Quotes/Philosophy

This is a list of quotes that I found interesting. Usually I came across them while reading, but sometimes I picked them up in random locations, such as Facebook. Other times I specifically searched for quotes about certain subjects. As is the nature of quotes on the internet, many of these are not verified, so please do your own research to ensure that these are accurate. I did my best to value the quotes on the basis of the words, not based on who said them, but in some instances I did include a quote based solely on to whom it was attributed, generally because I perceived there to be hypocrisy. I don’t agree with all the quotes listed, sometimes I included quotes with which I completely disagreed. Sometimes I included certain peoples’ words who came to be cancelled after I had added them. These aren’t for the faint of heart, but please read them with a light heart.

  • “‘And so it has come to this’ — applicable to any and all situations.” — Dr. Abraham’s college professor  (my OU physics professor’s college professor)
  • “A fish with his mouth closed never gets caught.” — Tony Accardo
  • “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
  • “Resolute in action, gentle in manner.” — Claudio Acquaviva
  • “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”  — Douglas Adams
  • “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.” — Douglas Adams.
  • “[I]magine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in – an interesting hole I find myself in – fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise.” — Douglas Adams
  • “We can accomplish almost anything within our ability if we but think we can.” — George Matthew Adams
  • “This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.”  — John Adams, 2nd president of the U.S.
  • “Democracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy; such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man’s life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit, and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable [abominable] cruelty of one or a very few.” — John Adams
  • “I have a theory that says no one can tell the difference between a great idea and a stupid one… People can often tell the difference between a run-of-the-mill ‘good’ idea and a bad idea. But great ideas often look identical to stupid ones right up until the moment they work.” — Scott Adams.
  • “I’ve never seen anyone change his mind because of the power of a superior argument or the acquisition of new facts, but I’ve seen plenty of people change behavior to avoid being mocked.” — Scott Adams
  • “One of the many benefits of being a weirdo is that sometimes, entirely by accident, you can end up looking like a visionary.” — Scott Adams
  • “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” — Joseph Addison
  • “It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.” — Alfred Adler
  • “It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.” — Aeschylus
  • “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”  – Aeschylus
  • “In quarreling about the shadow, we often lose the substance.” — Aesop
  • “The goal is the same: life itself; and the price is the same; life itself.” — James Agee
  • “Don’t blow off another’s candle, for it won’t make yours shine brighter.” — Jaachynma N.E. Agu
  • “The Buddha and all his successors warn us against intellectual structures that confine us to an artificial environment, and against concepts that smear over the living fact of things in themselves.” — Robert Aitken
  • “Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.” — Louisa May Alcott
  • “I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.” — Alexander the Great
  • “I am the greatest!” — Muhammad Ali
  • “I hated every minute of training, but I said [to myself], ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’” — Muhammad Ali
  • “Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.” — Muhammad Ali
  • “Procrastination is not about not doing [it] is about not doing and feeling crappy.” — David Allen
  • “Much of the stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they’ve started.” — David Allen
  • “You can do anything, but not everything.” — David Allen
  • “I can’t understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.” — Fred Allen
  • “He who would accomplish little must sacrifice little; he who would achieve much must sacrifice much; he who would attain highly must sacrifice greatly.” — James Allen
  • “If we assume that there is no God, it follows that morality is even more important than if there is a Deity. If God exists, his unlimited power can certainly redress imbalances in the scale of human justice. But if there is no God, then it is up to man to be as moral as he can.” — Steve Allen, on the Bible, Religion & Morality.
  • “I took a speed reading course and read ‘War and Peace’ in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.” — Woody Allen
  • “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” — Woody Allen
  • “The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.” — Michael Althsule
  • “Everything has a natural explanation. The moon is not a god but a great rock and the sun a hot rock.” — Anaxagorus (475 BC)
  • “The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well.” — Joe Ancis
  • “Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it.” — Greg Anderson
  • “If I think too much, it kind of freaks me out.” — Pamela Anderson (1967-)
  • “I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.” — Poul Anderson
  • “If everything’s under control, you’re going too slow.” — Mario Andretti
  • “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” — Maya Angelou
  • “Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.” — Maya Angelou
  • “Our entire life, with our fine moral code and our precious freedom, consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.” — Jean Anouilh
  • “Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform.” — Susan B. Anthony
  • “When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them.” — Michelangelo Antonioni
  • “The whole of existence is imagination within imagination, while true Being is God alone.” — Ibn Arabi
  • “You cannot teach a crab to walk straight.” — Aristophanes
  • “What lies in our power to do, lies in our power not to do.” — Aristotle
  • “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” — Aristotle
  • “We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” — Aristotle
  • “People fail forward to success.” — Mary Kay Ash
  • “When you come to a roadblock, take a detour.” — Mary Kay Ash
  • “I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn’t have. Somehow it was better to say one was humanist or agnostic. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.” — Isaac Asimov
  • “Creationists make it sound as though a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.” — Isaac Asimov
  • “If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I’d type a little faster.” — Isaac Asimov
  • “Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.” — Isaac Asimov
  • “If you’re already walking on thin ice, you might as well dance.” — Gill Atkinson
  • “O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet.” — Saint Augustine
  • “It is impossible that there should be inhabitants on the opposite side of the Earth, since no such race is recorded by Scripture among the descendants of Adam.” — St. Augustine.
  • “Bad times, hard times – this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: Such as we are, such are the times.” — St. Augustine
  • “If there is no legitimate objection to progress, an illegitimate one will be found.” — Austin’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “Think of what you have rather than of what you lack. Of the things you have, select the best and then reflect how eagerly you would have sought them if you did not have them.” — Marcus Aurelius
  • “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive -to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” — Marcus Aurelius
  • “The universe is a single life comprising one substance one soul.” — Marcus Aurelius
  • “Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.” — Marcus Aurelius
  • “Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”    — Marcus Aurelius
  • “Do every act of your life as if it were your last.” — Marcus Aurelius
  • “By your stumbling the world is perfected.” — Sri Aurobindo

