Quotes, March 2005
01. The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant - and let the air out of the tires.
- Dorothy Parker
02. Calvin: Sometimes when I’m talking, my words can’t keep up with my thoughts. I wonder why we think faster than we speak.
Hobbes: Probably so we can think twice.
- Bill Watterson, American cartoonist, "Calvin and Hobbes"
03. The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.
- Edward Gibbon
04. If you wouldst live long, live well; for folly and wickedness shorten life.
- Benjamin Franklin
05. Early to bed and early to rise probably indicates unskilled labor.
- John Ciardi
06. The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
- Joseph Conrad
07. A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things but cannot receive great ones.
- The Earl of Chesterfield
08. Of all the plagues with which the world is cursed, of every ill, a woman is the worst.
- George Granville
09. Flattery is all right so long as you don't inhale.
- Adlai Stevenson
10. The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact a return to the idealised past.
- Robertson Davies
11. The fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling.
- Thomas Hardy
12. I made some mistakes in drama. I thought the drama was when the actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.
- Frank Capra
13. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.
- Erich Fromm
14. For myself I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use being anything else.
- Winston Churchill
15. He that would have the fruit must climb the tree.
- Thomas Fuller
16. There are still some honest people left in the world, but they never seem to find anything you lose.
- Joe Moore
17. In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
- Orson Welles, «The Third Man» (1949)
18. Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress.
- Thomas Alva Edison
19. The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
- Carl Jung
20. The Vatican is a dagger in the heart of Italy.
- Giuseppe Garibaldi
21. I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.
- Truman Capote
22. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
- John W. Gardner
23. Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
- Mark Twain
24. The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
- Paul Valery
25. I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.
- George Burns
26. Pull the string, and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
27. Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifiying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity.
- Thomas Paine
28. If I want your opinion, I'll give it to you.
- Sam Goldwyn
29. Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well.
- Henry Wheeler Shaw
30. I would rather make my name than inherit it.
- William M. Thackeray
31. The most dangerous predator known to man, is woman.
- Cameron Koo
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