kinds of talent, man-made talent and God-given talent. With man-made talent you have to work very hard. With God-given talent, you just touch it up once in a while.
-- Pearl Bailey --
One is tempted to say that old myths never die; they just become embedded in the textbooks.
-- Thomas A. Bailey --
Son, you have to guard against speaking more clearly than you think.
-- Howard Baker's Father --
Lobbies exist to behave swinishly on behalf of people too delicate to behave swinishly for themselves.
-- Russell Baker --
While edging toward a coma during the endless years of baseball this weekend, I suddenly realized I didn't know what a slider was.
-- Russell Baker --
Life is always walking up to us and saying, "Come on in, the living's fine," and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.
-- Russell Baker --
The magic of children is their ability to cloud our memories so that when we look back we recall only the golden moments, the sweet laughter and the sentimental tears, and none of the awful trials.
-- Russell Baker --
When compelled to cook, I produce a meal that would make a sword-swallower gag.
-- Russell Baker --
Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don't work, those that break down, and those that get lost.
-- Russell Baker --
Character builds slowly, but it can be torn down with incredible swiftness.
-- Faith Baldwin --
One thing I know about march - whether it storms or shines, it is the key to spring.
-- Faith Baldwin --
We live in an age when silence is not only criminal but suicidal. If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.
-- James Baldwin --
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
-- James Baldwin --
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
-- James Baldwin --
The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
-- James Baldwin --
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart, for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
-- James Baldwin --
When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
-- James Baldwin --
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
-- James Arthur Baldwin --
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
-- James Baldwin --
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
-- James Baldwin --
The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
-- James Baldwin --
I thought he was a young man of promise, but it appears he is a young man of promises.
-- Arthur James Balfour --
Civilization is the upward struggle of mankind, in which millions are trampled to death that thousands may mount on their bodies.
-- Charles Balfour --
He who fishes for compliments can expect to be handed a line.
-- Ivern Ball --
In life, all things come hard, but wisdom is the hardest to come by.
-- Lucille Ball --
Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.
-- Lucille Ball --
Ever notice that people never say "It's only a game" when they're winning?
-- Ivern Ball --
In my ballets, woman is first, men are consorts. God made men to sing the praises of women. They are not equal to men; they are better.
-- George Ballanchine --
Californians are good at planning for the earthquake, while simultaneously denying it will happen.
-- Sheila Ballantyne --
A single bad habit will mar an otherwise flawless character as a single ink drop soils the pure white page.
-- Hosea Ballou --
He stood spellbound, like a child to whom his nurse is telling him some wonderful story.
-- Honere De Balzac --
Talent, like gout, sometimes skips two generations.
-- Honore De Balzac --
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
-- Honore de Balzac --
Society, like the Roman youth at the circus, never shows mercy to the fallen gladiator.
-- Balzac --
It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.
-- Honore de Balzac --
She walked with a proud, defiant step, like a martyr to the coliseum.
-- Honore De Balzac --
In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
-- Honore De Balzac --
Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice.
-- Honore Balzac --
The measure of the progress of civilization is the progress of the people.
-- George Bancroft --
By common consent gray hairs are a crown of glory; the only object of respect that can never excite envy.
-- George Bancroft --
The less I behave like Whistler's Mother the night before, the more I look like her the morning after.
-- Tallulah Bankhead --
I was a hedonist long before I knew what a hedonist was.
-- Tallulah Bankhead --
It's one of the tragic ironies of the theater that only one man in it can count on steady work, the night watchman.
-- Tallulah Bankhead --
I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right.
-- Tallulah Bankhead --
I read Shakespeare and the Bible and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education.
-- Tallulah Bankhead --
Facts do not make history; facts do not even make events. A fact is an isolated particle of experience, is reflected light without a source, planet with no sun, star without constellation, constellation beyond galaxy, galaxy outside the universe - fact is nothing.
-- Russell Banks --
She never quite leaves her children at home, even when she doesn't take them along.
-- Margaret Culkin Banning --
Athletics is a luxury.
-- Roger Bannister --
The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win.
-- Roger Bannister --
The reason that good women flock to see my pictures is that there is a little bit of vampire instinct in every woman.
-- Theta Bara --
God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air-conditioning.
-- Imamu Amiri Baraka --
I gave my beauty and my youth to men. I am going to give my wisdom and experience to animals.
-- Brigitte Bardot --
The cinema means nothing to me, I cannot remember it.
-- Brigitte Bardot --
They say they climb mountains because they are there. I wonder if it would astound them to know that the very same reason is why the rest of us go around them.
-- S. Omar Barker --
The best audience is intelligent, well educated and a little drunk.
-- Alben W. Barkley --
If I weren't earning three million dollars a year to dunk a basketball, most people on the street would run in the other direction if they saw me coming.
-- Charles Barkley --
We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart.
-- Djuna Barnes --
There's a sucker born every minute.
-- P. T. Barnum --
Money is, in some respects, like fire; it is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.
-- P. T. Barnum --
More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing than by believing in too much.
-- P. T. Barnum --
Experts say you should never hit your children in anger. When is a good time? When you're feeling festive?
-- Roseanne --
When it comes to getting things done, we need fewer architects and more bricklayers.
-- Colleen C. Barrett --
Nothing can be accomplished by denying that man is an essentially troubled being, except to make more trouble.
-- William Barrett --
You have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip.
-- J. M. Barrie --
The reason birds can fly and we can't is simply that they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.
-- James M. Barrie --
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.
-- J. M. Barrie --
When the first baby laughed for the first time, his laugh broke into a million pieces, and they all went skipping about. That was the beginning of fairies.
-- J. M. Barrie --
No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.
-- Dave Barry --
I have come up with a sure-fire concept for a hit television show, which would be called, "A Live Celebrity Gets Eaten by a Shark."
-- Dave Barry --
The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside we all believe that we are above-average drivers.
-- Dave Barry --
If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be "meetings."
-- Dave Barry --
I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me.
-- Dave Barry --
Crabgrass can grow on bowling balls in airless rooms, and there is no known way to kill it that does not involve nuclear weapons.
-- Dave Barry --
Both your socks should always be the same color, or at least both be fairly dark.
-- Dave Barry --
The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl.
-- Dave Barry --
Skiing combines outdoor fun with knocking down trees with your face.
-- Dave Barry --
Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke.
-- Lynda Barry --
The people are unreal. The flowers are unreal, they don't smell. The fruit is unreal, it doesn't taste of anything. The whole place is a glaring, gaudy, nightmarish set, built up in the desert.
-- Ethel Barrymore, on Hollywood --
Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn't know you left open.
-- John Barrymore --
The trouble with this life is that there are so many beautiful women and so little time.
-- John Barrymore --
It (rain) sounds like all the little beggars of the world, tapping their canes and crutches on the roof as they go out to ask for bread.
-- John Barrymore --
If it isn't the sheriff, it's the finance company. I've got more attachments on me than a vacuum cleaner.
-- John Barrymore --
Happiness sneaks in through a door you didn't know you left open.
-- John Barrymore --
The good die young - because they see no point in living if you have to be good.
-- John Barrymore --
If tolerance of diversity involves an admitted element of risk to national unity, intolerance involves a certainty that unity will be destroyed.
-- Alan Barth --
All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
-- Roland Barthes --
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.
-- Roland Barthes --
Cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals, the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists.
-- Roland Barthes --
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
-- Albert A. Bartlett --
I am a speculator. The word comes from the latin "speculari," which means "observe." I observe.
-- Bernard Baruch --
I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am.
-- Bernard Baruch --
Even when we know what is right, too often we fail to act. More often we grab greedily for the day letting tomorrow bring what it will, putting off the unpleasant and unpopular.
-- Bernard M. Baruch --
If you get all the facts, your judgment can be right; if you don't get all the facts, it can't be right.
-- Bernard M. Baruch --
The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them.
-- Bernard M. Baruch --
An elder statesman is somebody old enough to know his own mind and to keep quiet about it.
-- Bernard M. Baruch --
No man should think himself a zero, and think he can do nothing about the state of the world.
-- Bernard Baruch --
Don't try to buy at the bottom and sell at the top. This can't be done – except by liars.
-- Bernard Baruch --
We can't cross a bridge until we come to it, but I always like to lay down a pontoon ahead of time.
-- Bernard Baruch --
Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing.
-- Bernard Baruch --
What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others.
-- Mary Catherine Bateson --
A Jaywalker is a bird of the Schmo Family who can be found in traffic jams and morgues.
-- Phyllis Battelle --
If you haven't at least a slight poetic crack in the heart, you have been cheated by nature.
-- Phyllis Battelle --
A great speaker is one who rises to the occasion, and promptly sits down.
-- O. A. Battista --
Marriage will fast disappear unless it is limited strictly to only one to a customer.
-- O. A. Battista --
An easy chair is one that is hard to get in and even harder to get out of.
-- O. A. Battista --
The shortest distance between two jokes makes a perfect speech.
-- O. A. Battista --
There is no flower in the world that breathes a sweeter fragrance than a freshly bathed baby.
-- O. A. Battista --
The trouble with some mothers who raise their children by the books is they use the comic books.
-- O. A. Battista --
There is no better medicine for ailing grandparents than baby grandchildren.
-- O. A. Battista --
Frequently the fellow who doesn't let grass grow under his feet is too lazy to plant some.
-- O. A. Battista --
Each time the November elections are over, it's easy to understand why Thanksgiving Day always follows them.
-- O. A. Battista --
One time you can be sure you have twenty-twenty vision is when you go looking for trouble.
-- O. A. Battista --
The only fair way to talk about somebody is to imagine he is listening to every word you say.
-- O. A. Battista --
Tolerance consists in seeing things with your heart instead of with your eyes.
-- O. A. Battista --
When it comes to visitors, the most hospitable ones are those who like to listen.
-- O. A. Battista --
A smart wife is one who knows how to retie the Christmas package her husband has hidden from her.
-- O. A. Battista --
A sick boy is one who comes down with a bug on Saturday morning.
-- O. A. Battista --
The trait most people enjoy inheriting from their ancestors is trust in the form of an estate
-- O. A. Battista --
The man in the greatest danger always is the one who has climbed to the top of the ladder.
-- O. A. Battista --
[victor] Hugo, like a priest, always has his head bowed - bowed so low that he can see nothing except his own navel.
-- Charles Baudelaire --
A precious liquid, a poison dearer than that of the Borgias - because it is made from our blood, our health, our sleep, and two-thirds of our love - we must be stingy with it.
-- Charles Baudelaire, on hatred --
Even if God did not exist, religion would still be holy and divine. God is the only being who, in order to reign, need not even exist.
-- Charles Baudelaire --
Now is the time to get drunk! To stop being the martyred slaves of time to get absolutely drunk - on wine, poetry, or on virtue, as you please.
-- Charles Baudelaire --
I don't kill flies but I like to mess with their minds. I hold them above globes. They freak out and yell, "Whoa, I'm way too high!"
-- Bruce Baum --
I don't know what's wrong with my television set. I was getting C-Span and the Home Shopping Network on the same station. I actually bought a congressman.
-- Bruce Baum --
Too few people truly understand a good sandwich.
-- James Beard --
Perhaps the world's second-worst crime is boredom; the first is being a bore.
-- Cecil Beaton --
The truly fashionable are beyond fashion.
-- Cecil Beaton --
In all those expressions of conscious beauty, which when imitated become clumsy, or arrogant, or ridiculous, there is a manifestation of what Hollywood cannot destroy.
-- Cecil Beaton, on Greta Garbo --
It is not necessary to believe things in order to reason about them.
-- Beaumarchais --
One's life has value so long as one attribute value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, and compassion.
-- Simone de Beauvoir --
The ideal of the average western man is a woman who freely accepts his domination, who does not accept his ideas without discussions, but who yields to his arguments, who resists him intellectually, and ends by being convinced.
-- Simone de Beauvoir --
When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.
-- Simone de Beauvoir --
In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.
-- Simone de Beauvoir --
Better are the blows of a friend than the false kisses of an enemy.
-- Thomas a Becket --
Good music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and quits the memory with difficulty.
-- Thomas Beecham --
There are two golden rules for an orchestra; start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.
-- Thomas Beecham --
When inviting company, do not tempt the palate with a great variety of unhealthful dainties.
-- Catherine Beecher --
I think you might dispense with half your doctors if you would only consult Dr. Sun more.
-- Henry Ward Beecher --
He who hunts for flowers will find flowers; and he who loves weeds may find weeds.
-- H. W. Beecher --
I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love.
-- Henry Ward Beecher --
You cannot teach a child to take care of himself unless you will let him take care of himself. He will make mistakes, and out of these mistakes will come his wisdom.
-- Henry Ward Beecher --
It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Work is healthy; you can hardly put more upon a man than he can bear. Worry is rust upon the blade. It is not the revolution that destroys the machinery, but the friction. Fear secrets acids; but love and trust are sweet juices.
-- Henry Ward Beecher --
We grow best when clouds hang over us because clouds bear rain and rain refreshes us.
-- H. W. Beecher --
It is not what we intend but what we do that makes us useful.
-- Henry Ward Beecher --
There are many persons who look on Sunday as a sponge to wipe out the sins of the week.
-- Henry Ward Beecher --
A thoughtful mind, when it sees a nation's flag, sees not the flag, but the nation itself.
-- H. W. Beecher --
Fear is a kind of bell ...it is the soul's signal for rallying.
-- H. W. Beecher --
Troubles are often the tools by which God fashions us for better things.
-- H. W. Beecher --
Every man should have a fair-sized cemetery in which to bury the faults of his friends.
-- H. W. Beecher --
In this world, often, our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.
-- Henry Ward Beecher --
God pardons like a mother kisses away the tears of a repentant child.
-- Henry Ward Beecher --
Our life is but a new form of the way men have lived from the beginning.
-- H. W. Beecher --
Conceit is the most incurable disease that is known to the human soul.
-- Henry Ward Beecher --
A proud man is seldom a grateful man for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.
-- H. W. Beecher --
Selfishness is that detestable vice which no one will forgive in others, and no one is without in himself.
-- Henry Ward Beecher --
We never know the love of the parent till we become parents ourselves.
-- Henry Ward Beecher --
The blossom cannot tell what becomes of its odor; and no man can tell what becomes of his influence.
-- Henry W. Beecher --
The cynic puts all human actions into two classes: openly bad and secretly bad.
-- Henry Ward Beecher --
Nowhere can one find so miscellaneous, so various an amount of knowledge as is contained in a good newspaper.
-- Henry Ward Beecher --
The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and never fails to see a bad one.
-- Henry Ward Beecher --
The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.
-- Henry Ward Beecher --
The head learns new things, but the heart forever more practices old experiences.
-- Henry Ward Beecher --
The humblest individual exerts some influence, either for good or evil, upon others.
-- Henry Ward Beecher --
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
-- Henry Ward Beecher --
When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung.
-- Henry Ward Beecher --
A man that does not know how to be angry does not know how to be good.
-- Henry Ward Beecher --
Never chase a lie; let it alone and it will soon run itself to death.
-- Lyman Beecher --
No great advance has been made in science, politics or religion without controversy.
-- Lyman Beecher --
To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.
-- Max Beerbohm --
I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.
-- Sir Max Beerbohm --
Man sinks almost to the level of an animal when eating becomes his chief pleasure.
-- Ludwig Von Beethoven --
I will seize Fate by the throat; It shall certainly not bend and crush me completely.
-- Ludwig van Beethoven --
Each moment of a happy lover's hour is worth an age of dull and common life.
-- Aphra Behn --
You never have the wind with you - either it is against you or you're having a good day.
-- Daniel Behrman --
You can cage the singer but not the song.
-- Harry Belafonte --
If you can't write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don't have a clear idea.
-- David Belasco --
When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.
-- Alexander Graham Bell --
Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.
-- Alexander Graham Bell --
A man who talks a great deal talks a great deal of nonsense; he who talks very little hardly ever talks sense.
-- Hilaire Belloc --
I'm tired of love, i'm still more tired of rhyme, but money gives me pleasure all the time.
-- Hilaire Belloc --
She was what we used to call a suicide blonde - dyed by her own hand.
-- Saul Bellow --
The secret motive of the absent-minded is to be innocent while guilty. Absentmindedness is spurious innocence.
-- Saul Bellow --
There is a vital force in rumor. Though crushed to earth, to all intents and purposes buried, it can rise again without apparent effort.
-- Eleanor Robson Belmont --
There seems to be no limits to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. It seems to worry them. They can't believe that anything could be so funny just on its own hook.
-- Robert Benchley --
My only solution for the problem of habitual accidents is to stay in bed all day. Even then, there is always the chance that you will fall out.
-- Robert Benchley --
In America there are two classes of travel; first class and with children.