B

  • “Knowledge itself is power.” – Francis Bacon
  • “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man; and, therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not.” — Francis Bacon, Forbes
  • “The greatest pleasure in life is in doing what people say you cannot do.” – Walther Bageholt
  • “Quiet Night Thoughts: Before my bed/ There is bright-lit moonlight/ So that it seems/ Like frost on the ground:/ Lifting my head/ I watch the bright moon/ Lowering my head/ I dream that I’m home.” — Li Bai
  • “To tell a ruler truly what you think of him is faithfulness; to conceal the truth is treachery.” — Abu Bakr
  • “There is a difference between being a leader and being a boss. Both are based on authority. A boss demands blind obedience; a leader earns his authority through understanding and trust.” — Klaus Balkenhol
  • “The measure of progress of civilization is the progress of the people.” — George Bancroft
  • “If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.” — Tallulah Bankhead
  • “There’s nothing more dangerous than someone who wants to make the world a better place.” — Banksy
  • “The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It’s people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.” — Banksy
  • “I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.” – Banksy
  • “We will often find compensation if we think more of what life has given us and less about what life has taken away.” — William Barclay
  • “Expecting life to treat you well because you are a good person is like expecting an angry bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.” — Shari R. Barr
  • “Sometimes when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things… I am tempted to think… there are no little things.” — Bruce Barton
  • “Whatever task you undertake, do it with all your heart and soul. Always be courteous, never be discouraged. Beware of him who promises something for nothing. Do not blame anybody for your mistakes and failures. Do not look for approval except the consciousness of doing your best.” — Bernard M. Baruch, Forbes
  • “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.”  — Basho
  • “Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die.” — Basho
  • “Every moment/ of life is the last,/ every poem is a/ death poem.” — Basho
  • “Yield to the willow/ all the loathing/ all the desire of/ your heart.” — Basho
  • “The morning glory!/ But this too/ Can never be my friend.” — Basho
  • “My true desire is to relieve others of their pain though I myself may fall into hell.” — Bassui
  • “There is no ice or snow apart from water. The Buddhahood of ordinary people can be likened to snow and ice melting and becoming water. From the beginning nothing has ever been lost.” — Bassui
  • “After attaining enlightenment, I want to save the bright and the dull, teaching each one according to his capacity.” — Bassui
  • “Awakening is indeed close by—and supreme effort is required to realize it. Awakening is indeed far away—and readily accessible.” — Stephen Batchelor
  • “When socialism comes into power, the Roman Church will advocate socialism with the same vigor [with which] it is now favoring feudalism and slavery.” — Ferdinand August Bebel (1840-1913)
  • “A man’s true state of power and riches is to be in himself.” — Henry Ward Beecher
  • “When a nation’s young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung.” — Henry Ward Beecher
  • “God asks no man whether he will accept life. That is not the choice. You must take it. The only choice is how.” — Henry Ward Beecher
  • “One’s best success comes after their greatest disappointments.” — Henry Ward Beecher
  • “Doctrine is nothing but skin of truth, set up and stuffed.” — Henry Ward Beecher
  • “The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t.” — Henry Ward Beecher
  • “Fate gave to man the courage of endurance.” — Ludwig van Beethoven
  • “To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.” — Cardinal Bellarmine (1615, during the trial of Galileo).
  • “Everyone has two faces — one for those above him, and one for those below.” — Dantes Bellegards
  • “There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.” — Robert Benchley
  • “It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.” — Robert Benchley
  • “Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.” — Robert Benchley
  • “Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.” — Robert Benchley
  • “Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.” — Robert Benchley
  • “Besieging your targets until nothing makes any sense — giving them no time to absorb or recover from attacks — is a time-tested strategy in the history of war and authoritarian takeovers.”  — Ruth Ben-Ghait
  • “A single question can be more influential than a thousand statements.” — Bo Bennett
  • “The first wisdom of sociology is this: Things are not what they seem.” — Peter Berger
  • “Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.” — Henri Bergson
  • “Reality is a flowing. This does not mean that everything moves, changes, becomes. Science and common experience tell us that. It means that movement, change, becoming is everything that there is. There is nothing else; everything is movement, is change. The time that we ordinarily think about is not real time, but a picture of space.” — Henri-Louis Bergson
  • “Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils” — Hector Berlioz
  • “No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded.” — Yogi Berra
  • “Deja Vu all over again.” — Yogi Berra
  • “The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp.” — John Berry
  • “A Warning to My Readers:‘Do not think me gentlebecause I speak in praiseof gentleness, or elegantbecause I honor the gracethat keeps this world. I ama man crude as any,gross of speech, intolerant,stubborn, angry, fullof fits and furies. That Imay have spoken wellat times, is not natural.A wonder is what it is.’” — Wendell Berry
  • “The wise man never initiates any action.” — Bhagavad Gita
  • “Let not the fruit of action be your motive to action. Your business is with action alone, not with the fruit of action.” — The Bhagavad Gita
  • “The love of money is the root of all evil.” — Bible
  • “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes And clever in their own sight! Woe to those who are heroes in drinking wine And valiant men in mixing strong drink, Who justify the wicked for a bribe, And take away the rights of the ones who are in the right!” — Bible, Isaiah 5-20-23)
  • “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” — Bible, Matthew 7:7
  • “Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” — Bible, Matthew 18:18-20
  • “Whoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.” — Bible, Matthew 23:12
  • “The Dangers of the Last Days: You should know this, Timothy,that in the last days there will be very difficult times. For people will love only themselves and their money. They will be boastful and proud, scoffing at God, disobedient to their parents, and ungrateful. They will consider nothing sacred. They will be unloving and unforgiving; they will slander others and have no self-control. They will be cruel and hate what is good. They will betray their friends, be reckless, be puffed up with pride, and love pleasure rather than God. They will act religious, but they will reject the power that could make them godly. Stay away from people like that!” — Bible, 2 Timothy 3:1-5
  • “Acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.” — Ambrose Bierce
  • “Forgetfulness of self is remembrance of God.” — Bayazid Al-Bistami
  • “No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.” — William Blake
  • “It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.” — William Blake
  • “The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom … for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough.” — William Blake
  • “The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes.” — Tony Blair
  • “Sharing links that mock a caricature of the Other Side isn’t signaling that we’re somehow more informed. It signals that we’d rather be smug assholes than consider alternative views. It signals that we’d much rather show our friends that we’re like them, than try to understand those who are not.” — Sean Blanda
  • “You can’t call it an adventure unless it’s tinged with danger. The greatest danger in life, though, is not taking the adventure at all. To have the objective of a life of ease is death. I think we’ve all got to go after our own Everest.” — Brian Blessed Metro.co.uk
  • “Libertarianism is the view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others. Libertarians defend each person’s right to life, liberty, and property-rights that people have naturally, before governments are created. In the libertarian view, all human relationships should be voluntary; the only actions that should be forbidden by law are those that involve the initiation of force against those who have not themselves used force-actions like murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, and fraud.” — David Boaz, author of Libertarianism: A Primer
  • “All progress takes place outside the comfort zone.” — Michael John Bobak
  • “Everything you do is Zen.” — Bodhidharma
  • “Reality has no insider, outside, or middle part.” — Bodhidharma
  • “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” — Niels Bohr
  • “Who is content with nothing possesses all things.” — Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux
  • “The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.” — Charles du Bois
  • “It is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, nor to succeed in order to persevere.” — Charles the Bold
  • “Do you realize if it weren’t for Edison we’d be watching TV by candlelight?” — Al Boliska
  • “There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, ‘Yes, I’ve got dreams, of course I’ve got dreams.’ Then they put the box away and bring it out once in awhile to look in it, and yep, they’re still there.” — Erma Bombeck
  • “Ability has nothing to do with opportunity.” — Napoleon Bonaparte
  • “Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.” — Napoleon Bonaparte
  • “A leader is a dealer in hope.” — Napoleon Bonaparte
  • “Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.” — Napoleon Bonaparte
  • “History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.” — Napoleon Bonaparte
  • “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” — Napoleon Bonapare
  • “The less you know, the more you believe.” — Bono
  • “To be strong, you don’t have to be mean. To be tough, you don’t have to be cruel.” — Cory Booker
  • “The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.” — Daniel J. Boorstin
  • “But the Buddha also performed miracles. For example this one, a miracle of courtesy. The Buddha has to cross a desert at noon. The gods, from their thirty-three heavens, each send him down a parasol. The Buddha does not want to slight any of the gods, so he turns himself into thirty-three Buddhas. Each god sees a Buddha protected by the parasol he sent.” —Jorge Luis Borges
  • “Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.” — Hal Borland
  • “A frontier is never a place; it is a time and a way of life.” — Hal Borland
  • “It is a lot better to come from an evolved monkey than from a fallen angel.” — Marcellin Boule
  • “Our first and last love is – self-love.” — Bovee
  • “No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.” — Elizabeth Bowen
  • “Technological feasibility of a defensive shield is entirely irrelevant, because Star Wars has nothing to do with defense. It is an attempt to deploy offensive weapons disguised as defense. In 1982, in his secret defense guidance document, Ronald Reagan ordered the Department of Defense to develop Star Wars weapons, and he assigned them two missions. One: Destroy opposing satellites and seize control of space. Two: Destroy targets on the surface of the earth from space without warning. There wasn’t a word in there about shooting down ballistic missiles. That was a smokescreen for the American people, because they knew that the American people would never approve weapons in space for offensive purposes.” — Colonel Bob Bowman
  • You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance. — Ray Bradbury
  • “Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity.” — Ray Bradbury
  • “The atheist does not say ‘there is no God’, but he says ‘I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the  word ‘God’ is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation’. … The Bible God I deny; the Christian God I disbelieve in; but I am not rash enough to say there is no God as long as you tell me you are unprepared to define God to me.” — Charles Bradlaugh, “A Plea for Atheism”, 1864.
  • “Man is stumbling blindly through a spiritual darkness while toying with the precarious secrets of life and death. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. This is our century’s claim to distinction and progress!” — General Omar Bradley, first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1948, Newsweek
  • “Zen cannot be defined. It is not a ‘thing’ to be surrounded or reflected with words. When the last word is troweled into the prison it escapes and laughs away on the horizon.” — David Brandon
  • “To define a thing is to substitute the definition for the thing itself.” — Georges Braque
  • “Whoever you are, there is some younger person who thinks you are perfect. There is some work that will never be done if you don’t do it. There is someone who would miss you if you were gone. There is a place that you alone can fill.” — Jacob M. Braude
  • “In each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice. We’re each of us our own chiaroscuro, our own bit of illusion fighting to emerge into something solid, something real. We’ve got to forgive ourselves that. I must remember to forgive myself. Because there is a lot of grey to work with. No one can live in the light all the time.” ― Libba Bray
  • “It is said that power corrupts, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.” — David Brin
  • “A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.” — David Brinkley
  • “It’s the constant and determined effort that breaks down all resistance, sweeps away all obstacles.” — Claude M. Bristol
  • “The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.” — Jacob Bronowski
  • “God, as some cynic has said, is always on the side which has the best football coach.” — Heywood Broun
  • “Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.” — Les Brown
  • “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” — Brene Brown
  • “There can be no equality in porn, no female equivalent, no turning of the tables in the name of bawdy fun. Pornography, like rape, is a male invention designed to dehumanize women.” — Susan Brownmiller
  • “If Jesus has been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.” — Lenny Bruce.
  • “A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’” — William F. Buckley, Jr.
  • “We are what we think.” — Buddha
  • “Our theories of the eternal are as valuable as are those that a chick which has not broken its way through its shell might form of the outside world.” — Buddha
  • “A monk knows when he is going, ‘I am going.’ He knows when he is standing, ‘I am standing.’ He knows when he is sitting, ‘I am sitting.’ He knows when he is lying down, ‘I am lying down.’” — Buddha
  • “You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.” — Buddha
  • w
  • “When the clouds fly, the moon travels. When the boat sails, the shore moves.” — The Buddha
  • “The mind is everything. What you think, you become.” — The Buddha
  • “No conditions are permanent; no conditions are reliable; nothing is self.” — The Buddha
  • “Everything has Buddha nature.” — The Buddha
  • “Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” — Buddha
  • “Mere suffering exists, but no sufferer is found. The deeds are, but doer is found.” — Buddhaghosa
  • “It makes more sense to buy a wonderful business at a fair price than it does to buy a fair business at a wonderful price.” — Warren Buffet
  • “If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need.” — Warren Buffet
  • “Do not save what is left after spending, but spend what is left after saving.” — Warren Buffet
  • “Rule No. 1 is never lose money. Rule No. 2 is never forget Rule No. 1.” — Warren Buffet
  • “It’s always been a mistake to bet against America, since 1776.” — Warren Buffet
  • “Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and Greedy When Others Are Fearful.” ― Warren Buffett
  • “Don’t pass up something that’s attractive today because you think you will find something better tomorrow.” — Warren Buffet
  • “Every decade or so, dark clouds will fill the economic skies, and they will briefly rain gold.” — Warren Buffet
  • “You cannot make a good deal with a bad person.” — Warren Buffet
  • “Never test the depth of a river with both feet.” — Warren Buffet
  • “Honesty is a very expensive gift. Do not expect it from cheap people.” — Warren Buffet
  • “Predicting rain doesn’t count… Building arks does” — Warren Buffet
  • Reputation is everything.” — Warren Buffet
  • “You don’t need to have  extraordinary effort to achieve extraordinary results. You just need to  do the ordinary, everyday things exceptionally well.” — Warren  Buffett, reportedly
  • “If you’ve been in the game thirty minutes and you don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.” — Buffett’s Poker Principle, Murphy’s Law Daily Calendar
  • “That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.” — Charles Bukowski
  • “The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.” — Charles Bukowski
  • “Find what you love and let it kill you.” — Charles Bukowski
  • “[I]ntelligence isn’t a choice. Some people have it and others don’t. One shouldn’t be proud of what [one] can do, one should be proud of what [one] did and [is] doing. Too many peeps think being smart makes them remarkable. But without daring action, they are no different than everyone else. Yet, daring people of moderate intelligence can change the world. Knowledge without action is impotent.” — AJ Bullock, Facebook
  • “I’ve liven in prison a long time now, and I’ve met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence. Without exception, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography—deeply consumed by the addiction. The F.B.I.’s own study on serial homicide shows that the most common interest among serial killers is pornographers (sic). It’s true.” — Ted Bundy
  • “If it does not scare you, you are probably not dreaming big enough.” — Tory Burch
  • “He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.” — Edmund Burke
  • “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” — Edmund Burke, Vanity Fair article
  • “Too bad the only people who know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair.” — George Burns
  • “It takes only one drink to get me drunk. The trouble is, I can’t remember if it’s the thirteenth or the fourteenth.” — George Burns
  • “Dare to be honest and fear no labor.” — Robert Burns, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “The Kingdom of Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind.” — John Burroughs
  • “After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say I want to see the manager.” — William S. Burroughs
  • “Life is meant to be a celebration! It shouldn’t be necessary to set aside special times to remind us of this fact. Wise is the person who finds a reason to make every day a special one.” — Leo Buscaglia
  • “Don’t spend your precious time asking ‘Why isn’t the world a better place?’ It will only be time wasted. The question to ask is ‘How can I make it better?’ To that there is an answer.” — Leo F. Buscaglia
  • “I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.” — President George Bush, August 27, 1988.
  • “One man has enthusiasm for 30 minutes, another for 30 days, but it is the man who has it for 30 years who makes a success of his life.” — Edward B. Butler
  • “Experience shows that success is due less to ability than to zeal. The winner is he who gives himself to his work, body and soul.” — Charles Buxton
  • “Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death.” — James F. Byrnes
  • “Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.” — Lord Byron