-- Robert Benchley --
England and America should scrap cricket and baseball and come up with a new game that they both can play. Like baseball, for example.
-- Robert Benchley --
I am pretty sure that, if you will be quite honest, you will admit that a good rousing sneeze, one that tears open your collar and throws your hair into your eyes, is really one of life's sensational pleasures.
-- Robert Benchley --
Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he's supposed to be doing at the moment.
-- Robert Benchley --
Drawing on my fine command of the language, I said nothing.
-- Robert Benchley --
If we justify war it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed.
-- Ruth Benedict --
Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.
-- Ruth Benedict --
A man's indebtedness is not virtue; his repayment is. Virtue begins when he dedicates himself actively to the job of gratitude.
-- Ruth Benedict --
We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong. We though because we had power, we had wisdom.
-- Stephen Vincent Benet --
In Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben-Gurion --
It is well, when judging a friend, to remember he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality.
-- A. Bennett --
We were put to dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
-- Alan Bennett --
Of all the inhabitants of the inferno, none but Lucifer knows that hell is hell, and the secret function of purgatory is to make of heaven an effective reality.
-- Arnold Bennett --
A cause is like champagne and high heels – one must be prepared to suffer for it.
-- Arnold Bennett --
You are not in charge of the universe; you are in charge of yourself.
-- Arnold Bennett --
To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where previously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists.
-- Arnold Bennett --
The man of thirty who loves for the first time is usually the embodiment of cautious discretion. He does not fall in love with a violent descent, but rather lets himself gently down, continually testing the rope.
-- Arnold Bennett --
Always behave as if nothing had happened, no matter what has happened.
-- Arnold Bennett --
A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.
-- Arnold Bennett --
The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.
-- Thomas Arnold Bennett --
Blessed is he who expects no gratitude, for he shall not be disappointed.
-- W. C. Bennett --
Happiness is like a cat. If you try to coax it or call it, it will avoid you. It will never come. But if you pay no attention to it and go about your business, you'll find it rubbing against your legs and jumping into your lap.
-- William Bennett --
Managers are people who do things right, and leaders are people who do the right thing.
-- Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus --
Give me golf clubs, fresh air and a beautiful partner, and you can keep the clubs and the fresh air.
-- Jack Benny --
A recipe is only a theme which an intelligent cook can play each time with a variation.
-- Madame Benoit --
I believe in instinct, not in reason. When reason is right, nine times out of ten it is impotent, and when it prevails, nine times out of ten it is wrong.
-- A. C. Benson --
It is often wonderful how putting down on paper a clear statement of a case helps on to see, not, perhaps, the way out, but the way in.
-- A. C. Benson --
They know, they just know where to grow, how to dupe you, and how to camouflage themselves among the perfectly respectable plants, they just know, and therefore, I've concluded weeds must have brains.
-- Dianne Benson --
None of us wants to be average. That we are so is a melancholy fact borne in upon us in middle life, and we do not always relish it.
-- Margaret Benson --
If we all wore crowns, the kings would go bareheaded.
-- R. H. Benson --
A full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month old.
-- Jeremy Bentham --
The good may prove to be a hidden form of evil. The evil may prove to be a new and not yet recognized form of good.
-- Nicholas Berdyaev --
I wish I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.
-- Bernard Berenson --
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
-- Bernard Berenson --
All of the arts - poetry, music, ritual, the visible arts, the theater - must singly and together create the most comprehensive art of all: a humanized society, and its masterpiece, free man.
-- Bernard Berenson --
A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.
-- Jose Bergamin --
At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.
-- John Berger --
Reinhart was never his mother's favorite - and he was an only child.
-- Thomas Berger --
Tact is the art of making guests feel at home when that's really where you wish they were.
-- George E. Bergman --
After years of playing with images of life and death, life has made me shy.
-- Ingmar Bergman --
I am not a writer. My plays and scripts are skeletons awaiting sinew.
-- Ingmar Bergman --
Old age is like climbing a mountain. You climb from ledge to ledge. The higher you get, the more tired and breathless you become, but your views become more extensive.
-- Ingmar Bergman --
I always wanted to do comedies but nobody discovered this until my old age. They think all Swedes are like Garbo.
-- Ingrid Bergman --
I've never sought success in order to get fame and money; it's the talent and the passion that count in success.
-- Ingrid Bergman --
A committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours.
-- Milton Berle --
The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success. Talent is only a starting point in this business.
-- Irving Berlin --
Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.
-- Isaiah Berlin --
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
-- Henry Berlioz --
The sooner you are there (at the airport), the sooner you will find out how long you will be delayed.
-- Shelley Berman --
To be able to find joy in another's joy, that is the secret of happiness.
-- Georges Bernanos --
Journalism is the only thinkable alternative to working.
-- Jeffrey Bernard --
Once the curtain is raised, the actor ceases to belong to himself. He belongs to his character, to his author, to his public. He must do the impossible to identify himself with the first, not to betray the second, and not to disappoint the third.
-- Sandra Bernhardt --
The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives - has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed garbage.
-- Carl Bernstein --
The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing.
-- Carl Bernstein --
It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
-- Leonard Bernstein --
You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there.
-- Yogi Berra --
You can't win all the time. There are guys out there who are better than you.
-- Yogi Berra --
It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.
-- Yogi Berra --
Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do what they want to, when all they need is one reason why they can.
-- Mary Frances Berry --
The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
-- Wendell Berry --
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so... And moreover my mother taught me as a boy (repeatingly) "ever to confess you're bored means you have no inner resources."
-- John Berryman --
We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.
-- Andre Berthiaume --
For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.
-- Henry Beston --
Without faith, nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible.
-- Mary McLeod Bethune --
Thought itself needs words. It runs on them like a long wire. And if it loses the habit of words, little by little it becomes shapeless, somber.
-- Ugo Betti --
We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road: they get run over.
-- Aneurin Bevan --
He has the lucidity which is the by-product of a fundamentally sterile mind. He does not have to struggle with the crowded pulsations of a fecund imagination.
-- Aneurin Bevan, on Neville Chamberlain --
When a thing is true, there is no need to use any arguments to substantiate it.
-- Vinoba Bhave --
One of the favorite maxims of my father was the distinction between the two sorts of truths, profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to trivialities where opposites are obviously absurd.
-- Niels Bhor --
He is invariably in a hurry. Being in a hurry is one of the tributes he pays to life.
-- Elizabeth Bibesco --
The ocean is a body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
Patience: A minor form of despair disguised as a virtue.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
Epitaph: an inscription which hopes that virtues acquired by death will have a retroactive effect.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
When Eve first saw her reflection in a pool, she sought Adam and accused him of infidelity.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
Ocean: A body of water occupying two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
Consul: in American politics, a person who, having failed to secure an office from the people, is given one by the administration on condition that he leave the country.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
Dentist: a prestidigitator who, putting metal into your mouth, pulls coins out of your pocket.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
Knowledge: The small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
The gambling known as business looks with austere displeasure upon the business known as gambling.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
Future: that period of time when our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
Bigot: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
International arbitration can be defined as the substitution of many burning questions for a smoldering one.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
Responsibility: a detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
Clergyman: A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
Hospitality: The virtue that induces us to feed and lodge certain persons who are not in need of food and lodging.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
To be positive: To be mistaken at the top of one's voice.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary --
Beauty: the power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
The covers of this book are too far apart.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" --
Peace - in international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
Politics - a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
Day: n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary --
Absurdity, noun: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" --
Epitaph: An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
Here's to woman! Would that we could fall into her arms without falling into her hands.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
An international political alliance is the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.
-- Ambrose Bierce --
Ambition is like hunger; it obeys no law but its appetite.
-- Josh Billings --
I don't care how much a man talks if he only says it in a few words.
-- Josh Billings --
Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.
-- Josh Billings --
Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing well those cards you hold.
-- Josh Billings --
There's lots of people in this world who spend so much time watching their health that they haven't the time to enjoy it.
-- Josh Billings --
There's a great power in words, if you don't hitch too many of them together
-- Josh Billings --
There are people so addicted to exaggeration they can't tell the truth without lying.
-- Josh Billings --
If a man should happen to reach perfection in this world he would have to die immediately to enjoy himself.
-- Josh Billings --
The road to ruin is always kept in good repair, and the travelers pay the expense of it.
-- Josh Billings --
Friendship is like earthenware, once broken it can be mended; Love is like a mirror, once broken that ends it.
-- Josh Billings --
Every man has his follies - and often they are the most interesting thing he has got.
-- Josh Billings --
Genuine grief is like penitence, not glamorous, but subdued.
-- Josh Billings --
Advice is like castor oil, easy to give, but dreadful to take.
-- Josh Billings --
Laughing is the sensation of feeling good all over and showing it principally in one spot.
-- Josh Billings --
As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
-- Josh Billings --
The best time to hold your tongue is the time when you feel you must say something or bust.
-- Josh Billings --
Fame is climbing a greasy pole for ten dollars and ruining trousers worth fifteen dollars.
-- Josh Billings --
The best way to convince a fool that he is wrong is to let him have his own way.
-- Josh Billings --
Better that a girl has beauty than brains, because boys see better than they think.
-- Josh Billings --
As long as we are lucky we attribute it to our smartness; our bad luck we give the gods credit for.
-- Josh Billings --
A man with a small head is like a pin without any, very apt to get into things beyond his depth.
-- Josh Billings --
Solitude: a good place to visit, but a poor place to stay.
-- Josh Billings --
When a man gets talking about himself, he seldom fails to be eloquent and often reaches the sublime.
-- Josh Billings --
Man is my brother, and I am nearer related to him through his vices than I am through his virtue.
-- Josh Billings --
The thinner the ice, the more anxious is everyone to see whether it will bear.
-- Josh Billings --
The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so.
-- Josh Billings --
About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
-- Josh Billings --
Most people repent of their sins by thanking God they ain't so wicked as their neighbors.
-- Josh Billings --
Nature never makes any blunders; when she makes a fool she means it.
-- Josh Billings --
It is the little bits of things that fret and worry us; We can dodge an elephant but we can't dodge a fly.
-- Josh Billings --
In youth, we run into difficulties. And in old age, difficulties run into us.
-- Josh Billings --
I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain't so.
-- Josh Billings --
There are two things in this life for which we are never fully prepared, and that is twins.
-- Josh Billings --
The morning paper is just as necessary to an American as dew is to the grass.
-- Josh Billings --
Every man has a perfect right to his opinion, provided it agrees with ours.
-- Josh Billings --
I have seen hypocrisy that was so artful that it was good judgment to be deceived by it.
-- Josh Billings --
It is very easy to manage your neighbor's business, but our own sometimes bothers us.
-- Josh Billings --
The Devil is the father of lies, but he neglected to patent the idea. and the business now suffers from competition.
-- Josh Billings --
There are two kinds of fools: those who can't change their opinions and those who won't.
-- Josh Billings --
Fiftieth birthdays should be times of huge goodwill. Only people who put on fake tan and pretend to be younger than they are don't get to join the party.
-- Maeve Binchy --
I had to face the facts. I was pear shaped. I was a bit depressed because I hate pears. 'Specially their shape.
-- Charlotte Bingham --
A winner is someone who recognizes his God-given talents, works his tail off to develop them into skills, and uses these skills to accomplish his goals.
-- Larry Bird --
Push yourself again and again. Don't give an inch until the final buzzer sounds.
-- Larry Bird --
I do not object to people looking at their watches when I am speaking. But I strongly object when they start shaking them to make certain they are still going.
-- Lord Birkett --
(Those born in November) ... should prize the topaz's amber hue - emblem of friends and lovers true.
-- Birthstone Rhymes --
We get so much in the habit of wearing a disguise before others that we eventually appear disguised before ourselves.
-- Jim Bishop --
Passions are like the trout in a pond; one devours the others until only one fat old trout is left.
-- Otto von Bismarck --
People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election.
-- Otto von Bismarck --
When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn't the slightest intention of putting it into practice.
-- Otto von Bismarck --
With a gentleman, I am always a gentleman and a half, and with a fraud I try to be a fraud and a half.
-- Otto von Bismarck --
A conquering army on the border will not be stopped by eloquence.
-- Otto von Bismarck --
The chance of bread falling with the buttered side up is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.
-- Arthur Black --
It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffers.
-- William Blackstone --
It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.
-- William Blackstone --
This is not the time for sound bites. I can feel the hand of history on our shoulders.
-- Tony Blair, on talks with Northern Ireland --
The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes.
-- Tony Blair --
Most of the worthwhile, the beautiful, the progressive, and the useful achievements of Homo sapiens had been produced by introverted neurotics.
-- Anne Blaisdell --
If I'd known I was gonna live this long (100 years), I'd have taken better care of myself.
-- Eubie Blake --
It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.
-- William Blake --
A robin red breast in a cage puts all heaven in a rage.
-- William Blake --
No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
-- William Blake --
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
-- William Blake --
When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do.
-- William Blake --
Women aren't trying to do too much. Women have too much to do.
-- Mary Kay Blakely --
Memory seldom fails when its office is to show us the tombs of our buried hopes.
-- Lady Blessington --
Mountains appear more lofty the nearer they are approached, but great men resemble them not in this particular.
-- Lady Blessington --
There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.
-- Allan Bloom --
As dreams are the fancies of those that sleep, so fancies are but the dreams of those awake.
-- Sir Thomas Pope Blount --
I have a great diet. Eat anything you want, but you must eat it with naked fat people.
-- Ed Bluestone --
I learned to trust my obsessions. It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
-- Robert Bly --
Let us not say, every man is the architect of his own fortune; but let us say, every man is the architect of his own character.
-- G. D. Boardman --
The good life is the healthful life, the merry life. Life is health, joy, laughter.
-- Jean Bodin --
Actors have always been a suspect breed. Socially, I find myself more admissible now in England because I've written books.
-- Dirk Bogarde --
A hot dog at the ball game beats roast beef at the Ritz.
-- Humphrey Bogart --
Money has only one use - to give one independence from his enemies.
-- Humphrey Bogart --
The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind.
-- Humphrey Bogart --
When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.
-- John B. Bogart --
Gold gives even to plainness the color of beauty.
-- Nicolas Boileau --
Your families are extremely proud of you. You can't imagine the sense of relief they are experiencing. This would be a most opportune time to ask for money.
-- Gary Bolding, in a commencement speech --
The king has been very good to me. He promoted me from a simple maid to be a marchioness. Then he raised me to be a queen. Now he will raise me to a martyr.
-- Anne Boleyn --
Airline travel is hours of boredom interrupted by moments of stark terror.
-- Al Boliska --
One of the saddest lines in the world is, "Oh come now - be realistic." The best parts of this world were not fashioned by those who were realistic. They were fashioned by those who dared to look hard at their wishes and gave them horses to ride.
-- Richard Nelson Bolles --
A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses; it is an idea that possesses the mind.
-- Robert Bolton --
To use a method is to compare the realm of mind to a stool. The true thinker walks freely.
-- Godfried Bomans --
I get very disgusted with the younger generation of women. We had a torch to pass, and they are just sitting there. They don't realize it can be taken away.
-- Erma Bombeck --
People shop for a bathing suit with more care than they do a husband or wife. The rules are the same. Look for something you'll feel comfortable wearing. Allow room to grow.
-- Erma Bombeck --
What's with you men? Would hair stop growing on your chest if you asked directions somewhere?
-- Erma Bombeck --
Limousines used to be reserved for the ruling class, or, on special occasions, for the working class.
-- Erma Bombeck --
The Rose Bowl is the only bowl I've ever seen that I didn't have to clean.
-- Erma Bombeck --
In general, my children refused to eat anything that hadn't danced on TV.
-- Erma Bombeck --
If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.
-- Erma Bombeck --
Today, limousines are like taxicabs with the door handles still intact.
-- Erma Bombeck --
The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.
-- Erma Bombeck --
For some unexplained reason, it's always the other end of the table that's wild and raucous, with screaming laughter and a fella who plays "Holiday for Strings" on water glasses.
-- Erma Bombeck --
As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her.
-- Erma Bombeck --
I do not participate in any sport with ambulances at the bottom of a hill.
-- Erma Bombeck --
Before you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they're not trying to keep up with you.
-- Erma Bombeck --
Come, let us give a little time to folly, and even in a melancholy day let us find time for an hour of pleasure.
-- Saint Bonaventura --
The test of morality of a society is what it does for its children.
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer --
The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer --
It is only possible to live happily-ever-after on a day-to-day basis.
-- Margaret Bonnano --
Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, o Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night.
-- Book of Common Prayer --
Give, and it shall be given to you. For whatever measure you deal out to others, it will be dealt to you in return.
-- Book of Luke --
All you need for happiness is a good gun, a good horse, and a good wife.