C

  • “Every man is the maker of his own fortune.” — Appius Claudius Caecus
  • “As a rule, men worry more about what they can’t see than about what they can.” — Julius Caesar
  • “We are not committed to this or that. We are committed to nothing in between … whether we know it or not.” — John Cage
  • “To see, one must go beyond imagination and for that one must stand absolutely still as though at the center of a leap.” — John Cage
  • “I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I am doing.” — John Cage
  • “The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself.” — Mark Caine
  • “An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.” — Simon Cameron
  • “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, humility is thinking about yourself less” — Baroness Campbell
  • “Follow your bliss.” — Joseph Campbell
  • “I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.” — Joseph Campbell
  • “Integrity has no need of rules.” — Albert Camus
  • “Every minute of life carries with it its miraculous value, and its face of eternal youth.” — Albert Camus
  • “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” — Albert Camus
  • “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.” — Truman Capote
  • “There is no ‘answer,’ no cognitive solution, to the questions that self-destructive people put. They are, I think, putting questions before which philosophers no less than their analysts (if they can afford one) are struck dumb, the difference being the philosophers’ ignorance comes cheaper. Moreover, self-destructive people do not require an answer so much as companionship. We are all children of the same dark night, inhabited by the same demons, haunted by the same spectres… It is not a question of finding an answer to the night of truth but of sitting up with one another through the night, of dividing the abyss in half in a companionship that is its own meaning.” — John Caputo
  • “An optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist fears this is true.” — The Cardinal Conundrum, Murphy’s Law
  • “Every time you think about how dumb the average man is, just remember: by definition, half of them are even dumber than that.” — George Carlin
  • “Are people more violently opposed to fur rather than leather because its much easier to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs?” — George Carlin
  • “Conservatives say if you don’t give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they’ve lost all incentive because we’ve given them too much money.” — George Carlin
  • “Show me the man you honor and I will know what kind of man you are.” — Thomas John Carlisle
  • “Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.” — Thomas Carlyle
  • “Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.” — Dale Carnegie
  • “People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.” — Dale Carnegie
  • “Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.” — Dale Carnegie
  • “The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.” — Dale Carnegie
  • “‘Use what language you will’ said Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘you can never say anything but what you are.’” —  Dale Carnegie
  • “Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.” — Dale Carnegie
  • “Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes the furthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare.” — Dale Carnegie
  • “Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no help at all.” — Dale Carnegie
  • “Did you ever see an unhappy horse? Did you ever see bird that had the blues? One reason why birds and horses are not unhappy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses.” — Dale Carnegie
  • “I shall pass this way but once; any good, therefore, that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.” — Dale Carnegie
  • Man cannot remake himself without struggle, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.” — Alexis Carrel
  • “I would visualize things coming to me. It would just make me feel better. Visualization works if you work hard. That’s the thing. You can’t just visualize and go eat a sandwich.” — Jim Carrey
  • “The whole story of human and personal progress is an unmitigated tale of denials today—denials of rest, denials or repose and comfort and ease and pleasure—that tomorrow may be richer.” — James Carroll, Forbes
  • “If you don’t want your tax dollars to help the poor, then stop saying you want a country based on Christian values, because you don’t.” — Jimmy Carter
  • “A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go but ought to be.” — Rosalynn Carter
  • “The truly important things in life – love, beauty, and one’s own uniqueness – are constantly being overlooked.” — Pablo Casals
  • “Things don’t change. You change your way of looking, that’s all.” — Carlos Castaneda
  • “If you’re going to be weird, be confident about it.” – Meghan Castle
  • “After I’m dead I’d rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.” — Cato the Elder (234-149 BC)
  • “Instead of pointing fingers and attacking our fellow members of our generation maybe we should… idk teach and unify each other.” – Austin Caver
  • “I can’t force you to believe me that’s your choice. People live their lives bound by what they accept as correct and true. That’s how they define ‘reality’. But what does it mean to be ‘correct’ and ‘true’? Merely vague concepts…their reality may all be a mirage. Can we consider them to simply be living in their own world, shaped by their beliefs?” — Austin Caver
  • “It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.” — Dick Cavett
  • “If you genuinely want something, don’t wait for it—teach yourself to be impatient.” — Gurbaksh Chahal
  • “Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.” — Francis Chan
  • “If you help a friend in need, he is sure to remember you—the next time he’s in need.” — Cheit’s Lament, Murphy’s Law
  • “To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.” — G. K. Chesterton
  • “If at any moment you pass beyond confusion and reveal truth, then you are Buddha.” — Lin-Chi
  • “At this very moment reveal the truth!” — Lin-Chi
  • “A great tailor cuts little.” — Tao Te Ching
  • “He who knows he has enough is rich.” — Tao Te Ching
  • “Not collecting treasures prevents stealing.” — Tao Te Ching
  • “Being is born of not being.” — Tao Te Ching
  • “A good traveler leaves no track.” — Tao Te Ching
  • “The wise man sets no high value on a thing simply because it is hard to get.” — Tao Te Ching
  • “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” — Noam Chomsky
  • “All over the place, from popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.” — Noam Chomsky
  • “A basic principle of modern state capitalism is that cost and risk are socialized, while profit is privatized.” — Noam Chomsky
  • “The bee is more honored than other animals, not because she labors, but because she labors for others.” — Saint John Chrysostom
  • “You can come out of the furnace of trouble two ways: if you let if consume you, you come out a cinder; but there is a kind of metal which refuses to be consumed, and comes out a star.” — Jean Church
  • To mock someone who criticized him for ending a sentence with a preposition: “That is the sort of thing up with which I will not put!” — Winston Churchill
  • “This is no time for ease and comfort. It is the time to dare and endure.” — Winston Churchill, Forbes
  • “A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” — Winston Churchill
  • “The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.” — Winston Churchill
  • “There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.”  — Winston Churchill (1874-1965) after a failed assassination attempt.
  • “Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” or “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” — Winston Churchill
  • “I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.” — Winston Churchill
  • “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” — Sir Winston Churchill
  • “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give!” — Winston Churchill
  • “If you’re going through hell keep going.” — Winston Churchill
  • “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on.” — Winston Churchill
  • “Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.” — Cicero
  • “There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it.” — Cicero
  • “The proof of a well-trained mind is that it rejoices in which is good and grieves at the opposite.” — Cicero
  • “Assiduus usus uni rei deditus et ingenium et artem saepe vincit.” (Constant practice devoted to one subject often outdoes both intelligence and skill.) — M. Tullius Cicero
  • “A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, …Cicero
  • “We are new every day.” — Irene Claremont de Castillego
  • “He who believes is strong. Strong convictions precede great actions.” — J.F. Clarke
  • “Speed has never killed anyone. Suddenly becoming stationary, that’s what gets you.” — Jeremy Clarkson
  • “If you do not hope, you will not find what is beyond your hopes.” — St. Clement of Alexandria
  • “Answers not anger, empowerment not resentment.” — Bill Clinton
  • “I like that about the Republicans; the evidence does not faze them, they are not bothered at all by the facts.” — Bill Clinton
  • “It is better to be hated for what you are, than to be loved for what you’re not…” — Kurt Cobain
  • “I’d rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.” — Kurt Cobain
  • “A committee can make a decision that is dumber than any of its members.” — David Cobitz
  • “Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.” — Claud Cockburn
  • “To be content means that you realize you contain what you seek.” — Alan Cohen
  • “What is the difference between ignorance and apathy? I don’t know and I don’t care.” — Norman H. Cohen
  • “People are divided into two groups—the righteous and the unrighteous—and the righteous do the dividing.” — Cohen’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “It is impossible for an optimist to be pleasantly surprised.” — Coit-Murphy’s Statement on the Power of Negative Thinking, Murphy’s Law
  • “Knowledge was gained by association before it was understood by explanation.” — Robert E. Coleman
  • “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” — Robert Collier
  • “If you have more than three priorities, then you don’t have any.” —Jim Collins
  • “The superior man is distressed by the limitations of his ability; he is not distressed by the fact that men do not recognize the ability that he has.” — Confucius
  • “The expectations of life depend upon diligence; the mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools.” — Confucius, Forbes
  • “Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.” — Confucius
  • “When things are investigated, knowledge is extended.When knowledge is extended, the will becomes sincere.When the will is sincere, the mind is correct.When the mind is correct, the self is cultivated.” — Confucius
  • “When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps” — Confucius
  • “Only the supremely wise and the abysmally ignorant do not change.” — Confucius
  • “It’s not the situation…… it’s your reaction to the situation.” — Bob Conklin
  • “There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say.” — Cyril Connolly
  • “I have such a high regard for the truth that I use it sparingly.” — Timothy Connor
  • “Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.” — Joseph Conrad
  • “No mask like open truth to cover lies, As to go naked is the best disguise.” — William Congreve, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, house, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” — Constitution of the United States, Bill of Rights, Amendment IV
  • “… and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the person or thing to be seized.” — Constitution of the United States, Bill of Rights, Amendment IV
  • “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. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” — Calvin Coolidge
  • “No one ever listened himself out of a job.” — Calvin Coolidge
  • “Little progress can be made by merely attempting to repress what is evil; over great hope lies is developing what is good.” — Calvin Coolidge, Forbes
  • “When you stretch the truth, watch out for the snapback.” — Bill Copeland, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “Continuous effort, not strength or intelligence, is the key to unlocking our potential.” — Liane Cordes
  • “Decide that you want it more than you are afraid of it.” — Bill Cosby
  • “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” — Emile Coue
  • “If it was necessary to tolerate in other people everything that one permits oneself, life would be unbearable.” — Courteline’s Codicil, Murphy’s Law
  • “The need is not to amputate the ego but to transcend it.” — Norman Cousins
  • “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” — Steven Covey
  • “Anytime we think the problem is ‘out there’, that thought is the problem.” — Steven Covey
  • “The problem with today’s world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion and have others listen to it. The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense!” — Brian Cox
  • “Necessity was the test, survival the reward.” — Linda Crawford
  • “Silence is agreement” — Terry Crews
  • “When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty.” — Norm Crosby
  • “The point of quotations is that one can use another’s words to be insulting.” — Amanda Cross
  • “What would it be like if you lived each day, each breath, as a work of art in progress? Imagine that you are a Masterpiece unfolding, every second of every day, a work of art taking form with every breath.” — Thomas Crum
  • “There are two kinds of people who never amount to much: those who cannot do what they are told, and those who can do nothing else.” — Cyrus Curtis