-- Daniel Boone --
Although politicians hold no monopoly on speaking without thinking, they certainly have a knack for it.
-- Louis E. Boone --
Formerly a public man needed a private secretary for a barrier between himself and the public. Nowadays he has a press secretary, to keep him properly in the public eye.
-- Daniel Boorstin --
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.
-- Daniel Boorstin --
I've never been married, but I tell people I'm divorced so they won't think something's wrong with me.
-- Elayne Boosler --
My ancestors wandered lost in the wilderness for forty years because even in biblical times, men would not stop to ask for directions.
-- Elayne Boosler --
I have six locks on my door all in a row. When I go out, I lock every other one. I figure no matter how long somebody stands there picking the locks, they are always locking three.
-- Elayne Boosler --
A dress that zips up the back will bring a husband and wife together.
-- James H. Boren --
You can't measure life in days the way you do money in dollars, because every day is different.
-- Jorge Luis Borges --
There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.
-- Jorge Luis Borges --
The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.
-- Jorge Luis Borges --
Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.
-- Jorge Luis Borges --
In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense.
-- Jorge Luis Borges --
You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.
-- Hal Borland --
I, who have no sisters or brothers, look with some degree of innocent envy on those who may be said to be born to friends.
-- James Boswell --
There are two ways of meeting difficulties: you alter the difficulties or you alter yourself to meet them.
-- Phyllis Bottome --
Anyone who believes the exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
-- Kenneth Boulding --
When a man can observe himself suffering, and is able, later, to describe what he's gone through, that means he was born for literature.
-- Edouard Bourdet --
Good talk is like good scenery - continuous, yet constantly varying, and full of the charm of novelty and surprise.
-- Randolph Bourne --
The same wind that carries one vessel into port may blow another off shore.
-- C. N. Bovee --
Kindess is a language the mute can speak and the deaf can hear.
-- Christian Bovee --
Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers.
-- C. N. Bovee --
Active natures are rarely melancholy; Activity and sadness are incompatible.
-- C. N. Bovee --
Honesty is not only the first step toward greatness - it is greatness itself.
-- C. N. Bovee --
On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do.
-- Elizabeth Bowen --
The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.
-- Elizabeth Bowen --
When I hear of an “equity” in a case like this, I am reminded of a blind man in a dark room – looking for a black hat – which isn't there.
-- Lord Bowen --
I want to be a Frank Sinatra figure. And I will succeed.
-- David Bowie --
It wasn't why he painted a Campbell's soup can. It was "What sort of man paints a Campbell's soup can?" That's what aggravates people.
-- David Bowie, on Andy Warhol --
Anyone who eats three meals a day should understand why cookbooks outsell sex books three to one.
-- L. M. Boyd --
You are not as bright as you feel after the second drink.
-- Meg Bracken --
What most of us are after, when we have a picture taken, is a good natural-looking picture that doesn't resemble us.
-- Peg Bracken --
I've noticed your hostility towards him - I ought to have guessed you were friends.
-- Malcolm Bradbury --
The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.
-- Malcolm Bradbury --
You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
-- Ray Bradbury --
Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.
-- Ray Bradbury --
I've found two gray hairs in my head the week before last, and an impertinent crow has planted a delicate impression of his foot under my right eye.
-- Mary Elizabeth Braddon --
The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience.
-- Gen. Omar Bradley --
Far from being a handicap to command, compassion is the measure of it. For unless one values the lives of his soldiers and is tormented by their ideals, he is unfit to command.
-- Omar N. Bradley --
Bravery is the capacity to perform properly even when scared half to death.
-- Gen. Omar N. Bradley --
Leadership is intangible, and therefore no weapon ever designed can replace it.
-- Gen. Omar N. Bradley --
Set your course by the stars, not by the lights of every passing ship.
-- Gen. Omar N. Bradley --
I've never met a person, I don't care what his condition, in whom I could not see possibilities.
-- Preston Bradley --
If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant. If we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.
-- Anne Bradstreet --
Authority without wisdom is like a heavy ax without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.
-- Anne Bradstreet --
Snobbery is the pride of those who are not sure of their position.
-- Berton Braley --
Like mothers, taxes are often misunderstood, but seldom forgotten.
-- Lord Bramwell --
Why is the king of hearts the only one that hasn't a moustache?
-- James Branch --
Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.
-- Louis Brandeis --
If we would be guided by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold.
-- Louis D. Brandeis --
The only reason I'm in Hollywood is that I don't have the moral courage to refuse the money.
-- Marlon Brando --
A heretic is a fellow who disagrees with you regarding something neither of you knows anything about.
-- William Cowper Brann --
Count no day lost in which you waited your turn, took only your share, and sought advantage over no one.
-- Robert Brault --
Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true.
-- Robert Brault --
For my confirmation, I didn't get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift.
-- Wernher Von Braun --
With every new answer unfolded, science has consistently discovered at least three new questions.
-- Wernher Von Braun --
The source of status is no longer the ability to make things but simply the ability to purchase them.
-- Harry Braverman --
Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well-informed about the United States.
-- J. Bartlet Brebner --
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.
-- Bertolt Brecht --
Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.
-- Bertolt Brecht --
Because I don't trust him, we are friends.
-- Bertolt Brecht --
Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.
-- Marjorie Barstow Breenbie --
Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. the poor know that it is money.
-- Gerald Brenan --
A vegetarian is a person who won't eat anything that can have children.
-- David Brenner --
As a reporter, I like to keep in the middle and be disliked by both sides.
-- Jimmy Breslin --
An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.
-- Robert Bresson --
Diligence is that energy and industry which we show when we do what we like.
-- E. C. Brewer --
I know that if odor were visible, as color is, I'd see the summer garden in rainbow clouds.
-- Robert Bridges --
Animals feed; man eats. Only the man of intellect knows how to eat.
-- Brillat-Savarin --
I either want less corruption, or more chance to participate in it.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant --
My life has a superb cast, but I cannot figure out the plot.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant --
No man is an island, but some of us are pretty long peninsulas.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant --
It's not easy taking my problems one at a time when they refuse to get in line.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant --
When something bad happens to me, I think I'm able to deal with it in a pretty good way. That makes me lucky. Some people fall apart at the first little thing that happens.
-- Christie Brinkley --
A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.
-- David Brinkley --
The vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing.
-- William Broad --
Show me a guy who’s afraid to look bad, and I’ll show you a guy you can beat every time.
-- Lou Brock --
Anybody that wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.
-- David Broder --
Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off.
-- Paul Brodeur --
A passion for politics stems usually from an insatiable need, either for power, or for friendship and adulation, or a combination of both.
-- Fawn M. Brodie --
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
-- Jacob Bronowski --
The wish to hurt, the momentary intoxication with pain, is the loophole through which the pervert climbs into the minds of ordinary men.
-- Jacob Bronowski --
I feel monotony and death to be almost the same.
-- Charlotte Bronte --
A kiss makes the heart young again and wipes out the years.
-- Rupert Brooke --
Egotism is the anesthetic given by a kindly nature to relieve the pain of being a damned fool.
-- Bellamy Brooks --
Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.
-- Garth Brooks --
With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.
-- Gwendolyn Brooks --
Hope for the best. Expect the worst. Life is a play. We're unrehearsed.
-- Mel Brooks --
It is almost as presumptuous to think you can do nothing as to think you can do everything.
-- Phillips Brooks --
Emerson advised his fellow townsmen to manufacture schoolteachers and make them the best in the world.
-- Van Wyck Brooks --
Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level.
-- Joyce Brothers --
Success is a state of mind. If you want success, start thinking of yourself as a success.
-- Dr. Joyce Brothers --
Listening, not imitation, may be the sheerest form of flattery.
-- Joyce Brothers --
Marriage is not just spiritual communion; It is also remembering to take out the trash.
-- Joyce Brothers --
My riches consist not in the extent of my possessions but in the fewness of my needs.
-- Brotherton --
Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive, easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
-- Henry Brougham --
Almost nobody means precisely what he says when he makes the declaration, "I'm in favor of free speech."
-- Heywood Broun --
The underdog can and will lick his weight in the wildcats of the world.
-- Heywood Broun --
Being a well-dressed man is a career, and he who goes in for it has no time for anything else.
-- Heywood Broun --
The urge to gamble is so universal and its practice so pleasurable that I assume it must be evil.
-- Heywood Broun --
Repartee is what you wish you'd said.
-- Heywood Broun --
Brotherhood is not just a bible word. Out of comradeship can come and will come the happy life for all.
-- Heywood Broun --
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip, and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow.
-- Charlie Brower --
I have always thought the nuclear threat was blown way out of proportion. I have a feeling our descendants are going to look back at all this nuclear hysteria from the bottom of their toxic waste dumps and laugh their feelers off. Philosophically, I would much rather die in a nuclear holocaust along with three or four hundred million of my fellow world citizens than die alone in the gutter from some chemical induced cancer. I suppose that's because I'm basically a people person.
-- A. Whitney Brown --
Actually, I became a vegetarian not so much because I love animals but because I hate plants. I still like to hunt though. In fact, I've found that plants are a lot easier than animals to sneak up on.
-- A. Whitney Brown --
Our bombs are smarter than the average high school student. At least they can find Kuwait.
-- A. Whitney Brown --
There must be millions of people all over the world who never get any love letters - I could be their leader.
-- Charlie Brown --
Spy and the world spies with you; get caught and you're on your own.
-- G. Brown --
Live so that when your children think of fairness, caring and integrity, they think of you.
-- H. Jackson Brown Jr. --
Opportunity dances with those who are already on the dance floor.
-- H. Jackson Brown Jr. --
Time is God's way to keep everything from happening at once.
-- James Brown --
How prophetic L'Enfant was when he laid out Washington D. C. as a city that goes around in circles.
-- John Mason Brown --
Reasoning with a child is fine, If you can reach the child's reason without destroying your own.
-- John Mason Brown --
You know you're old when you have lost all your marvels.
-- Merry Brown --
If your sister is in a tearing hurry to go out and cannot catch your eye, she's wearing your best sweater.
-- Pam Brown --
Sisters don't need words. They have perfected a language of snarls and smiles and frowns and winks - expressions of shocked surprise and incredulity and disbelief. Sniffs and snorts and gasps and sighs - that can undermine any tale you're telling.
-- Pam Brown --
The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans are suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.
-- Rita Mae Brown --
You can't be truly rude until you understand good manners.
-- Rita Mae Brown --
Once you know what women are like, men get kind of boring.
-- Rita Mae Brown --
Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.
-- Rita Mae Brown --
You sell a screenplay like you sell a car. If somebody drives it off a cliff, that's it.
-- Rita Mae Brown --
Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don’t they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people of earth.
-- Rita Mae Brown --
The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they are okay, then it's you.
-- Rita Mae Brown --
A peacefulness follows any decision, even the wrong one.
-- Rita Mae Brown --
Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself.
-- Rita Mae Brown --
About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won't like you at all.
-- Rita Mae Brown --
The only person who listens to both sides of an argument is the fellow in the next apartment.
-- Ruth Brown --
The blues itself knows no color line. It is about people learning how to go inside themselves and touch something. The blues is like vocal crying. It is a way for a man to cry with dignity.
-- Ruth Brown --
Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.
-- Sam Brown --
It costs to be stupid. The stupider you are, the more it costs.
-- Sherrill Brown --
The sweetest sounds to mortals given; are heard in mother, home and heaven.
-- William Goldsmith Brown --
It is a brave act to despise death; but where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live.
-- Sir Thomas Browne --
But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.
-- Sir Thomas Browne --
It is the common wonder of all men, how among so many millions of faces, there should be none alike
-- Thomas Browne --
Men get opinions as boys learn to spell, by reiteration chiefly.
-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning --
I was only a poor poet, made for singing at her casement, as the finches or the thrushes, while she thought of other things.
-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning --
What I do and what I dream include thee, as the wine must taste of its own grapes.
-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning --
Since when was genius found respectable?
-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning --
When the fight begins within himself, a man's worth something.
-- Robert Browning --
The liberals can understand everything but people who don't understand them.
-- Lenny Bruce --
New Yorkers are nice about giving street directions - in fact, they seem proud of knowing where they are themselves.
-- Katherine Brush --
Weep not that the world changes - did it keep a stable, changeless state, it were cause indeed to weep.
-- William Cullen Bryant --
Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance. It is also owed to justice and to humanity. Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong.
-- James Bryce --
Medicine: the only profession that labors incessantly to destroy the reason for its own existence.
-- James Bryce --
I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice cream straight out of the container.
-- Bill Bryson --
It is the mistake of youth to think imagination a substitute for experience; it is the mistake of age to think experience a substitute for intelligence.
-- Lyman Bryson --
The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.
-- Martin Buber --
True ecstasy hails neither from spirit nor from nature, but from the union of these two.
-- Martin Buber --
Solitude is the place of purification.
-- Martin Buber --
True friends are those who really know you but love you anyway.
-- Edna Buchanan --
I always warn aspiring reporters to observe three basic rules: 1. Never trust an editor; 2. Never trust an editor; 3. Never trust an editor.
-- Edna Buchanan --
There is enough in the world for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed.
-- Frank Buchman --
Whether it's the best of times or the worst of times, it's the only time we've got.
-- Art Buchwald --
It is indeed exasperating to have a memory that begins too young and continues too long.
-- Pearl Buck --
None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.
-- Pearl S. Buck --
Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns how to be amused rather than shocked.
-- Pearl S. Buck --
There is an inverse relationship between reliance on the state and self-reliance.
-- William F. Buckley, Jr. --
All civilized men want peace. And all truly civilized men must despise pacifism.
-- William F. Buckley --
Never in this world can hatred be stilled by hatred; it will be stilled only by non-hatred - this is the law eternal.
-- The Buddha --
Times of luxury do not last long, but pass away very quickly; nothing in this world can be long enjoyed.
-- Buddha --
As a solid rock is not shaken by a strong gale, so wise persons remain unaffected by praise or censure.
-- Buddha --
Sound health is the greatest of gifts; contentedness, the greatest of riches; trust the greatest of qualities.
-- Buddha --
Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.
-- Buddha --
When you have gained a victory, do not push it too far.
-- Eustace Budgell --
You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.
-- Frederick Buechner --
It has been said that cigarettes are the only product that, if used according to the manufacturer's instructions, have a very high chance of killing you.
-- Michael Buerk --
Advertising - the driving force behind supply-and-demand economics: the stimulation of demand for useless products through the supply of misleading claims.
-- Chaz Bufe --
In the insurance business, there is no statute of limitations on stupidity.
-- Warren Buffett --
Investment must be rational. If you can't understand it, don't do it.
-- Warren Buffett --
Wall street is the only place people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from people who take the subway.
-- Warren Buffett --
We might have had a two party system, but one of the two parties would be in office and the other in prison.
-- Nikolai Bukharin --
You must have the score (music) in your head, not your head in the score.
-- Hans von Bulow --
Anger ventilated often hurries toward forgiveness; and concealed often hardens into revenge.
-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton --
Strike from mankind the principle of faith, and men would have no more history than a flock of sheep.
-- Bulwer --
Everyone who observes vigilantly and observes steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius.
-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton --
A fool flatters himself; the wise man flatters the fool.
-- Bulwer-Lytton --
The cleverness of avarice is but the cunning of imbecility.
-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton --
It is astonishing how little one feels poverty when he loves.
-- Baron Bulwer-Lytton --
Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness.
-- Bulwer-Lytton --
The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation, not overturning it.
-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton --
A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.
-- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton --
Most people are brave only in the dangers to which they accustom themselves, either in imagination or practice.
-- Edward George Bulwer-Lytton --
There are two things in life that a sage must preserve at every sacrifice, the coats of his stomach and the enamel of his teeth. Some evils admit of consolations, but there are no comforters for dyspepsia and the toothache.
-- Henry Bulwer-Lytton --
Nothing would disgust me more, morally, than winning an Oscar. Nothing in the world would make me accept it. I wouldn't have it in my home.
-- Luis Bunuel --
There was a man, though some did count him mad, the more he cast away, the more he had.
-- John Bunyan --
Men should stop fighting among themselves and start fighting insects.
-- Luther Burbank --
The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.
-- Robert Burchfield --
There are two days in the week when I never worry: one is yesterday, the other is tomorrow.
-- Robert Burdette --
In biblical times, a man could have as many wives as he could afford. Just like today.
-- Abigail Van Buren --
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 --
Laugh and the world laughs with you. Snore and you sleep alone
-- Anthony Burgess --
When a person visits you, remember he's your guest; receive him very kindly, and be sure he has the best.
-- Gelett Burgess --
When the waitress puts the dinner on the table, the old men look at the dinner. The young men look at the waitress.
-- Gelett Burgess --
If you want to say it with flowers, a single rose says: I'm cheap."