D

  • “Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.” — Salvadore Dali
  • “The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: It is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.” — Salvador Dali, Forbes
  • “Fight for your opinions, but do not believe that they contain the whole truth, or the only truth.” — Charles A. Dana
  • “Do not condemn the judgement of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong.” — Dandemis
  • “When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I’m beginning to believe it.” – Clarence Darrow
  • “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” — Charles Darwin
  • “A man who dares to waste one hour of life has not discovered the value of life.” — Charles Darwin
  • “If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.” — Charles Darwin
  • “When you stop chasing the wrong things, you give the right things a chance to catch you.” — Lolly Daskal
  • “Life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” — Lolly Daskal
  • “You can’t know wisdom, you have to be it.” — Baba Ram Dass
  • “If you think you’re free, there’s no escape possible.” — Baba Ram Dass
  • “The game is not becoming somebody, it’s about becoming nobody.” — Baba Ram Dass
  • “Quit this world. Quit the next world. Quit quitting.” — Baba Ram Dass
  • “If a pickpocket meets a Holy Man, he will see only his pockets.” — Hair Dass
  • “Low self-confidence isn’t a life sentence. Self-confidence can be learned, practiced, and mastered—just like any other skill. Once you master it, everything in your life will change for the better.” — Barrie Davenport
  • “Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspision that he is trying to be funny.” — Guy Davenport
  • “The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same.” — Colin R. Davis
  • “Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.” — Miles Davis
  • “I once asked a distinguished astronomer, a fellow of my college, to explain the big bang theory to me. He did so to the best of his (and my) ability, and I then asked what it was about the fundamental laws that made the spontaneous origin of space and time possible. ‘Ah,’ he smiled, ‘now we move beyond the realm of science. This is where I have to hand you over to our good friends, the chaplain.’ But why the chaplain? Why not the gardener or the chef? Of course chaplains, unlike chefs and gardeners, claim to have some insight into ultimate questions. But what reason have we ever been given for taking their claims seriously?” — Richard Dawkins
  • “I knew if I was to involve myself in something like this, it’s going to be the most selfless and exhausting thing I probably would have ever done in my life. I knew that I couldn’t sleep. I knew that I couldn’t take a break,” — Brandon Dean, 24 years old mayor of Brighton, Alabama
  • “Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.” — James Dean
  • “In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.” (Canton, OH, Anti-War Speech, June 16, 1918)” ― Eugene V. Debs, Voices of a People’s History of the United States
  • “Progress is nothing but the victory of laughter over dogma.” — Benjamin DeCasseres, Forbes
  • “Always provide correction in private and praise in public.” — Scott Delinger
  • “I have always admired the ability to bite off more than one can chew and then chew it.” — William DeMille
  • “It is the consistency of principle that when form changes, the mind and ch’i change with it. Principle has no form, but exists within ch’i.” — The Demon’s Sermon on the Martial Arts
  • “In God we trust; all others bring data.” — Dr. W. Edwards Deming
  • “Life unexamined, is not worth living.” — Democritus
  • “Virtue is its own punishment.” — Denniston’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “You can close your eyes to the things you don’t want to see, but you can’t close your heart to the things you don’t want to feel.” — Johnny Depp
  • “Me, I’m dishonest, and you can always trust a dishonest man to be dishonest. Honestly, it’s the honest ones you have to watch out for.” — Johnny Depp
  • “Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.” — Rene Descartes
  • “The body moves naturally, automatically, without any personal intervention or awareness. If we think too much, our actions become slow and hesitant.” — Taisen Deshimaru
  • “Keep your hands open, and all the sands of the desert can pass through them. Close them, and all you can feel is a bit of grit.” — Taisen Deshimaru
  • “Think with the whole body.” — Taisen Deshimaru
  • “From your first day at school you are cut off from life to make theories.” — Taisen Deshimaru
  • “Cut down the whole forest of desire, not just one tree only.” — The Dhammapada
  • “Not nakedness, not matters locks, not dirt or fasting or sleeping on the bare earth, or sitting motionless can purify a man who has not overcome his doubts.” — The Dhammapada
  • “One may conquer in battle a thousand times a thousand men, yet he is the best who conquers himself.” — The Dhammapada
  • “The evil live is really the thoughtless life.” — The Dhammapada
  • “As a beautiful flower that is full of hue but lacks fragrance, even so fruitless is the well-spoken word of one who does not practice it.” — The Dhammapada
  • “Watchfulness is the path to immortality, and thoughtlessness the path to death. The watchful do not die, but the thoughtless are already like the dead.” — The Dhammapada
  • “No suffering befalls the man who calls nothing his own.” — The Dhammapada
  • “All that we are is the result of what we have thought: It is founded on our thoughts and is made up of our thoughts.” — The Dhammapada
  • “Few among men are they who cross over to the further shore. The others merely run up and down the bank on this side.” — The Dhammapada
  • “Even as a solid rock is unshaken by the wind, so are the wise unshaken by praise or blame.” — The Dhammapada
  • “If you’re walking on ice, you might as well dance.” — Joey Coco Diaz
  • “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.” — Dick’s Lemma, Murphy’s Law
  • “The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.” — Emily Dickinson
  • “Is it oblivion or absorption when things pass from our mind?” — Emily Dickinson
  • “I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.” — Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook
  • “Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” — E. W. Dijkstra
  • “Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.” — Annie Dillard
  • “I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Hollins Pond not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget it about it. That is, I don’t think I can learn from wild animal how to live in particular … but I might learn something about mindfulness, something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying as the last ignobly in its talons.” — Annie Dillard
  • Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and a wing. –Annie Dillard
  • “Nothing ever perplexes an adversary so much as an appeal to his honor.” — Disraeli’s Rule, Murphy’s Law
  • “Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is knowing when to forego an advantage.” — Disraeli’s Rule, Murphy’s Law
  • “Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.” — Benjamin Disraeli
  • “I have brought myself by long meditation to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment.” — Benjamin Disraeli
  • “There is always a way to be honest without being brutal.” — Arthur Dobrin, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “The man who will neither play nor do business unless everything is just to his liking and notions, retards rather than contributes to progress.” — Henry L. Doherty, Forbes
  • “If all beings are Buddha, why all this striving?” — Dogen
  • “Everything is Buddhist nature.” — Dogen
  • “Though it has no thought of keeping watch, it’s not for naught that the scarecrow stands in the grain field.” — Dogen
  • “When you leave the way to the way, you attain the way. At the time of attaining the way, the way is always left to the way.” — Dogen
  • “It knows without touching things. Knowing, here, of course does not mean perception. For perception is of little measure. It does not mean understanding, for understanding is artificially constructed. Therefore, this knowing is not touching things. And not touching things is real knowing. Such knowing should not be measured as even universal knowledge. It should not be categorized as self-knowledge. This not touching means when they come in the light, I hit them in the light; when they come in the dark, I hit them in the dark. It means sitting and breaking the skin born of mother.” — Dogen
  • “Think of nonthinking. How is this done? By thinking beyond thinking and non-thinking. This is the very basis of zazen.” — Dogen-zenji (1200-53) (from Fukan zazen-gi)
  • “When you feel happy, really happy, it somehow seems that you’ve always been happy and that you’ll always be happy. The same is often true when you feel sad, or lonely, or depressed, or broke, or sick, or scared. Something, perhaps, to remember.” — Mike Dooley
  • “The only way to do this is to be very disciplined and very practiced.” — Jack Dorsey
  • “Geology shows that fossils are of different ages. Paleontology shows a fossil sequence, the list of species represented changes through time. Taxonomy shows biological relationships among species. Evolution is the explanation that threads it all together. Creationism is the practice of squeezing one’s eyes shut and wailing: ‘does not!’” — Dr. Pepper Facebook page
  • “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” — Peter F. Drucker
  • “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” — Peter F. Drucker
  • “Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.” — Peter F. Drucker
  • “Happy the man, and happy he alone, Who can call today his own; He who secure within can say, Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.” — John Dryden
  • “Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.” — Andre Dubus
  • “The powers that be do not sustain their legitimacy by convincing people that the current system is The Answer. That fiction would be too difficult to sustain in the face of so much evidence to the contrary. What they must do, and what they have done very effectively, is convince the mass of people that there is no alternative.” — Stephen Duncombe. “Notes from Underground.”
  • “What life means to us is determined not so much by what life brings to us as by the attitude we bring to life; not so much by what happens to us as by our reaction to what happens.” — Lewis L. Dunnington
  • “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.” — Tyler Durden
  • “Failure to plan ahead on your part does not create an emergency on my part.” — Steven Dutch
  • “When you pay a fortune for the priceless, you’re getting it cheap!” — Joseph Duveen, fine art dealer
  • “Pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women’s bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is a war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny.” — Andrea Dworkin
  • “Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice.” — Wayne Dyer

E

  • “What a strange day when I found out what I chasing wasn’t running.” — Shira E.
  • “Never judge a book by its movie.” — J. W. Eagan
  • “History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.” — Abba Eban
  • “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.” — Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
  • “Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.” — Meister Eckhart
  • “We are to practice virtue, not possess it.” — Meister Eckhart
  • “The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.” — Umberto Eco
  • “The second law of thermodynamics holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation, well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.” — Arthur Eddington
  • “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” — Sir Arthur Eddington
  • “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” — Thomas Edison
  • “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” –Thomas A. Edison
  • “If we did the things we are capable of, we would astound ourselves.” — Thomas Edison
  • “To trust yourself to test your limits. That is the courage to succeed.” — Bernard Edmonds
  • “If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or objects.” — Albert Einstein
  • “If at first an idea isn’t absurd there is no hope for it.” — Albert Einstein
  • “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” — Albert Einstein
  • “Logic will take you from A to B.  Imagination will take you everywhere.”  — Albert Einstein
  • “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” — Albert Einstein
  • “There are only two ways to live your life. One is though nothing is a miracle. The other is though everything is a miracle.” — Albert Einstein
  • “Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value.” — Albert Einstein
  • “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” — Albert Einstein
  • “An attempt at visualizing the Fourth Dimension: Take a point, stretch it into a line, curl it into a circle, twist it into a sphere, and punch through the sphere.” — Albert Einstein
  • “I do not believe in the god of theology who rewards good and punishes evil.” — Albert Einstein, 1955
  • “I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal god is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.” — Albert Einstein, 1949.
  • “It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”    — Albert Einstein.
  • “The idea of a personal god is an anthropological concept which I am unable to take seriously.”    — Albert Einstein, 1946.
  • “I have received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.” — Albert Einstein responding to a rumor that a jesuit priest had caused Einstein to convert from atheism, 1945.
  • “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.” — Albert Einstein
  • “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” — Albert Einstein
  • “A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.” — Albert Einstein
  • “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” — Albert Einstein
  • “When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about.” — Albert Einstein
  • “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.” — Albert Einstein
  • “The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.” — Albert Einstein
  • “The person who reads too much and uses his brain too little will fall into lazy habits of thinking.” — Albert Einstein
  • “Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live.” — Albert Einstein
  • “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it’s only a minute. But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.” — Albert Einstein
  • “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” — Albert Einstein
  • “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” — Albert Einstein
  • “The question that often drives me hazy, am I or the others crazy?” — Albert Einstein
  • “Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means.” — Albert Einstein
  • “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” — Albert Einstein
  • “We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.” — Albert Einstein
  • “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” — Albert Einstein
  • “A human being is part of the whole called by us ‘the Universe.’ Out task must be to widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” — Albert Einstein
  • “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” — Albert Einstein
  • “The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” — Albert Einstein
  • “Great spirits always have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”  — Albert Einstein
  • “I think most kids have a sense that it’s not supposed to be this way. You’re not supposed to hate Monday, or be happy when you don’t have to go to school. School should be something that you love. Life should be something that you love.” — Charles Eisenstein
  • “The older I get, the more wisdom I find in the ancient rule of taking first things first – a process which often reduces the most complex human problems to manageable proportions.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
  • “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
  • “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
  • “If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
  • “If you want to make a permanent change, stop focusing on the size of your problems and start focusing on the size of you!” — T. Harv Eker
  • “Whatever life throws at us, our individual responses will be all the stronger for working together and sharing the load.” — Queen Elizabeth II
  • “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” — Jim Elliot
  • “Vacillating people seldom succeed. They seldom win the solid respect of their fellows. Successful men and women are very careful in reaching decisions and very persistent and determined in action thereafter.” — L. G. Elliot
  • “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen. Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • to be a star, you must shine your own light, follow your path, and don’t worry about the darkness, for that is when the stars shine brightest.Always do what you are afraid to do.Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety. Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays. Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • ” A friend is a person who goes around saying nice things about you behind your back.Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “We become what we think about all day long.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “To leave the world a bit better… to know that one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “Hitch your wagon to a star.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “What I need is someone who will make me do what I can.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “Every man is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “That which we persist in doing becomes easier – not that the nature of the task has changed, but our ability to do has increased.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it – so fine that we often are on the line and do not know it.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you have was once among the things only hoped for.” — Epicurus
  • “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then does evil come from? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God ?” — Epicurus (341-270BC)
  • “There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.” — Epitectus
  • “When one with honeyed words but evil mind, Persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.” ― Euripides, Orestes
  • “Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” — Susan Erz
  • “America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.” — Evan Esar
  • “Character is what you have left when you’ve lost everything you can lose.” — Evan Esar
  • “The men who build the future are those who know that greater things are yet to come, and that they themselves will help bring them about.” — Melvin J. Evans
  • “Don’t let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.” — Richard L. Evans
  • “Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.” — Walker Evans
  • “Let me respectfully remind you, life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken! Take heed: Do not squander your life.” — The Evening Gatha
  • “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupery
  • “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