-- Delta Burke --
Ambition can creep as well as soar.
-- Edmund Burke --
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
-- Edmund Burke --
The people have been in the wrong, frequently and outrageously, both in other countries and in this. But I do say, that in all disputes between them and their rulers, the presumption is at least upon a par in favor of the people.
-- Edmund Burke --
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke --
People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.
-- Edmund Burke --
Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.
-- Edmund Burke --
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
-- Edmund Burke --
Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend.
-- Edmund Burke --
Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
-- Edmund Burke --
In doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish. But the works of malice and injustice are finished with a bold, masterly hand.
-- Edmund Burke --
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
-- Edmund Burke --
Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty.
-- Edmund Burke --
He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.
-- Edmund Burke --
The husband who doesn't tell his wife everything probably reasons that what she doesn't know won't hurt him.
-- Leo Burke --
Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.
-- Michael Burke --
When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get them, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either.
-- Leo Burnett --
It's a delightful thing to think of perfection; but it's vastly more amusing to talk of errors and absurdities.
-- Fanny Burney --
Angels come in all sizes and shapes and colors, visible and invisible to the physical eye. But always you are changed from having seen one.
-- Sophy Burnham --
A warless world will come as men develop warless hearts.
-- Charles Wesley Burns --
I'd rather be a failure at something I enjoy than be a success at something I hate.
-- George Burns --
It's hard for me to get used to these changing times. I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty.
-- George Burns --
I smoke cigars because at my age, if I don't have something to hang on to I might fall down.
-- George Burns --
Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.
-- George Burns --
When I went to school, I was so smart my teacher was in my class for five years.
-- George Burns --
When you stop giving and offering something to the rest of the world, it's time to turn out the lights.
-- George Burns --
You can't help getting older, but you don't have to get old.
-- George Burns --
There were twelve kids in my family, and my mother's idea of liberation was to get into the kitchen.
-- George Burns --
Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
-- George Burns --
I should have been a country-western singer. After all, I'm older than most western countries.
-- George Burns --
Happiness? A good cigar, a good meal. a good cigar, and a good woman - or a bad woman; it depends on how much happiness you can handle.
-- George Burns --
I have seen the Mississippi. That is muddy water. I have seen the St. Lawrence. That is crystal water. But the Thames is liquid history.
-- John Burns --
Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.
-- Robert Burns --
Some parents get better children than they deserve.
-- Raymond Burr --
All that I have accomplished has been by that plodding, patient, persevering process of accretion which builds the ant heap particle by particle, thought by thought, fact by fact.
-- Elihu Burritt --
A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.
-- John Burroughs --
Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.
-- William Burroughs --
I am an American and therefore what I do, however small, is of importance.
-- Struthers Burt --
When the chips are not exactly down but just scattered about, you discover who your real friends are.
-- Richard Burton --
A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.
-- Robert Burton --
If there is a hell upon earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man's heart.
-- Robert Burton --
I've watched so much Olympics that when Barbara asked me to move a piece of furniture, I asked her, "What's the degree of difficulty?"
-- George Bush --
Giving peace a chance does not mean taking a chance on peace.
-- George Bush --
I don't want to win? If that were the case, why the heck am I on the bus sixteen hours a day, shaking thousands of hands, giving hundred of speeches, getting pilloried in the press and cartoons and still staying on message to win?
-- George W. Bush --
Chew before you swallow.
-- George W. Bush, about his passing out while eating a pretzel --
I have a different vision of leadership. A leadership is someone who brings people together.
-- George W. Bush --
No matter how old you are and no matter what you do, you can never escape your mother.
-- George W. Bush --
By being myself I will distinguish myself from my father, because we're two separately different people.
-- George W. Bush --
The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing should be taken too seriously.
-- Nicholas Murray Butler --
All animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.
-- Samuel Butler --
Youth is like spring, an over-praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
-- Samuel Butler --
The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.
-- Samuel Butler --
"The Ancient Mariner" would not have taken so well if it had been called "The Old Sailor."
-- Samuel Butler --
The body is but a pair of pincers set over a bellows and a stewpan, and the whole fixed upon stilts.
-- Samuel Butler --
An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
-- Samuel Butler --
Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.
-- Samuel Butler --
A definition is the enclosing of a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.
-- Samuel Butler --
Though wisdom cannot be gotten with gold, still less can it be gotten without it.
-- Samuel Butler --
The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
-- Samuel Butler --
An obstinate man does not hold opinions, but they hold him.
-- Samuel Butler --
To live is to love; all reason is against it; instinct is for it.
-- Samuel Butler --
Adversity, if a man is set down to it by degrees, is more supportable with equanimity by most people than any great prosperity arrived at in a single lifetime.
-- Samuel Butler --
Example is not only the best way of propagating an opinion, but it is the only way worth taking into account.
-- Samuel Butler --
Life is like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
-- Samuel Butler --
If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.
-- Samuel Butler --
He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear. It is in strife that life lies, and were there no opposing forces there would be neither moral nor immoral, neither victory nor defeat.
-- Samuel Butler --
The lions would not eat Daniel; they would eat most anything but they drew the line at prophets.
-- Samuel Butler --
It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.
-- Samuel Butler --
If the better part of valor is discretion, how much more is not discretion the better part of vice?
-- Samuel Butler --
One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.
-- Samuel Butler --
Some people, no matter how old they get, never lose their beauty - they merely move it from their faces into their hearts.
-- Martin Buxbaum --
Silence is sometimes the severest criticism.
-- Charles Buxton --
The fact is, nothing comes; at least, nothing good. All has to be fetched.
-- Charles Buxton --
You have not fulfilled every duty unless you have fulfilled that of being cheerful and pleasant.
-- C. Buxton --
A man doesn't begin to attain wisdom until he recognizes that he is no longer indispensable.
-- Richard E. Byrd --
A library, a garden, a grove, a purling stream, are the innocent scenes that divert our leisure
-- William Byrd --
All is to be feared where all is to be lost.
-- Lord Byron --
Man's love is of man's life a part; it is woman's whole existence.
-- Byron --
No hand can make the clock strike for me the hours that are passed.
-- Byron --
It is to be hoped that, with all the modern improvements, a mode will be discovered of getting rid of bores.
-- Lord Byron --
Society is now one polish'd horde, formed of two might tribes, the bores and the bored.
-- Lord Byron --
Here's a sigh to those who love me, and a smile to those who hate; and whatever sky's above me, here's a heart for every fate.
-- Lord Byron --
All who would win joy must share it - Happiness was born a twin.
-- Lord Byron --
I wish he would explain his explanation.
-- Lord Byron --
We are all selfish and I no more trust myself than others with a good motive.
-- Lord Byron --
It is the hour when from the boughs the nightingale's high note is heard.
-- Lord Byron --
The American dream is that any citizen can rise to the highest office in the land. The British dream is that the Queen drops in for tea.
-- Michael Bywater --
Virtue has always been conceived of as victorious resistance to one's vital desire.
-- James Branch Cabell --
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.
-- James Branch Cabell --
I regret that I have but one life to live in San Francisco.
-- Herb Caen --
The trouble with telling a good story is that it invariably reminds the other fellow of a dull one.
-- Sid Caesar --
With me, a career was the simple matter of putting groceries on the table.
-- James Cagney --
It is an article of faith in my creed to pick the man who does not take himself seriously, but does take his work seriously.
-- Michael C. Cahill --
Do something for the joy of doing it and pray you won't be punished.
-- Sammy Cahn --
The sins of the flesh have always been very attractive to me - all of them.
-- Michael Caine --
The secret of negotiation is to harmonize the real interests of the parties concerned.
-- Francois de Calieres --
A lie can be halfway round the world before the truth has its boots on.
-- James Callaghan --
I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.
-- Italo Calvino --
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.
-- Helder Camara --
You gotta be a man to play baseball for a living but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you, too.
-- Roy Campanella --
Let me be a little kinder, let me be a little blinder to the faults of those around me.
-- Glenn Campbell --
The departure from the world is regarded not as a fault, but as the first step into that noble path at the remotest turn of which illumination is to be won.
-- Joseph Campbell --
Tallulah Bankhead is always skating on thin ice. Everyone wants to be there when it breaks.
-- Mrs. Patrick Campbell --
Wedlock: The deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise.
-- Mrs. Patrick Campbell --
Golf is the only game in the world in which a precise knowledge of the rules can earn you a reputation for bad sportsmanship.
-- Patrick Campbell --
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
-- Albert Camus --
Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.
-- Albert Camus --
If there is a sin against life, it lies perhaps less in despairing of it than in hoping for another and evading the implacable grandeur of the one we have.
-- Albert Camus --
I have said the world is absurd but I spoke too soon. All we can say is that this world in and of itself is not reasonable. What is absurd, though, is the conflict between this irrationality and man's desperate wish for intelligibility.
-- Albert Camus --
I don't want to be a genius; I have enough problems just trying to be a man.
-- Albert Camus --
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
-- Albert Camus --
A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but most certainly, without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.
-- Albert Camus --
With freedom of the press, nations are not sure of going toward justice and peace. But without it, they are sure of not going there.
-- Albert Camus --
It is indeed true that we live in tragic times, but too many people confuse tragedy with despair.
-- Albert Camus --
You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having to ask any clear question.
-- Albert Camus --
A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.
-- Albert Camus --
Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and "historical tasks" is an actual or potential assassin.
-- Albert Camus --
There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
-- Albert Camus --
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
-- Albert Camus --
We are drawn to our television sets each year the way we are drawn to the scene of an accident.
-- Vincent Canby on the Academy Awards Show --
All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.
-- Elias Canetti --
When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.
-- Elias Canetti --
Some people think doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell.
-- Dorothy Canfield --
The two most common causes of divorce? Men and women.
-- Eddie Cantor --
I know one star in Hollywood who hasn't been spoiled by success and that is Mickey Mouse.
-- Eddie Cantor --
It takes twenty years to make an overnight success.
-- Eddie Cantor --
Many women are poor cooks only because their native greatness has been beaten down by ingratitude.
-- Robert Capon --
You can get much further with a kind word and a gun that you can get with a kind word alone.
-- Al Capone --
Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for a the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.
-- Truman Capote --
Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.
-- Truman Capote --
Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
-- Al Capp --
All living things are manipulated. As long as there is a will, it is bent and twisted constantly. Only the dead are allowed the luxury of freedom, and then only because they want nothing, and therefore can't be thwarted.
-- Orson Scott Card --
If you're not English, you're a foreigner, so you must be sexy. It's an old British film cliche.
-- Claudia Cardinale --
Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.
-- Benjamin Cardozo --
Unaccompanied Bach is for me one of the severest hardships of the calling of musical critic. It is probably good, even jolly, to play, but to have to listen to it is worse than breaking stones.
-- Neville Cardus --
I see my face in the mirror and go, "I'm a Halloween costume? That's what they think of me?"
-- Drew Carey --
I was raised by just my mom. See, my father died when I was eight years old. At least, that's what he told us in the letter.
-- Drew Carey --
Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.
-- George Carlin --
As grown-ups, we never get to "wave bye-bye." I think it would be fun. "Steve, the boss is sailing for Europe; we're all going down to the dock to wave bye-bye."
-- George Carlin --
I saw a sign that said, "coming soon - a 24-hour restaurant." and I thought, "well, that's unusual. At least try it for a week or two, and see if you can build a clientele."
-- George Carlin --
My parents chose what, at the time, was the very latest method of childbirth. You've heard of Lamaze? This was La Paz. The mother receives powerful narcotics, the father is sent to Bolivia, and the nurse does all the screaming.
-- George Carlin --
The day after tomorrow is the third day of the rest of your life.
-- George Carlin --
I don't like to lose my bearings, so I keep them in the cabinet near my bed.
-- George Carlin --
The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.
-- George Carlin --
I enjoy chaos and disorder, and not just because they help me professionally.
-- George Carlin --
I think when you eat out you should have a little fun; it's good for digestion. Simple things. After the waiter recites a long list of specials, ask him if they serve cow feet.
-- George Carlin --
It is impossible to know accurately how you look in your sunglasses.
-- George Carlin --
Scientists announced today that they have discovered a cure for apathy. However, they claim no one has shown the slightest interest in it.
-- George Carlin --
As a matter of principle. I never attend the first annual anything.
-- George Carlin --
If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted?
-- George Carlin --
Do you know why hurricanes have names instead of numbers? To keep the killing personal. No one cares about a bunch of people killed by a number. "200 dead as Number Three slams ashore" is not nearly as interesting a headline as "Charlie kills 200." Death is much more satisfying and entertaining if you personalize it.
-- George Carlin --
There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.
-- George Carlin --
After the Go-Gos sold three or four million albums, we thought we wouldn't be treated like an all-girl band anymore, but as a rock 'n' roll band. That never really worked.
-- Belinda Carlisle --
TV cameras seem to add ten pounds to me. So I make it a point never to eat TV cameras.
-- Kitty Carlisle --
Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man!
-- Thomas Carlyle --
It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.
-- Thomas Carlyle --
Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.
-- Thomas Carlyle --
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
-- Thomas Carlyle --
Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.
-- Thomas Carlyle --
Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one rascal less in the world.
-- Carlyle --
Of all acts of man, repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.
-- Thomas Carlyle --
Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth.
-- Thomas Carlyle --
If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and authorcraft are of small amount to that.
-- Thomas Carlyle --
Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
-- Thomas Carlyle --
Thought works in silence, so does virtue. One might erect statues to silence.
-- Thomas Carlyle --
If you are ever in doubt as to whether or not you should kiss a pretty girl, give her the benefit of the doubt.
-- Thomas Carlyle --
Take away my people, but leave my factories, and soon grass will grow on the factory floors. Take away my factories, but leave my people, and soon we will have a new and better factory.
-- Andrew Carnegie --
As I grow older I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.
-- Andrew Carnegie --
People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.
-- Andrew Carnegie --
No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.
-- Andrew Carnegie --
There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.
-- Andrew Carnegie --
You cannot push a man up a ladder unless he is willing to climb himself.
-- Andrew Carnegie --
Concentrate your energy, thought, and capital exclusively upon the business in which you are engaged. "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" is all wrong. I tell you "put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket."
-- Andrew Carnegie --
The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.
-- Andrew Carnegie --
Eight hours to work; Eight hours to play; Eight hours to sleep; seems the ideal division.
-- Andrew Carnegie --
Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community.
-- Andrew Carnegie --
The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.
-- Dale Carnegie --
Don't be afraid to give your best to what seemingly are small jobs. Every time you conquer one it makes you that much stronger. If you do the little jobs well, the big ones will tend to take care of themselves.
-- Dale Carnegie --
You can close more business in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.
-- Dale Carnegie --
Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes furthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare.
-- Dale Carnegie --
The best things in life are yours, if you can appreciate yourself.
-- Dale Carnegie --
Little acts of kindness, little words of love make our earth an Eden like heaven above.
-- Julia Carney --
What the historian is called on to investigate is what lies behind the act; and to this the conscious thought or motive of the individual actor may be quite irrelevant.
-- Edward Hallett Carr --
After the fruit has got its growth it should juice up and mellow. God forbid I should live long enough to ferment and rot and fall to the ground in a squash.
-- Emily Carr --
All students are gifted; Some just open their packages earlier than others.
-- Michael Carr --
The first duty of society is to give each of its members the possibility of fulfilling his destiny. When it becomes incapable of performing this duty it must be transformed.
-- Alexis Carrel --
The difference between constructive criticism and destructive criticism is simple: any criticism you give is constructive; any criticism you get is destructive.
-- Jon Carroll --
Curtsy while you're thinking what to say. It saves time.
-- Lewis Carroll --
They drew all manner of things – everything that begins with M, such as mousetraps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness.
-- Lewis Carroll --
If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.
-- Lewis Carroll --
Begin at the beginning ... and go on till you come to the end: Then stop.
-- Lewis Carroll --
Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
-- Lewis Carroll --
If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners.
-- Johnny Carson --
No experiment is ever a complete failure. It can always be used as a bad example.
-- Johnny Carson --
If life was fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.
-- Johnny Carson --
It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.
-- Rachel Carson --
For all at last return to the sea - to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.
-- Rachel Carson --
In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.
-- Rachel Carson --
The "control of nature" is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of man.
-- Rachel Carson --
A simple and a proper function of government is just to make it easy for us to do good and difficult for us to do wrong.
-- Jimmy Carter --
Public opinion is the last refuge of a politician without any opinion of his own.
-- Mark Bonham Carter --
First Ladies throughout our history have been expected to be adoring wives and perfect mothers.
-- Rosalyn Carter --
Once you accept the fact that you're not perfect, then you develop some confidence.
-- Rosalynn Carter --
The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson --
Watermelon, it's a good fruit. You eat, you drink, you wash your face.