F

  • “[People] be like ‘Omggggg everything is so offensive [nowadays].’/ Nah. Shit was ALWAYS offensive, people just stand up for themselves now. There was a time where you could say racist/sexist/homophobic things and no one would get angry, or so you thought. But people were angry, and [were] offended, they just didn’t have the courage to say so. Now they do.” — Facebook Post, Matthew Berry
  • The myth still exists that happiness is a choice, which perpetuates the notion of depression as weakness.” — Kate Fagan
  • “The radical Christian blows up others and buildings. The radical Muslim blows himself up with others. The radical Buddhist sets himself on fire, after he makes sure that no living things are around him to get hurt.” — Wed Fan.
  • “Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.” — Frantz Fanon
  • “That some good can be derived from every event is a better proposition than that everything happens for the best, which it assuredly does not.” — James K. Feibleman
  • “The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.” — Bruce Feirstein
  • “To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.” — Felson’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “We are what we think; as we desire so do we become! By our thoughts, desires, and habits, we either ascend to the full divine dignity of our nature, or we descend to suffer and learn.” — J. Todd Ferrier
  • “A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.” — Tim Ferriss
  • “You can tell how smart people are by what they laugh at.” — Tina Fey
  • “For what it’s worth…it’s never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit. Start whenever you want. You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • “Seize the day”; “Carpe Diem.” — Quintus Hortius Flaccus 65BC – 8BC
  • “There is no truth. There is only perception.” — Gustave Flaubert
  • “When the worms are scarce, what does a hen do? Does she stop scratching? She does not. She scratches all the harder. A lot of businessmen have been showing less sense than a hen since orders became scarce. The have laid off salesmen; they have stopped or reduced their advertising; they have simply resigned themselves to inaction and, of course, to pessimism. If a hen knows enough to scratch all the harder when the worms are scarce, surely businessmen … ought to have gumption enough to scratch all the harder for business.” — B. C. Forbes
  • “How you start is important, very important, but in the end it is how you finish that counts. It is easier to be a self-starter than a self-finisher. The victor in the race is not the one who dashes off swiftest but the one who leads at the finish. In the race for success, speed is less important than stamina. The sticker outlasts the sprinter in life’s race. In America we breed many hares but not so many tortoises.” — B. C. Forbes
  • “Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.” — Malcolm Forbes
  • “The best vision is insight.” — Malcolm Forbes
  • “The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one’s destiny to do, and then do it.” — Henry Ford
  • “Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.” — Henry Ford
  • “Anybody can do anything that he imagines.” — Henry Ford
  • “Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.” — Henry Ford
  • “Don’t find fault. Find a remedy.” — Henry Ford
  • “You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.” — Henry Ford.
  • “Obstacles are those frightening things that become visible when we take our eyes off our goals.” — Henry Ford
  • “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses’.” — Henry Ford
  • “I am reminded of what Mahatma Gandhi supposedly said when asked what he thought of Western Civilization: ‘I think it would be a good idea.’” — Richard Thompson Ford
  • “It is surprising how easy it is to forget that the way to get things done is to do them.” — Mark Forster
  • “No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No stream or gas ever drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara ever turned light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.” — Harry Emerson Fosdick
  • “The emotions that you numb, you can’t be selective with. So everything that you numb, that your trying to numb, you also numb everything [that] good. I was blocking out a lot of love, I was blocking out a lot of the person I wanted to be, and the person that I know that I am.” — Arian Foster
  • “To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream, not only plan, but also believe.” — Anatole France
  • “I believe that the church not only should apologize to the person who is gay whom it has offended, but has to apologize to the poor, to exploited women, to children exploited for labor; it has to ask forgiveness for having blessed many weapons.” — Pope Francis
  • “How lovely to think that no one need wait a moment, we can start now, start slowly changing the world! How lovely that everyone, great and small, can make their contribution toward introducing justice straightaway… And you can always, always give something, even if it is only kindness!” — Anne Frank
  • “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” — Anne Frank
  • “Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because the regret is stronger than gratitude.” — Anne Frank in her diary
  • “View your life from your funeral: Looking back at your life experiences, what have you accomplished? What would you have wanted to accomplish but didn’t? What were the happy moments? What were the sad? What would you do again, and what wouldn’t you do?” — Victor Frankl
  • “Life is just a blank slate, what matters most is what you write on it.” — Christine Frankland
  • “He that would live in peace and at ease must not speak all he knows or all he sees.” — Benjamin Franklin
  • “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” — Benjamin Franklin
  • “Any society that would give up a little Liberty, to gain a little security, will deserve neither and lose both.” — Benjamin Franklin
  • “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!” — Benjamin Franklin
  • “Well done is better than well said.” – Benjamin Franklin
  • “Diligence is the mother of good luck.” — Benjamin Franklin
  • “Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.” — Benjamin Franklin
  • “Energy and persistence conquer all things.” — Benjamin Franklin
  • “Find balance in your life. Work hard but don’t let work take over your life, you will lose yourself. Love, but love for the right reasons. Life is too short for anything mediocre. Know who you are and know that you are worthy of reaching your dreams and that it is never too late to start creating that life you have always dreamed of. Do not compare yourself to others, that’s just deadly. No two souls are the same. You are your own person, you are beautiful and you are unique. Put your trust in the universe. Some things are just meant to happen, and some are not. Let go of whatever is stealing your happiness, it’s hard but it is worth it. Embrace change. Embrace life. Everything happens for a reason, sometimes you just need to breathe, trust and let go.” — Charlotte Friedman
  • “The more you know, the more you realise how much you don’t know — the less you know, the more you think you know.” — David T. Freeman
  • “The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.” — David Friedman
  • “The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.” — David Friedman
  • “Quiet is the absence of sound. Silence is the presence of silence.” — Robert Fripp
  • “Two roads diverged in a wood and I  took the one less traveled by, and that made all the difference.” — Robert Frost
  • “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.” — Robert Frost
  • “The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.” — Steve Furtick

G

  • “I like to read the bible in public places where people are watching me read it. And I like to murmur out to myself: ‘Bullshit!’” — Zach Galifianakis (1969-), american actor.
  • “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” — Galileo Galilei
  • “I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.” — Galileo Galilei
  • “Change is inevitable – except from a vending machine.” — R.C. Gallagher’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “A government too weak to threaten our liberties may be by that very fact too weak to secure our rights, let alone advance our shared purposes.” — “Liberal Purposes” (1991), Professor William A. Galston of the University of Maryland, NYTimes
  • “When there is attachment, association with it brings endless misery.” — Gampopa
  • As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world… as in being able to remake ourselves. Mahatma Gandhi
  • “Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding.” — Mahatma Gandhi
  • “A man is but the product of his thoughts; what he thinks, he becomes.” — Gandhi
  • “The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would solve most the worlds problems.” — Gandhi
  • “An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.” — Gandhi
  • “God has no religion.” — Gandhi
  • “My life is my message.” — Gandhi
  • “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” — Gandhi
  • “I have lived a severely moral life. But it would be a mistake for other people to try that, or for me to recommend it. Very few would succeed.” — Gandhi
  • “There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there.” — Indira Gandhi.
  • “An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.” — Mahatma Gandhi
  • “I want to realize brotherhood or identity not merely with the things being called human, but I want to realize identity with all life, even with such things as crawl upon earth.” — Mohandas K. Gandhi
  • “If you want to know the last word, I’ll tell you, simply—This! This!” — Ganto
  • “As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.” — Bill Gates
  • “Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.” — Bill Gates.
  • “I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job… because, he will find an easy way to do it.” — Bill Gates
  • “Until we perceive the meaning of our past, we remain the mere carriers of ideas, like the Nomads.” — Stephen Gardiner
  • “Lottery tickets: fun taxes you can play” — Conrad Thomas Gardner
  • “Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of someone else.” — Judy Garland
  • “Bigotry wrapped in a prayer is still bigotry.” — Pastor Ron Garner, Wantagh Memorial Congregational Church
  • “If you don’t value your time, neither will others. Stop giving away your time and talents—start charging for it.” — Kim Garst
  • “Ask her to wait a moment—I’m almost done.” Mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777—1855) when informed that his wife was dying.
  • “Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.” ― Charles de Gaulle
  • “To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.” — Jose Ortega Y Gasset
  • “Brain researchers estimate that your unconscious data base outweighs the conscious on an order of 10 million to one. This data base is the source of your hidden natural genius. In other words, a part of you is much smarter than you are. The wise people regularly consult that smarter part.” — Michael J. Gelb
  • “Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.” — David Lloyd George
  • “A Christian telling an atheist he is going to Hell is about as scary as a small child telling an adult they won’t get any presents from Santa.” — Ricky Gervais
  • “The progress is made by correcting the mistakes resulting from the making of progress.” — Claude Gibb, Forbes
  • “We improve ourselves by victory over our self. There must be contests, and you must win.” — Edward Gibbon
  • “And God said ‘Love your enemy.’ and I obeyed him and loved myself.” — Khalil Gibran
  • “The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.” — William Gibson
  • “Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.” — Andre Gide
  • “Faith can move mountains; true: mountains of stupidity.” — André Gide, French writer (Nobel prize 1947).
  • “One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” — Andre Gide
  • “A sure sign of a crisis is that no one tries to tell you how to do your job.” – Gilbert’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously among extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing?” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
  • “He showed me a sketch he’d drawn once during meditation. It was an androgynous human figure, standing up, hands clasped in prayer. But this figure had four legs, and no head. Where the head should have been, there was only a wild foliage of ferns and flowers. There was a small, smiling face drawn over the heart./ ‘To find the balance you want,’ Ketut spoke through his translator, ‘this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it’s like you have four legs, instead of two. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God.’” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
  • “There is no ox so dumb as the orthodox.” — George Francis Gillette.
  • “Die when you die. Die when you die. Lie down when you lie down. Die when you die” — Allen Ginsberg
  • “Look when you look, hear when you hear, taste what you taste, smell what you smell.” — Allen Ginsberg
  • “The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve go it made.” — Jean Giraudoux
  • “Only the mediocre are always at their best.” — Jean Giraudoux
  • “1. You can’t win 2. You can’t break even. 3. You can’t even quit the game.” – Ginsberg’s Theorem, Murphy’s Law
  • “Success is simple. Do what’s right, the right way, at the right time.” — Arnold Glasgow
  • “Individualism to the point of extremism is dangerous. Individualism to the point of backbone is required.” – Jared Glass
  • “Never count your chickens before they hatch, but always, always count your eggs.” – Jared Glass
  • “Sometimes the trick isn’t finding the right thing to say, it’s finding the right person to listen.” – Jared Glass
  • “Grab your pepper spray folks, because it’s a muggy day outside.” – Jared Glass
  • “Nothing can be forced to live. The earth is like a drug now, like a voice from far away, a lover or master. In the end, you do what the voice tells you. It says forget, you forget. It says begin again, you begin again.” — Louise Gluck, March
  • “In a battle between two ideas, the best one doesn’t necessarily win. No, the idea that wins is the one with the most fearless heretic behind it.” — Seth Godin
  • “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such a time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” — Joseph Goebbels
  • “The Buddha did not teach Buddhism, he taught a way of life.” — S.N. Goenka
  • “It is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself.” — Johann Goethe
  • “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic and power in it. Begin it now.” — Goethe
  • “Our work is the presentation of our capabilities.” — Goethe
  • “If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • “The man who masters himself is delivered from the force that binds all creatures.” — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
  • “Tolerance should really be only a temporary attitude; it must lead to recognition.” — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
  • “In the realm of ideas, everything depends on enthusiasm; in the real world, all rests on perseverance.” — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
  • “There are two types of people who will tell you that you cannot make a difference in this world: those who are afraid to try and those who are afraid you will succeed.” — Ray Goforth
  • “It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper understanding.” — Vincent Van Gogh
  • “Anything we fully do is an alone journey.” — Natalie Goldberg
  • “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” — Emma Goldman
  • “There is nothing so absurd or ridiculous that has not at some time been said by some philosopher.” — Goldsmith’s Axiom, Murphy’s Law
  • “Be kind to everyone you talk with. You never know who’s going to be on the jury.” — Goldstick’s Rule, Murphy’s Law
  • “‘Bitch’ is an auto-antonym. Someone who is a big bitch is overly aggressive, while a little bitch is generally submissive.” — Daniel Gomez
  • “I never lie because I don’t fear anyone. You only lie when you’re afraid.” — John Gotti, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for—in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.” — Ellen Goodman
  • “2 is not equal to 3, not even for large values of 2.” — Grabel’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.” — Baltasar Gracian
  • “Life is short, we should expect its shortness to take us by surprise. And that is just what tends to happen. You take things for granted, and then they’re gone. You think you can always write that book, or climb that mountain, or whatever, and then you realize the window has closed. The saddest windows close when other people die. Their lives are short too.” — Paul Graham
  • “Public education does not exist for the benefit of students or for the benefit of their parents. It exists for the benefit of the social order. We have discovered as a species that it is useful to have an educated population. You do not need to be a student or have a child who is a student to benefit from public education. Every second of every day of your life, you benefit from public education. So let me explain why I like to pay taxes for schools, even though I don’t personally have a kid in school: It’s because I don’t like living in a country with a bunch of stupid people.” — John Green
  • “You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.” — Wayne Gretzky
  • “Collectivists would have you believe that individualism is merely another word for selfishness, because individualists oppose welfare and other forms of coercive redistribution of wealth, but just the opposite is true. Individualists advocate true charity, which is the voluntary giving of their own money, while collectivists advocate the coercive giving of other people’s money; which, of course, is why it is so popular.” — G. Edward Griffin
  • Where are all the good men dead? In the heart or in the head? – Grosse Pointe Blank
  • “Opportunities don’t happen, you create them.” — Chris Grosser
  • “What we learn after we know it all is what counts.” – Groya’s Law of Epistemology, Murphy’s Law
  • “The lesson is, the rewards in life don’t always go to the biggest, or the bravest, or the smartest. The rewards go to the dogged; and when you’re going through hell, to the person who just keeps doing.” — Bear Grylls
  • “You are the one and only creator of your own experience” — Sophia Gubb
  • “Silence is argument carried on by other means.” — Guevera’s Axiom, Murphy’s Law
  • “Many will call me an adventurer, and that I am … one of a different sort: one who risks his skin to prove his truths.” — Che Guevara, Last Letter to His Parents (1965)
  • “When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong– or absolutely right.” — Albert Guinon
  • “The quantity of and access to pornography has grown exponentially since the 1980’s alongside the growth of the video cassette/DVD and then the Internet industries, while the content has become increasingly violent, degrading, and harmful to participants and viewers. Moreover, sex trafficking, which is closely related to pornography, is now widely acknowledged as a significant international problem. One cannot understand the dynamics of demand without careful attention to both prostitution and pornography. Activists must confront pornography and prostitution in any effort to attack sex trafficking.” — David E. Guinn
  • “There are people who, instead of listening to what is being said to them, are already listening to what they are going to say themselves.” — Albert Guinon
  • “Generosity is an act, while altruism is a way of life.” — Dr. Sanjay Gupta
  • “True freedom is freedom from choice.” — Gutierrez’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “We have the opportunity to enter and follow the path to enlightenment, a survival path motivated by compassion for all living beings.” — Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