-- Enrico Caruso --
I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast, but there was no one to tell me.
-- George Washington Carver --
The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?
-- Pablo Casals --
A woman broke up with me and sent me pictures of her and her new boyfriend in bed together. Solution? I sent them to her dad.
-- Christopher Case --
Nightclubs are places where the tables are reserved and the guests aren't.
-- Frank Caspar --
The biggest word in the language of business is not gross, but net.
-- Herbert Casson --
The more parking spaces you provide, the more cars will come to fill them. It's like feeding pigeons.
-- Sir Hugh Casson --
I would not vote for the mayor. It's not just because he didn't invite me to dinner, but because on my way into town from the airport there were such enormous potholes.
-- Fidel Castro --
What was any art but a mold in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
-- Willa Cather --
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
-- Willa Cather --
Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
-- Willa Cather --
Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
-- Willa Cather --
In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.
-- Willa Cather --
We cannot control the evil tongues of others, but a good life enables us to disregard them.
-- Cato --
The wise man does no wrong in changing his habits with the times.
-- Cato --
The best way to keep good acts in memory is to refresh them with new.
-- Cato --
If your parents never had children, chances are you won't either.
-- Dick Cavett --
The man who trusts men will make fewer mistakes than he who distrusts them.
-- Camillo Di Cavour --
I have a great dog. She's half Lab, half pit bull. A good combination. Sure, she might bite off my leg, but she'll bring it back to me.
-- Jim Celeste --
Good Manners: The noise you don't make when you're eating soup.
-- Bennett Cerf --
Every man was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
-- Cervantes --
A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.
-- Cervantes --
Take care, your worship, those things over there are not giants but windmills.
-- Miguel Cervantes --
Those who play with cats must expect to be scratched.
-- Cervantes --
Make it your business to know yourself, which is the most difficult lesson in the world.
-- Cervantes --
No man is more than another unless he does more than another.
-- Miguel De Cervantes --
By the street of by-and-by one arrives at the house of never.
-- Cervantes --
Delay always breeds danger, and to protract a great design is often to ruin it.
-- Miguel de Cervantes --
There is no greater folly in the world than for a man to despair.
-- Cervantes --
Valor lies just halfway between rashness and cowardice.
-- Cervantes --
Experience is the universal mother of sciences.
-- Miguel de Cervantes --
When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.
-- Miguel de Cervantes --
When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God-made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.
-- Marc Chagall --
Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers - and never succeeding.
-- Marc Chagall --
The Americans are a funny lot. They drink whiskey to keep them warm, then they put ice in it to make it cool; then they put some sugar in it to make it sweet, and then they put a slice of lemon in it to make it sour. Then they say, "Here's to you" and drink it themselves.
-- B. N. Chakravarty --
The grand essentials of life are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for
-- Allan Chalmers --
Human nature, if healthy, demands excitement; and if it does not obtain its thrilling excitement in the right way, it will seek if in the wrong. God never makes bloodless stoics; He makes no passionless saints.
-- Oswald Chambers --
When a man is at his wits' end, it is not a cowardly thing to pray, it is the only way he can get in touch with Reality.
-- Oswald Chambers --
Nowadays, those who love nature are accused of being romantic.
-- Chamfort --
Fortune, in order to come to me, must conform to certain conditions imposed on her by my character.
-- Chamfort --
Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.
-- Nicolas Chamfort --
If we would please in society, we must be prepared to be taught many things we know already by people who do not know them.
-- Sebastien Chamfort --
A little drowsing cat is an image of perfect beatitude.
-- Champfleury --
Take away the newspaper and this country of ours would become a scene of chaos.
-- Harry Chandler --
A smile appeared upon her face as if she'd taken it directly from her handbag and pinned it there.
-- Loma Chandler --
The edges of the folded handkerchief in her breast pocket looked sharp enough to slice bread.
-- Raymond Chandler --
It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.
-- Raymond Chandler --
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.
-- Raymond Chandler --
If I'm going slow I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.
-- Raymond Chandler --
Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.
-- Coco Chanel --
How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.
-- Coco Chanel --
God knows I wanted love. But the moment I had to choose between the man I loved and my dresses, I chose the dresses.
-- Coco Chanel --
Youth is something very new: Twenty years ago no one mentioned it.
-- Coco Chanel --
April is the month when the green returns to the lawn, the lilac, and the IRS.
-- Changing Times --
Laughter is much more important than applause. Applause is almost a duty. Laughter is a reward.
-- Carol Channing --
Undoubtedly a man is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself.
-- William Channing --
No human being, man or woman, can act up to a sublime standard without giving offense.
-- W. E. Channing --
The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.
-- W. E. Channing --
He is to be educated not because he is to make shoes, nails and pins, but because he is a man.
-- William Ellery Channing --
A man in earnest finds means, or if he cannot find, creates them.
-- W. E. Channing --
Have you ever noticed that life consists mostly of interruptions, with occasional spells of rush work in between?
-- Buwei Yan Chao --
Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it forgoes revenge, and dares forgive an injury.
-- E. H. Chapin --
At the bottom of a good deal of bravery lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion.
-- Edwin H. Chapin --
Not armies, not nations, have advanced the race; but here and there, in the course of ages, an individual has stood up and cast his shadow over the world.
-- Edwin Hubbell Chapin --
Be ready when opportunity comes. Luck is the time when preparation and opportunity meet.
-- Roy Chapin, Jr. --
All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman, and a pretty girl.
-- Charlie Chaplin --
I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.
-- Charlie Chaplin --
They are spoiling the oldest art in the world - the art of pantomime. They are ruining the great beauty of silence.
-- Charlie Chaplin, on talkies --
People get so in the habit of worry that if you save them from drowning and put them on a bank to dry in the sun with hot chocolate and muffins, they wonder whether they are catching cold.
-- John Jay Chapman --
So long as there is any subject which men may not freely discuss, they are timid upon all subjects.
-- John Jay Chapman --
Politicians are necessary, and it'd be foolish to blame them for our troubles. They're just doing what they've always done - looking to survive, looking to climb, trying to please everyone at once, and grinning and lying while they're doing it.
-- Ray Charles --
Little comfort can be sucked from a perhaps.
-- Stephen Charnock --
He who receives a benefit should never forget it; he who bestows should never remember it.
-- Pierre Charron --
There are few successful adults who were not at first successful children.
-- Alexander Chase --
The obstinacy of human beings is exceeded only by the obstinacy of inanimate objects.
-- Alexander Chase --
Like building a house, travel always costs more than you estimate.
-- Ilka Chase --
When he said we were trying to make a fool of him, I could only murmur that the Creator had beaten us to it.
-- Ilka Chase --
One is not superior merely because one sees the world as odious.
-- Chateaubriand --
An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.
-- Viscount De Chateaubriand --
In some cases, non-violence requires more militancy than violence.
-- Cesar Chaves --
Homesickness is absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find.
-- John Cheever --
A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.
-- John Cheever --
If you cry, "forward," you must be sure to make clear the direction in which to go. Don't you see that if you fail to do that and simply call out the word to a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in precisely opposite directions.
-- Anton Chekhov --
One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake.
-- Anton Chekhov --
Love, friendship, respect do not unite people as much as common hatred for something.
-- Anton Chekhov --
Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other.
-- Anton Chekhov --
All people are made alike. They are made of bones, flesh and dinners. Only the dinners are different.
-- Gertrude L. Cheney --
If grass can grow through cement, love can find you at every time in your life.
-- Cher --
The trouble with some women is they get all excited about nothing - and then they marry him.
-- Cher --
I'm the female equivalent of a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. Half of what you see is a pretty good reproduction, and the rest is a fraud.
-- Cher --
They call me the Queen of the Newsstands. There are not enough hours in the day for me to do all the things they say I do, and with all the people they say I do them with.
-- Cher --
Capitalism requires people to be pious souls in the workplace, wily pagans at the cash register.
-- Ron Chernow --
In scandal, as in robbery, the receiver is always as bad as the thief.
-- Earl Of Chesterfield --
An injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.
-- Lord Chesterfield --
In matters of religion and matrimony I never give any advice; because I will not have anybody's torments in this world or the next laid to my charge.
-- Lord Chesterfield --
Patience is a most necessary qualification for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request.
-- Lord Chesterfield --
I recommend you take care of the minutes, for the hours will take care of themselves.
-- Lord Chesterfield --
Lay aside the best book whenever you can go into the best company; and depend upon it, you change for the better.
-- Lord Chesterfield --
Abhor a knave and pity a fool in your heart, but let neither of them unnecessarily see that you do.
-- Lord Chesterfield --
Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.
-- Lord Chesterfield --
Never hold any one by the button, or the hand, in order to be heard out; for if people are unwilling to hear you, you had better hold your tongue than them.
-- Lord Chesterfield --
Modesty is the only sure bait when you angle for praise.
-- Lord Chesterfield --
He who has the most friends and the fewest enemies is the strongest.
-- Lord Chesterfield --
The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.
-- Lord Chesterfield --
A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things yet cannot receive giant ones.
-- Lord Chesterfield --
Whoever is in a hurry shows that the thing he is about is too big for him.
-- Lord Chesterfield --
A wise man will live as much within his wit as within his income.
-- Lord Chesterfield --
It is often more necessary to conceal contempt than resentment, the former being never forgiven, but the latter sometimes forgot. Wrongs are often forgiven; contempt never.
-- Lord Chesterfield --
Be wiser than other people if you can, but do not tell them so.
-- Lord Chesterfield --
A man who cannot command his temper should not think of being a man of business.
-- Lord Chesterfield --
Manners must adorn knowledge and smooth its way in the world, without them it is like a great rough diamond very well in a closet by way of curiosity, and also for its intrinsic value; but most prized when polished.
-- Lord Chesterfield --
There is hardly any place or any company where you may not gain knowledge, if you please; almost everybody knows some one thing and is glad to talk about that one thing.
-- Lord Chesterfield --
When you have found out the prevailing passion of any man, remember never to trust him where that passion is concerned.
-- Lord Chesterfield --
There are no uninteresting things, only uninteresting people.
-- G. K. Chesterton --
Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.
-- G. K. Chesterton --
Music with dinner is an insult to both the cook and violinist.
-- Gilbert K. Chesterton --
The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger.
-- G. K. Chesterton --
Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
-- G. K. Chesterton --
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
-- G. K. Chesterton --
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
-- G. K. Chesterton --
The only people who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.
-- G. K. Chesterton --
To the world you may be just one person, but to one person you may be the world. An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
-- G.K. Chesterton --
Tradition does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are living.
-- Gilbert Chesterton --
Honor is a luxury for aristocrats, but it is a necessity for hall porters.
-- G. K. Chesterton --
There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.
-- G.K. Chesterton --
Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.
-- G. K. Chesterton --
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
-- G. K. Chesterton --
A vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.
-- G. K. Chesterton --
The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.
-- G.K. Chesterton --
Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
-- G. K. Chesterton --
I shall continue to praise the English climate till I die, even if I die of the English climate.
-- G. K. Chesterton --
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump. You may be freeing him from being a camel.
-- G. K. Chesterton --
The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.
-- G. K. Chesterton --
A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.
-- G. K. Chesterton --
Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
-- G. K. Chesterton --
Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom.
-- G. K. Chesterton --
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
-- Gilbert K. Chesterton --
Children are innocent and love justice, while most adults are wicked and prefer mercy.
-- Gilbert K. Chesterton --
What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; It is rather not finding them in the familiar place.
-- G. K. Chesterton --
Many a man has fallen in love with a girl in a light so dim he would not have chosen a suit by it.
-- Maurice Chevalier --
When the last red man shall have vanished from this earth, and his memory is only a story among the whites, these shores will still swarm with the invisible dead of my people.
-- Chief Seattle --
If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to the man. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth.
-- Chief Seattle --
Noodles are not only amusing but delicious.
-- Julia Child --
The dinner table in America is becoming a trap. People are so scared, they don't have any butter or anything. When they talk about healthy food, they usually mean things that don't taste very good.
-- Julia Child --
It's (food) so beautifully arranged on the plate - you know someone's fingers have been all over it.
-- Julia Child --
An effort made for the happiness of others lifts us above ourselves.
-- L. M. Child --
Nature made us individuals, as she did the flowers and the pebbles; but we are afraid to be peculiar, and so our society resembles a bag of marbles, or a string of mold candles. Why should we all dress after the same fashion? The frost never paints my windows twice alike.
-- Lydia M. Child --
Writers are encouraged to "keep ‘em laughing" and complain "with good humor" in order to "win" allies. The joke is always on ourselves.
-- Alice Childress --
I was so mad you could have boiled a pot of water on my head.
-- Alice Childress --
Service is the rent that you pay for room on this earth.
-- Shirley Chisholm --
It's possible to have too much in life. Too many clothes jade our appreciation for new ones; too much money can put us out of touch with life; too much free time can dull the edge of the soul.
-- Joan Chittister --
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
-- Noam Chomsky --
The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.
-- Kate Chopin --
It was the kind of desperate, headlong, adolescent calf love that he should have experienced years ago and got over.
-- Agatha Christie --
Surfing is like that. You are either vigorously cursing or else you are idiotically pleased with yourself.
-- Agatha Christie --
One of the oddest things in life, I think is the things one remembers.
-- Agatha Christie --
There is something about conscious tact that is very irritating.
-- Agatha Christie --
Sometimes you have to learn how to give the right answer to a wrong question.
-- Warren Christopher --
No Santa Claus! Thank God, he lives and he lives forever.
-- Francis P. Church --
I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
-- Winston Churchill --
I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.
-- Winston Churchill --
The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small state to the wolves is a fatal delusion.
-- Winston Churchill --
It is no use saying, "we are doing our best." you have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.
-- Winston Churchill --
There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.
-- Winston Churchill --
I shall always be glad to have seen it - for the same reason papa gave for being glad to have seen Lisbon - namely "that it will be unnecessary ever to see it again."
-- Winston Churchill, On Calcutta --
Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
-- Winston Churchill --
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing has happened.
-- Winston Churchill --
It was the nation and the race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion's heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.
-- Winston Churchill --
Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they may not dismount and the tigers are getting hungry.
-- Winston Churchill --
My wife and I used to breakfast together. But we had to stop or our marriage would have been wrecked.
-- Winston Churchill --
There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.
-- Winston Churchill --
In those days he was wiser than he is now; he used frequently to take my advice.
-- Winston Churchill --
Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.
-- Winston Churchill --
I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
-- Winston Churchill --
Continuous efforts - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.
-- Winston Churchill --
Houses are built of bricks, mortar and good will, not politics, prejudices and spite.
-- Winston Churchill --
I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like being taught.
-- Winston Churchill --
The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.
-- Winston Churchill --
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
-- Sir Winston Churchill --
All great things are simple, and many can be expressed in single words: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.
-- Sir Winston Churchill --
The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty.
-- Winston Churchill --
I do not like elections, but it is in my many elections that I have learnt to know and honor the people of this island. They are good through and through.
-- Winston Churchill --
From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
-- Sir Winston Churchill --
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.
-- Sir Winston Churchill --
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
-- Sir Winston Churchill --
It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link of the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.
-- Winston Churchill --
Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
-- Winston Churchill --
I am certainly not one of those who need to be prodded. In fact, if anything, I am the prod.
-- Winston Churchill --
Without measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed.
-- Winston Churchill --
It's not good enough that we do our best; Sometimes we have to do what's required.
-- Sir Winston Churchill --
I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
-- Sir Winston Churchill --
Life is a test and this world a place of trial. Always the problems - or it may be the same problem - will be presented to every generation in different forms.
-- Winston Churchill --
Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed.
-- Sir Winston Churchill --
The fulfillment of spiritual duty in our daily life is vital to our survival.
-- Winston Churchill --
Modem art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.
-- John Ciardi --
The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.
-- John Ciardi --
Old houses mended cost little less than new before they're ended.
-- Colley Cibber --
What one has, one ought to use; and whatever he does, he should do with all his might.
-- Cicero --
No one was ever great without some portion of divine inspiration.
-- Cicero --
Faithfulness and truth are the most sacred excellences and endowments of the human mind.
-- Cicero --
The good of the people is the chief law.
-- Cicero --
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.
-- Cicero --
It is foolish to tear one's hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.
-- Cicero --
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain a perennial child.
-- Cicero --
What I enjoy is not the fruits alone, but I also enjoy the soil itself, its nature and its power.
-- Cicero --
Every man can tell how many goats or sheep he possesses, but not how many friends.
-- Cicero --
As if anything were so common as ignorance! The multitude of fools is a protection to the wise.
-- Cicero --
Even the best pilots are willing to take advice from their passengers in bad weather.
-- Cicero --
The contemplation of celestial things will make a man both speak and think more sublimely and magnificently when he comes down to human affairs.
-- Cicero --
No man who depends on the caprice of the ignorant rabble can be accounted great.
-- Cicero --
Let us not go over old ground; let us rather prepare for what is to come.
-- Cicero --
It is the character of a brave and resolute man not to be ruffled by adversity and not to desert his post.
-- Cicero --
Never go to excess, but let moderation be your guide.
-- Cicero --
A life of peace, purity, and refinement leads to a calm and untroubled old age.
-- Cicero --
He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason.
-- Cicero --
Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.
-- Cicero --
Let arms give place to the robe, and the laurel of the warriors yield to the tongue of the orator.
-- Cicero --
A happy life consists in tranquility of mind.
-- Cicero --
In men of the highest character and noblest genius there is to be found an insatiable desire for honor, command, power, and glory.
-- Cicero --
I will go further, and assert that nature without culture can often do more to deserve praise than culture without nature.
-- Cicero --
We had seen the light at the end of the tunnel, and it was out
-- John C. Clancy --
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
-- Tom Clancy --
We didn't really have a band with Cream. We rarely played as an ensemble; We were three virtuosos, all of us soloing all the time.
-- Eric Clapton --
No man is so insignificant as to be sure his example can do no hurt.
-- Lord Clarendon --
There are no true friends in politics. We are all sharks circling, and waiting, for traces of blood to appear in the water.
-- Alan Clark --
What a lot of people are saving for a rainy day is somebody else's umbrella.
-- Caroline Clark --
If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere.
-- Frank A. Clark --
Gossip needn't be false to be evil - there's a lot of truth that shouldn't be passed around.
-- Frank A. Clark --
Maybe a person's time would be as well spent raising food as raising money to buy food.
-- Frank A. Clark --
It's hard to detect good luck – it looks so much like something you've earned.
-- Frank A. Clark --
The only thing that continues to give us more for our money is a weighing machine.
-- George Clark --
A right is not what someone gives you, it's what no one can take from you.
-- Ramsey Clark --
There is no such thing as chance or accident, the words merely signify our ignorance of some real and immediate cause.
-- Adam Clarke --
It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.
-- Arthur C. Clarke --
If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong.
-- Arthur C. Clarke --
The intelligence of the planet is constant and the population is growing.
-- Arthur C. Clarke --
It has yet to be proved that intelligence has any survival value.
-- Arthur C. Clarke --
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-- Arthur C. Clarke --
The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.
-- Arthur C. Clarke --
And O! She was the Sunday, in every week.
-- Austin Clarke --
A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman of the next generation.
-- J. F. Clarke --
A word spoken is past recalling.
-- John Clarke --
The most terrible of lies is not that which is uttered but that which is lived.
-- W. G. Clarke --
A successor is almost always deemed not as adequate as the incumbent, and that's almost always not true.
-- A. W. Clausen --
The time will come when winter will ask you what you were doing all summer.
-- Henry Clay --
Political parties serve to keep each other in check, one keenly watching the other.
-- Henry Clay --
If you do everything you should do, and do not do anything you should not do, you will, according to the best available statistics, live exactly eighteen hours longer than you would otherwise.
-- Logan Clendening --
We should render a service to a friend to bind him closer to us, and to an enemy in order to make a friend of him.
-- Cleobulus --
The ship of democracy, which has weathered many storms, may sink through the mutiny of those aboard.
-- Grover Cleveland --
We have a generation enslaving itself to drugs, young men and women doing to our race what slavery couldn't.
-- Lucille Clifton --
The bad news is our only child is going to college. The good news is it opens up another bedroom.
-- Bill Clinton --
There is no such thing as other people's children.
-- Hillary Rodham Clinton --
All our artists and cultural institutions are an integral part of what we call America, and we must work very hard not only to preserve and nurture, but to love them, because of the impact they make on our lives.
-- Hillary Rodham Clinton --
All great art comes from a sense of outrage.
-- Glenn Close --
His face looked like a face that had refused to gel and was about to run down on his clothes.
-- Irvin S. Cobb --
If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers.
-- Irvin S. Cobb --
It is by attempting to reach the top at a single leap, that so much misery is caused in the world.
-- William Cobbett --
A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
-- Sir Barnett Cocks --
An artist cannot speak about his work any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
-- Jean Cocteau --
Silence moves faster when it's going backward.
-- Jean Cocteau --
History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.
-- Jean Cocteau --
Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.
-- Jean Cocteau --
Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
-- Jean Cocteau --
When I wrote that Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo, I was not joking.
-- Jean Cocteau --
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
-- Jean Cocteau --
I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.
-- Leonard Cohen --
Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.
-- Leonard Cohen --
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
-- Leonard Cohen --
To be celebrated is nothing. To be loved is everything.
-- Claudette Colbert --
A "new thinker," when studied closely, is merely a man who does not know what other people have thought.
-- Frank L. Colby --
Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig. How many of them will own up to a lack of humor?
-- Frank Moore Colby --
Persecution was at least a sign of personal interest. Tolerance is composed of nine parts of apathy to one of brotherly love.
-- Frank Moore Colby --
Prose is words in their best order; poetry is the best words in the best order.
-- Charles Coleridge --
The fruits of the tree of knowledge are various; he must be strong indeed who can digest all of them.
-- Mary Coleridge --
Solitude affects some people like wine; they must not take too much of it, for it flies to the head.
-- Mary Coleridge --
No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge --
Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon and the deeper it sinks into the mind
-- Samuel Coleridge --
I have no faith in act-of-parliament reform. All the great - the permanently great - things that have been achieved in the world have been so achieved by individuals, working from the instinct of genius or of goodness.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge --
Every human feeling is greater and larger than its exciting cause - a proof, I think, that man is designed for a higher state of existence.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge --
The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions - the little, soon-forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look, a heart-felt compliment, and the countless infinitesimals of pleasurable and genial feeling.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge --
A man of maxims only is like a cyclops with one eye, and that eye placed in the back of his head.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge --
Some men are like musical glasses; to produce their finest tones, you must keep them wet.
-- Samuel Coleridge --
My cat does not talk as respectfully to me as I do to her.
-- Colette --
You go through so many changes as a child, then you grow up and discover that none of that stuff mattered, except for the impression it made on your mind.
-- Joan Walton Collaso --
Music is almost as dangerous as gunpowder; and it maybe requires looking after no less than the press, or the mint. 'Tis possible a public regulation might not be amiss.
-- Jeremy Collier --
Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do.
-- R. G. Collingwood --
"Dynasty" was the opportunity to take charge of my career rather than walking around like a library book waiting to be loaned out.
-- Joan Collins --
To ask for advice is in nine cases out of ten to tout for flattery.
-- John Churton Collins --
What I am looking for is a blessing not in disguise.
-- Kitty O'neill Collins --
The good teacher makes the poor student good, and the good student superior.
-- Marva Collins --
A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius; and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition.
-- Charles Caleb Colton --
If you want enemies, excel others; if you want friends, let others excel you.
-- C. C. Colton --
Logic is a large drawer, containing some useful instruments, and many more that are superfluous. A wise man will look into it for two purposes, to avail himself of those instruments that are really useful, and to admire the ingenuity with which those that are not so, are assorted and arranged.
-- Charles Caleb Colton --
Marriage is like a feast where the grace is sometimes better than the dinner.
-- Charles Caleb Colton --
If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city.
-- Charles Caleb Colton --
None are so fond of secrets as those who do not keep them.
-- Charles Caleb Colton --
All adverse and depressing influences can be overcome, not by fighting, but by rising above them.
-- Charles Caleb Colton --
There are three modes of bearing the ills of life: by indifference, by philosophy, and by religion.
-- Charles Caleb Colton --
Men are born with two eyes, but only one tongue, in order that they should see twice as much as they say.
-- Charles Caleb Colton --
The bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret; we make up our minds every night to leave it early, but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late.
-- Charles Caleb Colton --
True friendship is like sound health; The value of it is seldom known until it be lost.
-- Charles Colton --
He that has energy enough to root out a vice should go further, and try to plant a virtue in its place.
-- Charles Caleb Colton --
Wealth after all is a relative thing, since he that has little and wants less is richer than he that has much and wants more.
-- C. C. Colton --
If the music doesn't say it, how can the words say it for the music?
-- John Coltrane --
Although it is dangerous to have too much knowledge of certain subjects, it is still more dangerous to be totally ignorant of them.
-- Columbat --
A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins.
-- Laurie Colwin --
I don't call it gossip. I call it "emotional speculation."
-- Laurie Colwin --
Management must be concerned first with the opportunity for a decent living.
-- Hugh Comer --
The conservation of natural resources is, and has been for half a century, the paramount domestic issue before the American people.
-- Henry Steele Commager --
The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.
-- Henry Steele Commager --
We should not forget that our tradition is one of protest and revolt, and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past while we silence the rebels of the present.
-- Henry Steele Commager --
Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change.
-- Henry Steele Commager --
For a people to be without history, or to be ignorant of its history, is as for a man to be without memory.
-- Henry Steele Commager --
If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong way.
-- Barry Commoner --
The audience knows I'm not going to do anything after all these years to upset them.
-- Perry Como --
Appearances are not held to be a clue to the truth. But we seem to have no other.
-- Ivy Compton-Burnett --
Slogans are both exciting and comforting, but they are also powerful opiates for the conscience.
-- James Conant --
Virtue is like the polar star, which keeps its place, and all stars turn toward it.
-- Confucius --
The people may be made to follow a course of action, but they may not be made to understand it.
-- Confucius --
Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon or stars.
-- Confucius --
When you are laboring for others let it be with the same zeal as if it were for yourself.
-- Confucius --
I hear and forget. I see and remember. I do and understand.
-- Confucius --
In education there should be no class distinction.
-- Confucius --
It is man that makes truth great, not truth that makes man great.
-- Confucius --
The superior man is satisfied and composed; the mean man is always full of distress.
-- Confucius --
Chi Wen Tsu always thought three times before taking action. Twice would have been quite enough.
-- Confucius --
The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.
-- Confucius --
Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
-- Confucius --
Humility is the solid foundation of all the virtues.
-- Confucius --
The mirror reflects all objects without being sullied.
-- Confucius --
It is by the odes that the man is aroused. It is by the rules of propriety that the character is established. It is from music that the finish is received.
-- Confucius --
He who speaks without modesty will find it difficult to make his words good.
-- Confucius --
The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.
-- Confucius --
Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart.
-- Confucius --
When we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.
-- Confucius --
Study the past if you would define the future.
-- Confucius --
Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses.
-- Confucius --
Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles.
-- Confucius --
What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others.
-- Confucius --
If you look into your own heart, and you find nothing wrong there, what is there to worry about? What is there to fear?
-- Confucius --
What, he speaks unseasonable truths sometimes, because he has not wit enough to invent an evasion.
-- William Congreve --
More than anything else, I'd like to be an old man with a good face, like Hitchcock or Picasso.
-- Sean Connery --
I like women. I don't understand them, but I like them.
-- Sean Connery --
Marriage is a wonderful invention; but, then again, so is a bicycle repair kit.
-- Billy Connolly --
I've always wanted to go to Switzerland to see what the army does with those wee red knives.
-- Billy Connolly --
Have you heard about the oyster who went to a disco and pulled a mussel?
-- Billy Connolly --
He could not blow his nose without moralizing on the state of the handkerchief industry.
-- Cyril Connolly --
Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
-- Cyril Connolly --
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk.
-- Cyril Connolly --
All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
-- Cyril Connolly --
I take it that what all men are really after is some form of, perhaps only some formula of, peace.
-- James Conrad --
You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
-- Joseph Conrad --
The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.
-- Joseph Conrad --
The intention of every other piece of prose may be discussed and even mistrusted; but the purpose of a cookery book is one and unmistakable. Its object can conceivably be no other than to increase the happiness of mankind.
-- Joseph Conrad --
A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.
-- Joseph Conrad --
Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love and to put its trust in life.
-- Joseph Conrad --
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upwards on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
-- Joseph Conrad --
The sea never changes, and its works, for all the talk of men, are wrapped in mystery.
-- Joseph Conrad --
It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself the face of pain.
-- Joseph Conrad --
Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.
-- Pat Conroy --
I believe in opening mail once a month, whether it needs it or not.
-- Bob Considine --
St. Patrick's day is an enchanted time - a day to begin transforming winter's dreams into summer's magic.
-- Adrienne Cook --
Calvin Coolidge's perpetual expression was of smelling something burning on the kitchen stove.
-- Sherwin L. Cook --
Curiosity ... endows the people who have it with a generosity in argument and a serenity in cheerful willingness to let life take the form it will.
-- Alistair Cooke --
Nearly every move in baseball - the windup, the pitch, the motion of the infielders - is different from other games.
-- Alistair Cooke --
Don't fight with the pillow, but lay down your head and kick every worriment out of the bed.
-- Edmund Cooke --
We rarely gain a high or larger view except as it is forced upon us through struggles which we would have avoided if we could.
-- Charles Horton Cooley --
Economy is the method by which we prepare today to afford the improvements of tomorrow.
-- Calvin Coolidge --
A school is not the end but only the beginning of an education.
-- Calvin Coolidge --
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
-- Calvin Coolidge --
No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave.
-- Calvin Coolidge --
Few men are lacking in capacity, but they fail because they are lacking in application.
-- Calvin Coolidge --
One of the first lessons a president has to learn is that every word he says weighs a ton.
-- Calvin Coolidge --
If the shoe fits, you're not allowing for growth.
-- Robert N. Coons --
I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper.
-- Gary Cooper (on his decision not to take the leading role in "Gone with the Wind.") --
Candor is a proof of both a just frame of mind, and of a good tone of breeding. It is a quality that belongs equally to the honest man and to the gentleman.
-- James Fenimore Cooper --
Never drink black coffee at lunch; it will keep you awake in the afternoon.
-- Jilly Cooper --
Bloody men are like bloody buses - you wait for about a year and as soon as one approaches your stop two or three others appear.
-- Wendy Cope --
To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.
-- Aaron Copeland --
When you stretch the truth, watch out for the snapback.
-- Bill Copeland --
To get something done a committee should consist of no more than three people, two of whom are absent.
-- Robert Copeland --
Listening to the fifth symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes.
-- Aaron Copland --
The difference between Beethoven and Mahler is the difference between watching a great man walk down the street and watching a great actor act the part of a great man walking down the street.
-- Aaron Copland --
Whom God wishes to destroy, He first makes successful in show business.
-- Francis Ford Coppola --
I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog which growls every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon, and a cat that comes home late at night.
-- Marie Corelli --
Apart from cheese and tulips, the main product of the country (Holland) is advocaat, a drink made from lawyers.
-- Alan Coren --
Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what it is you think you want to hear.
-- Alan Coren --
The Act of God designation on all insurance policies means roughly that you cannot be insured for the accidents that are most likely to happen to you. If your ox kicks a hole in your neighbor's Maserati, however, indemnity is instantaneous.
-- Alan Coren --
There is nothing love cannot face; There is no limit to its faith, its hope, and endurance.
-- Corinthians --
He on whom heaven confers a sceptre knows not the weight till he bears it.
-- Corneille --
Propaganda is that branch of the art of lying which consists in very nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies.
-- Francis M. Cornford --
I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart that can be cured only with gold.
-- Hernando Cortes --
My childhood should have taught me lessons for my own fatherhood, but it didn't, because parenting can be learned only by people who have no children.
-- Bill Cosby --
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
-- Bill Cosby --
A word to the wise ain't necessary - it's the stupid ones that need the advice.
-- Bill Cosby --
Stopping at third base adds no more to the score than striking out.
-- E. Joseph Cossman --
The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night's sleep.
-- Joseph Cossman --
But in truth there are only three types of people in the world: people who work, people who are not allowed to, and people who don't have to.
-- Elvis Costello --
Acting has always been holy to me. When I act I don't get caught lying very often.
-- Kevin Costner --
Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better.
-- Smile Coue --
Love matches are formed by people who pay for a month of honey with a life of vinegar.
-- Countess Of Blessington --
I don't answer the phone. I get the feeling whenever I do that there will be someone on the other end.
-- Fred Couples --
One of the most obvious results of having a baby around the house is to turn two good people into complete idiots who probably wouldn't have been much worse than mere imbeciles without it.
-- Georges Courteline --
Ignorance is the primary source of all misery and vice.
-- Victor Cousin --
The message from the moon which we have flashed to the far corners of this planet is that no problem need any longer be considered insoluble.
-- Norman Cousins --
It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.
-- Noel Coward --
At this particular moment, I cannot find so much to laugh at as I would like.
-- Noel Coward --
I write at high speed because boredom is bad for my health. It upsets my stomach more than anything else. I also avoid green vegetables. They're grossly overrated.
-- Noel Coward --
I never had any other desire so strong, and so like to covetousness, as that one which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and large garden.
-- Abraham Cowley --
Five minutes - Zounds! I have been five minutes too late all my lifetime.
-- Hannah Cowley --
Our thoughts are unseen hands shaping the people we meet. Whatever we truly think them to be, that's what they'll become for us.
-- Richard Cowper --
Absence of occupation is not rest; a mind quite vacant is a mind distressed.
-- William Cowper --
With spots quadrangular of diamond form, Ensanguined hearts, clubs typical of strife, And spades, the emblems of untimely graves.
-- William Cowper --
Boys are, at best, but pretty buds unblown, whose scent and hues are rather guessed than known.
-- William Cowper --
Variety's the very spice of life that gives it all its flavor.
-- William Cowper --
Keeping your clothes well pressed will keep you from looking hard pressed.
-- Coleman Cox --
Heredity: the thing a child gets from the other side of the family.
-- Marcelene Cox --
Divorce: that's when a husband no longer has to bring the money home to his wife. He can mail it.
-- Morty Craft --
You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you do not trust enough.
-- Frank Crane --
To be a genuine individualist requires a great deal of strength and courage. It is never easy to chart new territory, to cross new frontiers, or to introduce subtle shadings to an established color.
-- Toller Cranston --
I think women see me on the cover of magazines and think I never have a pimple or bags under my eyes. You have to realize that's after two hours of hair and makeup, plus retouching. Even I don't wake up looking like Cindy Crawford.
-- Cindy Crawford --
I need sex for a clear complexion, but I'd rather do it for love.
-- Joan Crawford --
Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
-- Quentin Crisp --
There was no need to do any housework after all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.
-- Quentin Crisp --
Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.
-- Quentin Crisp --
If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.
-- Quentin Crisp --
There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.
-- Walter Cronkite --
Make a bigger space in the universe for you head to live in and it will grow to fill the space.
-- David Crosby --
Angels descending, bring from above, Echoes of mercy, whispers of love.
-- Fanny Crosby --
In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt.
-- Amanda Cross --
Life has this in common with prizefighting: If you've received a belly blow, it's likely to be followed by a right to the jaw.
-- Amanda Cross --
Try as hard as we may for perfection, the net result of our labors is an amazing variety of imperfectness. We are surprised at our own versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways.
-- Samuel McChord Crothers --
God has editing rights over our prayers. He will edit them, correct them, bring them in line with His will and then hand them back to us to be resubmitted.
-- Stephen Crotts --
War destroys men but luxury destroys mankind; at once it corrupts the body and mind.
-- John Crowne --
Knowledge is not a passion from without the mind, but an active exertion of the inward strength, vigor, and power of the mind, displaying itself from within.
-- Ralph Cudworth --
Games must be regarded not as conscious inventions, but as survivals from primitive conditions, under which they originated in magical rites and chiefly as means of divination.
-- Stewart Culin --
He had no nose, properly speaking, but a large beak of preposterous widthlessness, which gave his whole face the expression of falling gravely downstairs, and quite obliterated the unimportant chin.
-- e. e. cummings --
I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.
-- e. e. cummings --
It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
-- e. e. cummings --
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
-- e. e. cummings --
Do not save your loving speeches for you friends till they are dead; do not write them on their tombstones, speak them rather now instead.
-- Anna Cummins --
I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in fifty years what my father taught by example in one week.
-- Mario Cuomo --
A belief is made religious, not so much by its content, as rather by the way it is held.
-- Don Cupitt --
Etiquette means behaving yourself a little better than is absolutely essential.
-- Will Cuppy --
All my life through, the new sight of nature made me rejoice like a child.
-- Marie Curie --
I was taught that the way of progress is neither swift nor easy.
-- Marie Curie --
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
-- Marie Curie --
Life is not easy for any of us, but what of that? We must have perseverance and, above all, confidence in ourselves.
-- Marie Curie --
Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.
-- Marie Curie --
One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.
-- Marie Curie --
In cooking, as in all the arts, simplicity is the sign of perfection.
-- Curnonsky --
A color commentator is a guy who's paid to talk while everyone goes to the bathroom.
-- Bill Curry --
When I first got to Hollywood, I made forty dollars a week and they named a hair style after me and made me into a kind of male Yvonne DeCarlo, fooling around in Arabian Nights rubbish.
-- Tony Curtis --
The air moves like a river and carries the clouds with it; just as running water carries all the things that float upon it.
-- Leonardo da Vinci --
The time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they look on the murder of men.
-- Leonardo da Vinci --
A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law, which instrument it is within the capacity of man to reproduce with all its movements.
-- Leonardo Da Vinci --
I have wasted my hours.
-- Leonardo da Vinci --
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
-- Leonardo da Vinci --
Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard and not seen.
-- Leonardo da Vinci --
Just as eating against one's will is injurious to health, so study without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.
-- Leonardo da Vinci --
It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.
-- Leonardo da Vinci --
When I was six, I made my mother a little hat - out of her new blouse.
-- Lilly Dache --
Mothers are basically a patient lot. They have to be or they would devour their offspring early on, like guppies.
-- Mary Daheim --
A little nonsense now and then is cherished by the wisest men.
-- Roald Dahl --
There is a strange and mighty race of people called the Americans who are rapidly becoming the coldest in the world because of this cruel, man-eating idol, lucre.
-- Edward Dahlberg --
Though man is the only beast that can write, he has small reason to be proud of it. When he utters something that is wise it is nothing that the river horse does not know, and most of his creations are the result of accident.
-- Edward Dahlberg --
Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others' activities. For this reason it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others.
-- Dalai Lama --
We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.
-- Salvador Dali --
I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait. - - Salvador Dali
-- Salvador Dali --
The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.
-- Salvador Dali --
Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.
-- Salvador Dali --
I think I care too much about what people think about me.
-- Matt Damon --
As I walk from crap game to crap game, my brain becomes active and agile and dwells on lofty thoughts.
-- Nick "The Greek" Dandalos --
Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.
-- Frank Dane --
If you have time to whine and complain about something then you have the time to do something about it.
-- Anthony J. D'Angelo --
Every private citizen has a public responsibility.
-- Myra Daniels --
A habit is something you can do without thinking - which is why most of us have so many of them.
-- Frank A. Dark --
We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as effectively as by bombs.
-- Kenneth Dark --
Men would be great criminals did they need as many laws as they make.
-- Charles John Darling --
If a man is happy in America, it is considered he is doing something wrong.
-- Clarence Darrow --
Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause.
-- Clarence Darrow --
I don't like spinach, and I'm glad I don't, because if I liked it I'd eat it and I just hate it.
-- Clarence Darrow --
I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure - that is all that agnosticism means.
-- Clarence Darrow --
Freedom comes from human beings, rather than from laws and institutions.
-- Clarence Darrow --
Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.
-- Clarence Darrow --
History repeats itself, and that's one of the things that's wrong with history
-- Clarence Darrow --
It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.
-- Charles Darwin --
A man who dares to waste one hour of life has not discovered the value of life.
-- Charles Darwin --
Great is the power of steady misrepresentation - but the history of science shows how, fortunately, this power does not long endure.
-- Charles Darwin --
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
-- Charles Darwin --
In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
-- Francis Darwin --
The crimes of extreme civilization are certainly more atrocious man those of extreme barbarism.
-- Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly --
Canada is not really a place where you encouraged to have large spiritual adventures.
-- Robertson Davies --
Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone, but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.
-- Bette Davis --
We movie stars all end up by ourselves. Who knows? Maybe we want to.
-- Bette Davis --
This will remain the land of the free only as long as it is the home of the brave.
-- Elmer Davis --
Never be haughty to the humble; never be humble to the haughty.
-- Jefferson Davis --
Way down deep, we're all motivated by the same urges. Cats have the courage to live by them.
-- Jim Davis --
Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.
-- Sir H. Davy --
I think it is likely that there is life out there. I fear we shall never know about it.
-- Richard Dawkins --
The great consulting room of a wise man is the library.
-- G. Dawson --
As time goes on, new and remote aspects of truth are discovered which can seldom be fitted into creeds that are changeless.
-- Clarence Day --
The poets of each generation seldom sing a new song. They turn themes men always have loved, and sing them in the mode of their times.
-- Clarence Day --
Information's pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience.
-- Clarence Day --
The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you'll outgrow it.
-- Doris Day --
If a man does something silly, people say, "Isn't he silly?" If a woman does something silly, people say, "Aren't women silly?"
-- Doris Day --
You know my views about some regulations - they're written for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men.
-- Harry Day --
She is a fool, who trusts a man.
-- Marie de France --
Deliberation is a function of the many; action is the function of one.
-- Charles De Gaulle --
A great country worthy of the name does not have any friends.
-- Charles de Gaulle --
You have to be sure the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination.
-- Charles de Gaulle --
History does not teach fatalism. There are moments when the will of a handful of free men breaks through determinism and opens up new roads. People get the history they deserve.
-- Charles de Gaulle --
The real connoisseurs in art are those who make people accept as beautiful something everybody used to consider ugly, by revealing and resuscitating the beauty in it.
-- Edmond and Jules de Goncourt --
What I love best about music is the women who listen to it.
-- Jules de Goncourt --
Before undergoing a surgical operation, arrange your temporal affairs - you may live.
-- Remy de Gourmont --
We live less and less, and we learn more and more. Sensibility is surrendering to intelligence.
-- Remy de Gourmont --
False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.
-- Joseph de Maistre --
Great artists impose their particular illusion on humanity.
-- Guy de Maupassant --
A good education is harmful to a dancer. A good calf is better than a good head.
-- Agnes De Mille --
Then I did the simplest thing in the world. I leaned down and kissed him. And the world cracked open.
-- Agnes de Mille --
If takes great passion and great energy to do anything creative, especially in the theater. You have to care so much that you can't sleep, you can't eat, you can't talk to people.
-- Agnes de Mille --
Flowers that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their coloring as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of years been the heritage of children - honored as the jewelry of God.
-- Thomas de Quincey --
It is most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man, that he is disguised in liquor; for, on the contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety.
-- Thomas de Quincey --
There are two things which will always be very difficult for a democratic nation: to start a war and to end it.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville --
The surface of American society is covered with a layer of Democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville --
"Skeptic" does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.
-- Miguel de Unamuno --
There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.
-- Peter de Vries --
You can't be happy with a woman who pronounces both d's in Wednesday.
-- Peter de Vries --
Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.
-- Peter de Vries --
The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds; they mature slowly.
-- Peter de Vries --
The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.
-- Peter de Vries --
I love being a writer. what I can't stand is the paperwork.
-- Peter de Vries --
Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff.
-- Peter de Vries --
I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world.
-- Eugene V. Debs --
When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.
-- Eugene Debs --
The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. They have always taught you that it is your patriotic duty to go to war and slaughter yourselves at their command.
-- Eugene V. Debs --
People don't very much like things that are beautiful - they are so far from their nasty little minds.
-- Claude Debussy --
Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.
-- Stephen Decatur --
The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear.
-- Daniel Defoe --
Everybody has talent at twenty-five. The difficult thing is to have it at fifty.
-- Edgar Degas --
What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists. One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming.
-- Edgar Degas --
I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls, and they say, "because it's such a beautiful animal." there you go. Well, I think my mother's attractive, but I have photographs of her.
-- Ellen Degeneres --
In the beginning there was nothing. God said, "Let there be light!" And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better.
-- Ellen DeGeneres --
My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the hell she is.
-- Ellen Degeneres --
Shall we call ourselves benevolent when the gifts we bestow do not cost us a single privation?
-- Degerando --
O what a heaven is love! O what a hell!
-- Thomas Dekker --
The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.
-- Eugene Delacroix --
What is most real for me are the illusions I create with my paintings. Everything else is quicksand.
-- Eugene Delacroix --
Self-sacrifice which denies common sense is not a virtue, it's a spiritual dissipation.
-- Margaret DeLand --
In our dreams, we are always young.
-- Sadie Delany --
I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.
-- Don Delillo --
When the designs are chosen with care, tattoos have a power and magic all their own. They decorate the body but they also enhance the soul.
-- Michelle Delio --
Tattooing is about personalizing the body, making it a true home and fit temple for the spirit that dwells inside it. Tattooing, therefore, is a way of keeping the spiritual and material needs of my body in balance.
-- Michelle Delio --
I've been fighting ten years to make people forget I'm just a pretty boy with a beautiful face. It's a hard fight, but I'll win it.
-- Alain Delon --
I'm actually a thin, serious person, but I play fat and funny, but only for the movies.
-- Dom Deluise --
A dozen press agents working overtime can do terrible things to the human spirit.
-- Cecil B. DeMille --
Remember you are a star. Never go across the alley even to dump garbage unless you are dressed to the teeth.
-- Cecil B. DeMille, To Paulette Goddard --
Strength and beauty are the blessings of youth; temperance, however, is the flower of old age.
-- Democritus --
The wise man belongs to all countries, for the home of a great soul is the whole world.
-- Democritus --
There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good.
-- Edwin Denby --
I pretty much try to stay in a constant state of confusion just because of the expression it leaves on my face.
-- Johnny Depp --
Whoever said money can't buy happiness simply didn't know where to go shopping.
-- Bo Derek --
Do you know anyone who would - secretly, sincerely, in his innermost self - really prefer to return to childhood?
-- Anita Desai --
I seemed to have gained nothing in trying to educate myself unless it was to discover more and more fully how ignorant I was.
-- Rene Descartes --
Common sense is the best-distributed commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well-supplied with it.
-- Rene Descartes --
Common sense is the most widely shared commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well-supplied with it.
-- Rene Descartes --
Have no more doubt of the omnipotence of a free people.
-- Camille Desmoulins --
The British press is always looking for stuff to fill the space between the cartoons.
-- Bernadette Devlin --
Patience is the greatest of all shock absorbers. The only thing you can get in a hurry is trouble.
-- Thomas R. Dewar --
Genuine ignorance is profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas.
-- John Dewey --
Failure is instructive. The person who thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
-- John Dewey --
Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.
-- John Dewey --
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
-- John Dewey --
What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child that must the community want for all its children.
-- John Dewey --
I like viable women who are out there doing. I like women who are very involved with living and who haven't pulled out from life.
-- Colleen Dewhurst --
You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the rabbit and plays with the apple, I'll buy you a new car.
-- Harvey Diamond --
If men had to have babies, they would only ever have one each.
-- Diana, Princess of Wales --
Every one of us needs to show how much we care for each other and, in the process, care for ourselves.
-- Princess Diana --
Anywhere I see suffering, that is where I want to be, doing what I can.
-- Princess Diana --
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
-- Philip K. Dick --
It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's
-- Charles Dickens --
Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many: not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.
-- Charles Dickens --
Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he's well dressed. There ain't much credit in that.
-- Charles Dickens --
Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.
-- Charles Dickens --
Philadelphia is a handsome city, but distractingly regular. After walking about it for an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked street.
-- Charles Dickens --
Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism, are all very good words for the lips; especially prunes and prism.
-- Charles Dickens --
Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.
-- Charles Dickens --
I do not know the American gentleman. God forgive me for putting two such words together.
-- Charles Dickens --
It is well for a man to respect his own vocation, whatever it is, and to think himself bound to uphold it and to claim for it the respect it deserves.
-- Charles Dickens --
With affection beaming out of one eye, and calculation shining out of the other.
-- Charles Dickens --
No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.
-- Charles Dickens --
A person who can't pay gets another person who can't pay to guarantee that he can pay.
-- Charles Dickens --
Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you've conquered human nature.
-- Charles Dickens --
Adventures are an indication of inefficiency. Good explorers don't have them.
-- Herbert Spencer Dickey --
A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.
-- James Dickey --
To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
-- Emily Dickinson --
I felt it shelter to speak to you.
-- Emily Dickinson --
Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without words, and never stops at all.
-- Emily Dickinson --
Anger as soon as fed is dead - 'tis starving makes it fat.
-- Emily Dickinson --
The pedigree of honey does not concern the bee, a clover, anytime, to him, is aristocracy.
-- Emily Dickinson --
The spider as an artist has never been employed, though his surpassing merit is freely certified.
-- Emily Dickinson --
That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.
-- Emily Dickinson --
Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.
-- Emily Dickinson --
A young man gave up his lucrative job to become a writer. He was asked, "Have you sold anything yet?" He replied, "Yes, my car and my television."
-- Patrick Dickinson --
I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran through and left me holding the knob.
-- Bo Diddley --
Women swallow at one mouthful the lie that flatters, and drink drop by drop the truth that is bitter.
-- Denis Diderot --
Mankind have banned the Divinity from their presence; they have relegated Him to a sanctuary; the walls of the temple restrict His view; He does not exist outside of it.
-- Denis Diderot --
In general, the more a people is civilized, refined, the less its morals are poetic; everything weakens and turns mild.
-- Denis Diderot --
Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.
-- Denis Diderot --
The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
-- Joan Didion --
Soup not only warms you and is easy to swallow and to digest, it also creates the illusion in the back of your mind that mother is there.
-- Marlene Dietrich --
Superstitions are habits rather than beliefs.
-- Marlene Dietrich --
The average man is more interested in a woman who is interested in him than he is in a woman with beautiful legs.
-- Marlene Dietrich --
I think the dying pray at the last not "please" but "thank you" as a guest thanks his host at the door.
-- Annie Dillard --
There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
-- Annie Dillard --
Women want men, careers, money, children, friends, luxury, comfort, independence, freedom, respect, love, and a three-dollar pantyhose that won't run.
-- Phyllis Diller --
When I go to the beauty parlor, I always use the emergency entrance. Sometimes I just go for an estimate.
-- Phyllis Diller --
Fang, my husband, says the only thing domestic about me is that I was born in this country.
-- Phyllis Diller --
A smile is a curve that sets everything straight.
-- Phyllis Diller --
Old age is when the liver spots show through your gloves.
-- Phyllis Diller --
If your house is really a mess and a stranger comes to the door, greet him with, "Who could have done this? We have no enemies."
-- Phyllis Diller --
These few dollars you lose here today are going to buy you stories to tell your children and great-grandchildren.
-- John Dillinger --
Ironically, rural America has become viewed by a growing number of Americans as having a higher quality of life not because of what it has, but rather because of what it does not have!
-- Don A. Dillman --
Repentance, without amendment, is like continually pumping without mending the leak.
-- Lewis W. Dilwyn --
A ballplayer's got to be kept hungry to become a big leaguer. That's why no boy from a rich family ever made the big leagues.
-- Joe Dimaggio --
Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.
-- Ernest Dimnet --
The flamingos are the most delicately colored of all the African birds, pink and red like a flying twig of an oleander bush.
-- Isak Dinesen --
I think these difficult times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way and that so many things that one goes around worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.
-- Isak Dinesen --
In the mind and nature of a man a secret is an ugly thing, like a hidden physical defect.
-- Isak Dinesen --
Over the door of a library in Thebes is the inscription, "Medicine For The Soul".
-- Diodorus Siculus --
A blush is the color of virtue.
-- Diogenes --
Aristotle said that education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.
-- Diogenes --
Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad.
-- Diogenes --
Zest is the secret of all beauty. There is no beauty that is attractive without zest.
-- Christian Dior --
In science, one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.
-- Paul Dirac --
A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.
-- Everett Dirksen --
I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.
-- Everett Dirksen --
It's not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.
-- Roy Disney --
I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I've ever known.
-- Walt Disney --
Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret
-- Disraeli --
Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of man.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
A university should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
Youth is the trustee of prosperity.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we expect generally happens.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
The wisdom of the wise and the experience of ages may be preserved by quotation.
-- Disraeli --
The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
Mankind may supply us with facts, but the results, even if they agree with previous ones, must be the work of our mind.
-- Disraeli --
The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
Teach us that wealth is not elegance, that profusion is not magnificence, that splendor is not beauty.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
There are some silent people who are more interesting than the best talkers.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
A man who is not a liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a conservative at sixty has no head.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
The secret of success is constancy of purpose.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
To be conscious that you are ignorant of the facts is a great step in knowledge.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
The most dangerous strategy is to jump a chasm in two leaps.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
The divine right of kings may have been a plea for feeble tyrants, but the divine right of government is the keystone of human progress, and without it governments sink into police, and a nation is degraded into a mob.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
Great services are not canceled by one act or by one single error.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
He was one of those men who think that the world can be saved by writing a pamphlet.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
Wherever is found what is called a paternal government was found a State education. It had been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
Nurture your mind with great thoughts; to believe in the heroic makes heroes.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
Individuals may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
-- Benjamin Disraeli --
If you are determined enough and willing to pay the price, you can get it done.
-- Mike Ditka --
While it is a misfortune to a woman never to be loved, it is a tragedy for her never to love.
-- Dorothy Dix --
The reason husbands and wives don't understand each other is because they belong to different sexes.
-- Dorothy Dix --
Surely the consolation of old age is finding out how few things are worth worrying over.
-- Dorothy Dix --
It is necessary to invent quotes more and more these days because professional golfers are gradually losing the power of speech. Already adverbs have been eliminated entirely from their vocabulary. "I hit the ball super but putted just horrible."
-- Peter Dobereiner --
There is always a way to be honest without being brutal.
-- Arthur Dobrin --
Great individuals, not great organization men, make a college or university great.
-- Harold W. Dodds --
Nowadays, people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.
-- Robert Doisneau --
Sometimes I think we're the only two lawyers who trust each other.
-- Elizabeth Dole, To Bob Dole --
Only the amateurs stay mad.
-- Sam Donaldson --
We need metaphors of magic and monsters in order to understand the human condition.
-- Stephen Donaldson --
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
-- J. P. Donleavy --
Death be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.
-- John Donne --
Remember me not for my abilities, but remember my labors and my endeavors.
-- John Donne --
All other things, to their destruction draw. Only our love hath no decay; This, no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday. Running it never runs from us away, but truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.
-- John Donne --
Reason is our soul's left hand, faith her right; By these we reach divinity.
-- John Donne --
Individuals are considered sincere when there is little or no discrepancy between the goals they seek and those they claim to be seeking.
-- Leonard W. Doob --
It's very dangerous if you keep love letters from someone who is not now your husband.
-- Diana Dors --
The power of love to change bodies is legendary, built into folklore, common sense, and everyday experience. Throughout history, "tender loving care" has uniformly been recognized as a valuable element in healing.
-- Larry Dossey --
Too high a price is asked for harmony, and so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket. It's not God that I don't accept, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.
-- Fyodor Dostoevsky --
So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.
-- Fyodor Dostoevsky --
Man survives where swine perish, and laughs where gods go mad.
-- Dostoyevsky --
One stands perplexed and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use humble love! If you resolved on that once and for all, you may subdue the whole world.
-- Fyodor Dostoevsky --
If the devil does not exist, and Man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.
-- Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky --
A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky --
Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky --
A man can wear a hat for years without being oppressed by its shabbiness.
-- James Douglas --
The heroes, the saints, and sages – they are those who face the world alone.
-- Norman Douglas --
You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
-- Norman Douglas --
Why always "not yet"? Do flowers in spring say "not yet"?
-- Norman Douglas --
Are we never to learn that socialism has its roots in envy and in nothing else?
-- Norman Douglas --
A man who reforms himself has contributed his full share toward the reformation of his neighbor.
-- Norman Douglas --
Perhaps one should not think so much of oneself, though it is an interesting subject.
-- Norman Douglas --
The Liberals talk about a stable government, but we don't know how bad the stable is going to smell.
-- Thomas Douglas --
The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms.
-- William O. Douglas --
No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
-- Frederick Douglass --
A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me.
-- Frederick Douglass --
The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.
-- Maureen Dowd --
Sometimes a noble failure serves the world as faithfully as a distinguished success.
-- Dowden --
Hatred is never anything but fear - if you feared no one, you would hate no one.
-- Hugh Downs --
How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle --
While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will be up to, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to.
-- Arthur Conan Doyle --
Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for wind to fly a kite. Or waiting around for Friday night or waiting perhaps for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil or a better break or a string of pearls or a pair of pants or a wig with curls or another chance. Everyone is just waiting.
-- Dr. Seuss --
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.
-- Dr. Seuss --
Affluence was, quite simply, a question of texture. The threadbare carpets of infancy, the coconut matting, the ill-laid linoleum, the utility furniture has all spoken of a life too near the bones of subsistence, too little padded, too severely worn.
-- Margaret Drabble --
Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations.
-- Margaret Drabble --
And there isn't any way that one can get rid of the guilt of having a nice body by saying that one can serve society with it, because that would end up with oneself as what? There simply doesn't seem to be any moral place for flesh.
-- Margaret Drabble --
If a ferret bites you it is nearly always your own fault.
-- Phil Drabble --
A bad grade is only one letter in the Essay of Life.
-- Lee Drake --
The advantage of time and place in practical actions is half the victory; which being lost is irrecoverable.
-- Sir Francis Drake --
The Montreal Olympics can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby.
-- Jean Drapeau --
Our beliefs in a rich future life are of little importance unless we coin them into a rich present life.
-- Thomas Dreier --
Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.
-- Elizabeth Drew --
Part of me is still waiting to grow up, to be an adult, and the other part knows there is no such thing.
-- Richard Dreyfuss --
I always knew that I could be a star for the audience that didn't relate to John Wayne or Al Pacino.
-- Richard Dreyfuss --
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
-- Peter F. Drucker --
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
-- Peter F. Drucker --
Wherever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
-- Peter Drucker --
Truth is the foundation of all knowledge and the cement of all societies.
-- John Dryden --
Shakespeare is the very Janus of poets; he wears almost everywhere two faces, and you have scarce begun to admire the one, ere you despise the other.
-- John Dryden --
One cannot say he wanted wit, but rather that he was frugal of it.
-- John Dryden --
For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.
-- Alfred D'Souza --
Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor, not that men are wicked, but that men know so little of men.
-- W. E. B. Du Bois --
Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.
-- W. E. B. Du Bois --
The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
-- W. E. B. Du Bois --
There should be an invention that bottles up a memory like a perfume, and it never faded, never got stale, and whenever I wanted to I could uncork the bottle, and live the memory all over again.
-- Daphne du Maurier --
The ambition of every good cook must be to make something very good with the fewest possible ingredients.
-- Chef Urbain Dubois --
Fame is based on what people say about you, reputation on what they think of you.
-- Louis Dudek --
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
-- Charles H. Duell(Commissioner, U. S. Office of Patents, 1899) --
I used to say of him that his presence on the field made the difference of forty thousand men.
-- Duke of Wellington, on Napoleon --
Social progress does not have to be bought at the price of individual freedom.
-- John Foster Dulles --
There is nothing more galling to angry people than the coolness of those on whom they wish to vent their spleen.
-- Alexander Dumas --
Kings will lose privilege, as stars which have completed their time lose their splendor.
-- Alexandre Dumas, pere --
We enjoy thoroughly only the pleasure that we give.
-- Alexandre Dumas --
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
-- Alexandre Dumas --
The real American type can never be a ballet dancer. The legs are too long, the body too supple, and the spirit too free for this school of affected grace and toe-walking.
-- Isadora Duncan --
Before I go out on the stage, I must place a motor in my soul. If I do not get time to put that motor in my soul, I cannot dance.
-- Isadora Duncan --
Dancing: the highest intelligence in the freest body.
-- Isadora Duncan --
I find I always have to write something on a steamed mirror.
-- Elaine Dundy --
I always believed that if you set out to be successful, then you already were.
-- Katherine Dunham --
Everything one does enough of eventually generates its own interest and one then begins to believe in it.
-- Alan Dunn --
Change is an easy panacea. It takes character to stay in one place and be happy there.
-- Elizabeth Clarke Dunn --
I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out.
-- Katherine Dunn --
What happened to Truman Capote was that he got inside the establishment and tried to stay. It's just a place to visit.
-- Dominick Dunne --
It doesn't make much difference what you study as long as you don't like it.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
The past always looks better than it was; it's only pleasant because it isn't here.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
A fanatic is a man that does what he thinks the Lord would do if he knew the facts of the case.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
Swearing was invented as a compromise between running away and fighting.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
People tell me to be frank but how can I when I don't dare to know myself?
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
No matter whether the country follows the flag or not, the Supreme Court follows the election returns.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
When the American people get through with the English language, it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
There is one thing to be said in favor of drink, and that is that it has caused many a lady to be loved that otherwise might have died single.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
If you go to the zoo, always take something to feed the animals, even if the signs say "Do not feed animals". It wasn't the animals that put them signs up.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
Like most poets, preachers, and metaphysicians, he burst into conclusion at a spark of evidence.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
Most vegetarians look so much like the food they eat that they can be classified as cannibals.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
Politics ain't beanbag: 'tis a man's game, and women, children 'n' 'pro-hy-bitionists' had best stay out of it.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
One of the strangest things about life is that the poor, who need money the most, are the very ones that never have it.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
The first thing to have in a library is a shelf. From time to time, this can be decorated with literature. But the shelf is the main thing.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
Trust everybody, but cut the cards.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
An appeal is when you ask one court to show its contempt for another court.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
There are no friends at cards or world politics.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
A lie with a purpose is one of the worst kind, and the most profitable.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
Many a man that could rule a hundred million strangers with an iron hand is careful to take off his shoes in the front hallway when he comes home late at night.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
Alcohol is necessary for a man so that now and then he can have a good opinion of himself, undisturbed by the facts.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
Among men, Hennessy, wet eye means dry heart.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
The best husbands stay bachelors; they're too considerate to get married.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
A man that would expect to train lobsters to fly in a year is called a lunatic; but a man that thinks men can be turned into angels by an election is a reformer and remains at large.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
Freedom is like drink. If you take any at all, you might as well take enough to make you happy for a while.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
High finance isn't burglary or obtaining money by false pretenses, but rather a judicious selection from the best features of those fine arts.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
A man has more fun wishing for the things he hasn't got than enjoying the things he has got.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
Minds are like parachutes; they only function when open.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
You can lead a man up to the university, but you can't make him think.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
I wonder why you can always read a doctor's bill and you never can read his prescription.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable.
-- Finley Peter Dunne --
But logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.
-- Edward Dunsany --
Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effects when taken in large quantities.
-- Lord Dunsany --
The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character. The only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionaries are philosophers and saints.
-- Will Durant --
Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day.
-- Will Durant --
The world wisely prefers happiness to wisdom.
-- Will Durant --
Education is a progressive discovery of our ignorance.
-- Will Durant --
As we acquire knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.
-- Will Durant --
From the point of view of morals, life seems to be divided into two periods; in the first we indulge, in the second we preach.
-- Will Durant --
In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.
-- Will Durant --
The great snare in human thought is unconditional acceptance or irrational assumptions.
-- Will Durant --
Be nice to people on your way up because you may meet them on your way down.
-- Jimmy Durante --
Just as a Hollywood pin-up represented sex, so I represented the ideal daughter millions of fathers and mothers wished they had.
-- Deanna Durbin --
Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
-- Lawrence Durrell --
I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket.
-- Lawrence Durrell --
No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.
-- Lawrence Durrell --
A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.
-- Lawrence Durrell --
I hate the outdoors. To me, outdoors is where the car is.
-- Will Durst --
While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.
-- Andrea Dworkin --
You leave old habits behind by starting out with the thought, 'I release the need for this in my life'.
-- Dr. Wayne W. Dyer --
No amount of energy will take the place of thought. A strenuous life with its eyes shut is a kind of wild insanity.
-- Henry van Dyke --
Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.
-- Henry van Dyke --
He not busy being born is busy dying.
-- Bob Dylan --
We each have our own vision and a voice inside that talks only to us. We have to be able to hear it.
-- Bob Dylan --
Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.
-- Bob Dylan --
The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.
-- Bob Dylan --
People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas.
-- Bob Dylan --
In writing songs, I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie.
-- Bob Dylan --
For insight into human affairs I turn to stories and poems rather than to sociology. I am not able to make use of the wisdom of the sociologists because I do not speak their language.
-- Freeman Dyson --
If any man will draw up his case, and put his name at the foot of the first page, I will give him an immediate reply. Where he compels me to turn over the sheet, he must wait my leisure.
-- Earl of Sandwich --
I think there are only three things America will be known for two thousand years from now when they study this civilization: the Constitution, jazz music, and baseball.
-- Gerald Early --
The streets of the City of Failure are paved with alibis - some of which are absolutely perfect.
-- Harry A. Earnshaw --
When you're not interested in trying new things, that's when you should start hitting golf balls.
-- Clint Eastwood --
There's a rebel lying deep in my soul. I hate the idea of trends. I hate imitation; I have a reverence for individuality. I got where I am by coming off the wall.
-- Clint Eastwood --
Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that's real power.
-- Clint Eastwood --
I've always had the ability to say to the audience: "Watch this if you like it and if you don't - take a hike."
-- Clint Eastwood --
I used to play a lot of lab assistants. I'd be the guy running in, yelling "The place is on fire!" I never got shot or died - if that had happened, I would've gotten more screen time than average.
-- Clint Eastwood --
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
-- Abba Eban --
Propaganda is the art of persuading others of what you don't believe yourself.
-- Abba Eban --
People must not do things for fun. We are not here for fun. There is no reference to fun in any act of parliament.
-- Abba Eban --
If there is a faith that can move mountains, it is a faith in your own power.
-- Marie von Ebner