H

  • “There is no enlightenment outside of daily life.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
  • “Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.” — Jonathan Haidt
  • “Being considered ‘crazy’ by those who are still victims of cultural conditioning is a compliment.” — Jason Hairston
  • “Persistence is what makes the impossible possible, the possible likely, and the likely definite.” — Robert Half
  • “We are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy.” — Alexander Hamilton
  • “You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy doesn’t reserve a plot for weeds.” — Dag Hammarskjold
  • “I am the vessel. The draught is God’s. And God is the thirsty one.” — Dag Hammarskjold
  • “To reach perfection, we must all pass, one by one, through the death of self-effacement.” — Dag Hammarskjold
  • “The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was.” — Hampton’s Homily, Murphy’s Law
  • “If common sense were common. This world would be a lot better place.” — Marcus Hand
  • “Sometimes when I reflect on all the beer I drink I feel ashamed – Then I look into the glass & think about the workers in the brewery & all of their hopes & dreams. If I didn’t drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say to myself, ‘It is better that I drink this beer & let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver.’” — Jack Handey
  • “I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.” — Jack Handey
  • “The IRS is an extraordinary example of the end justifying the means. The means of this agency is growth. It is interesting that the revenue officers within the IRS refer to taxpayers as ‘inventory’. The IRS embodies the political realities of the selfish human desire to dominate others. Thus the end of this gigantic pretense of officialdom is power, pure and simple. The meek may inherit the earth, but they will never receive a promotion in an agency where efficiency is measured by the number of seizures of taxpayers’ property and by the number of citizens and businesses driven into bankruptcy.” — Congressman George Hansen
  • Every new enclosure of the commons involves the infringement of somebody’s personal liberty. Infringements made in the distant past are accepted because no contemporary complains of a loss. It is the newly proposed infringements that we vigorously oppose; cries of “rights” and “freedom” fill the air. But what does “freedom” mean? When men mutually agreed to pass laws against robbing, mankind became more free, not less so. Individuals locked into the logic of the commons are free only to bring on universal ruin; once they see the necessity of mutual coercion, they become free to pursue other goals. I believe it was Hegel who said, “Freedom is the recognition of necessity.” — Garrett Hardin
  • “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.” — Salvor Hardin
  • “You almost never get the pleasure of seeing that you won the argument in real time. People just don’t like to publicly change their minds. They change their minds in private.” — Sam Harris
  • “When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard,’ I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?’” — Sydney J. Harris
  • “Attack along the line of least expectation, and tactically along the line of least resistance.” — B.H. Liddell Hart, summarizing William T. Sherman.
  • “I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.” — Stephen Hawking
  • “I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.” — Stephen Hawking.
  • “Progress does not consist in replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is right. It consists in replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is more subtly wrong.” — Hawkin’s Theory of Progress, Murphy’s Law
  • “Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • “Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes the edge off of admiration.” – Hazlitt’s Homily, Murphy’s Law
  • “Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.” — Ben Hecht
  • “I like rice. Rice is great if you’re hungry and want 2000 of something.” — Mitch Hedberg
  • “One should forgive one’s enemies, but not before they are hanged.” — Heine’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak because a baby can’t chew it.” — Heinlein.
  • “Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.” — Robert Heinlein
  • “Under a dictatorship active resistance can only be practiced by those who pretend to collaborate. … Anyone speaking out openly against the system thereby indubitably deprives himself of any chance of active resistance. … he will naturally finish up a few days later in a concentration camp. Even if he is put to death his martyrdom will in practice never be known, since it will be forbidden to mention his name.” — Werner Heisenberg
  • “You may know where the market is going, but you can’t possibly know where it’s going after that.” — Heisenberg’s Principle of Investment, Murphy’s Law
  • “If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry. Worry never fixes anything.” — Mrs. Ernest Hemingway
  • “Write drunk. Edit sober.” — Ernest Hemingway
  • “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.” – Ernest Hemingway
  • “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” — Ernest Hemingway
  • “The first draft of anything is shit.” — Ernest Hemingway
  • “Never mistake motion for action.” — Hemingway’s Rule, Murphy’s Law
  • “The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.” — Nelson Henderson
  • “When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.” — Jimi Hendrix
  • “There is no well-defined boundary between honesty and dishonesty. The frontiers of one blend with the outside limits of the other, and he who attempts to tread this dangerous ground may be sometimes in one domain and sometimes in the other.” — O. Henry, Rolling Stones, 1912, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “Give as few orders as possible. Once you’ve given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.” — Frank Herbert
  • “There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have.” — Don Herold
  • “Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.” — Hermann Hesse
  • “There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.” — Hermann Hesse
  • “Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, that there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imaginations of ourselves.” — Bill Hicks
  • “If you’re being yourself, nobody can be you as well as you can be you, so you’ll have supply and demand covered.” — Bill Hicks
  • “People are frustrated not having their voice of reason confirmed, and everyone has that voice of reason that goes ‘this is bull man, what I’m watching is bull.’ And yet, the media does not confirm it.” — Bill Hicks
  • “A happy life is just a string of happy moments. But most people don’t allow the happy moment, because they’re so busy trying to get a happy life.” — Esther Hicks
  • “17 seconds of focused pleasureable visualization is stronger than 2000 hours of working to obtain a goal.” — Esther Hicks
  • “Physics is becoming too difficult for the physicists.” — David Hilbert
  • “Whatever your mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” — Napoleon Hill
  • “Opportunity… often it comes disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary defeat.” — Napoleon Hill
  • “The number one reason people fail in life is because they listen to their friends, family, and neighbors.” — Napoleon Hill
  • “The starting point of all achievement is desire.” — Napoleon Hill
  • “The major work of the world is not done by geniuses. It is done by ordinary people, with balance in their lives, who have learned to work in an extraordinary manner.” ― Gordon B. Hinckley
  • “As a general rule, the constitutions and the habits of a people follow the nature of the land where they live.” — Hippocrates
  • “That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” — Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)
  • “In the primitive simplicity of their minds, they will more easily fall victim to a large lie than a small lie, since they sometimes tell petty lies themselves, but would be ashamed to tell a lie that was too big. They would never consider telling a lie of such magnitude themselves, or knowing that it would require such impudence, they would not consider it possible for it to be told by others. Even after being enlightened and shown that the lie is a lie, they will continue to doubt and waiver for a long time and will still believe there must be some truth behind it somewhere, and there must be some other explanation. For this reason, some part of the most bold and brazen lie is sure to stick. This is a fact that all the great liars and liars’ societies (meaning the Jewish press) in this world know only too well and use regularly.” — Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf
  • “I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.” — Adolf Hitler
  • “It is always more difficult to fight against faith than against knowledge.” — Adolf Hitler
  • “The national government … will maintain and defend the foundations on which the power of our nation rests. It will offer strong protection to Christianity as the very basis of our collective morality.” — Adolf Hitler
  • “Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.” — Dee Hock
  • “Some things have to be believed to be seen.” — Ralph Hodgson
  • “You can never get enough of what you don’t really need.” — Eric Hoffer
  • “The fear of becoming a ‘has-been’ keeps some people from becoming anything.” — Eric Hoffer
  • “You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.” — Eric Hoffer
  • “When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.” — Eric Hoffer
  • “The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.” — Eric Hoffer
  • “Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.” — Eric Hoffer
  • “Death is nothing at all.I have only slipped away to the next room.I am I and you are you.Whatever we were to each other,That, we still are.Call me by my old familiar name.Speak to me in the easy waywhich you always used.Put no difference into your tone.Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.Laugh as we always laughedat the little jokes we enjoyed together.Play, smile, think of me. Pray for me.Let my name be ever the household wordthat it always was.Let it be spoken without effect.Without the trace of a shadow on it.Life means all that it ever meant.It is the same that it ever was.There is absolute unbroken continuity.Why should I be out of mindbecause I am out of sight?I am but waiting for you.For an interval.Somewhere. Very near.Just around the corner.All is well.Nothing is past; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before only better, infinitely happier and forever we will all be one together with Christ.” — Henry Scott Holland
  • “Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.” — Ernest Holmes
  • “If you can eliminate all the other choices, the remaining choice, no matter how improbable, is the answer.” — Sherlock Holmes
  • “Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.” — Lou Holtz
  • “Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.” — Lou Holtz’
  • “All progress and growth is a matter of change, but change must be growth within our social and government concepts if it should not destroy them.” — Herbert Hoover, Forbes
  • “A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it.” — Bob Hope
  • “Keep your eyes open and try to catch people in your company doing something right, then praise them for it.” — Tom Hopkins
  • “And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.” — K. Hosseini
  • “Seize the day, put no trust in tomorrow!” — Horace
  • “Of the dead [say] nothing but good.” — Horace
  • “He who has begun has the work half done.” — Horace
  • “He who feared he would not succeed sat still.” — Horace
  • “The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity.” — Doug Horton
  • “The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is universally interested.” — William Dean Howells
  • “Being natural means to exist spontaneously without having to take any action … By taking no action is not meant folding one’s arms and closing one’s mouth. If we simply let everything act by itself, it will be contented with its nature and destiny.” — Kuo-Hsiang
  • “Those who seek the truth by means of intellect and learning only get further and further away from it. Not till your thoughts cease their branching here and there, not till you abandon all thoughts of seeking for something, not till your mind is motionless as wood or stone, will you be on the right road to the Gate.” — Huang-Po
  • “If you conceive of a Buddha, you will be obstructed by that Buddha!” — Huang-Po
  • “There is only the one reality, neither to be realized nor attained. To say ‘I am able to realize something’ or ‘I am able to attain something’ is to place yourself among the arrogant.” — Huang-po
  • “Why seek a doctrine? As Soon as You have a doctrine, you fall into dualistic thought.” — Huang-Po
  • “To avoid criticism , do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.” — Elbert Green Hubbard
  • “The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed — it is a process of elimination.” — Elbert Hubbard
  • “Some people pay a compliment as if they expect a receipt.” — Hubbard’s Homily, Murphy’s Law
  • “I genuinely apologize and if it makes you feel any better, I’ll spend the next 1-15 years sporadically thinking about this moment in which I’ve upset you, full of regret.” — Christopher Hudspeth
  • “Success is never wondering what if.” — Karrie Huffman
  • “The concerns that have come down from numberless ages are only in the present; if you can understand them right now, then the concerns of numberless ages will instantly disperse, like tiles being scattered or ice melting. If you don’t understand right now, you’ll pass through countless eons more, and it’ll still be just as it is.” — [Ta Hui] (1088-1163)
  • “Therefore we know that, unawakened, even a Buddha is a sentient being, and that even a sentient being, if he is awakened in an instant of thought, is a Buddha.” — Hui-Neng
  • “We get to CHOOSE the meaning for our lives. Our lives mean exactly what we say they do—no more, no less. Each of us chooses their path in life.” — Jonathan Lockwood Huie
  • “Plant trees for your great-grandchildren—
for future generations. 
Create the legacy of a better world. 
Leave this world a better place than you found it. 
Literally planting trees for 
your great-grandchildren is a wonderful idea, 
but far more important… 
use this symbolism—this imagery—to represent the kind of legacy 
you want to leave to future generations.” — Jonathan Lockwood Huie
  • “There are three stages of scientific discovery: first people deny it is true; then they deny it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.” — Alexander von Humbolt
  • “To be a good writer, an honest writer, and a writer who actually writes, it’s important to evaluate one’s inhibitions.” — Bryan Hitchinson, from ‘Writer’s Doubt’
  • “An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.” — Aldous Huxley
  • “It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end of that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder.’” — Aldous Huxley
  • “The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man’s foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.” — Thomas Huxley
  • “Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.” — Thomas H. Huxley
  • “Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” — Thomas H. Huxley

I

  • “The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone.” — Henrik Ibsen
  • “…self-delusion deepens, and the lonely life begins.” — “I’ll Quit Tomorrow”
  • “While I am opposed to all orthodox creeds, I have a creed myself; and my creed is this. Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so. This creed is somewhat short, but it is long enough for this life, strong enough for this world. If there is another world, when we get there we can make another creed.” — Robert Green Ingersoll
  • “Never try to pacify anyone at the height of their rage.” — The Ire Principle, Murphy’s Law
  • “Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above it.” — Washington Irving

J

  • “You are a den of vipers. I intend to rout you out and by the Eternal God I will rout you out. If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning.” — President Andrew Jackson (addressing bankers asking him to renew the charter for the U.S. Bank)
  • “If you want me to sing this Christmas song with the feeling and the meaning, you better see if you can locate that check.” — Mahalia Jackson
  • “No person’s life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.” — Jacquin’s Postulate on Democratic Government, Murphy’s Law
  • “There are some things that are impossible to know—but it is impossible to know these things.” — Jaffe’s Precept, Murphy’s Law
  • “The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.” — William James
  • “Generating creative work is not for the faint of heart.” — Julien Jarreau
  • “As to the position that ‘ the people always mean well,’ that they always mean to say and do what they believe to be right and just—it may be popular, but it can not be true. The word people applies to all the individual inhabitants of a country… That portion of them who individually mean well never was, nor until the millennium will be, considerable. Pure democracy, like pure rum, easily produces intoxication and with it a thousand pranks and fooleries. I do not expect mankind will, before the millennium, be what they ought to be and therefore, in my opinion, every political theory which does not regard them as being what they are, will prove abortive. Yet I wish to see all unjust and unnecessary discriminations everywhere abolished, and that the time may come when all our inhabitants of every color and discrimination shall be free and equal partakers of our political liberties.” — John Jay
  • “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” — Stephen Jay
  • “When we see ourselves in a situation which must be endured and gone through, it is best to make up our minds to it, meet it with firmness, and accommodate everything to it in the best way practicable. This lessens the evil; while fretting and fuming only serves to increase your own torments.” — Thomas Jefferson, Forbes
  • “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” or “I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.”  — Thomas Jefferson
  • “A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.” — Thomas Jefferson
  • Jefferson’s ten rules of life
    1. Never put off till tomorrow what you can do to-day.
    2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.
    3. Never spend your money before you have it.
    4. Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.
    5. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold.
    6. We never repent of having eaten too little.
    7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.
    8. How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!
    9. Take things always by their smooth handle.
    10. When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, an hundred.
  • “It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it as the butterfly in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life.” — Richard Jeffries
  • “It is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.” — Jerome K. Jerome, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “Just because everything is different doesn’t mean anything has changed.” — Jerry’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.” — Saint Theresa of Jesus
  • “One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.” — Joan of Arc 
  • “When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards!” — Steve Jobs
  • “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” — Steve Jobs
  • “You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.” — Steve Jobs
  • “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” — Steve Jobs
  • “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” — Steve Jobs
  • “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by Dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” — Steve Jobs
  • “I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” — Steve Jobs
  • “That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” — Steve Jobs
  • “Here’s to the crazy ones — the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” — Steve Jobs
  • “What would you do if you weren’t afraid.” — Spencer Johnson
  • “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.” — Samuel Johnson
  • “Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.” — Samuel Johnson
  • “Great works are performed, not by strength, but perseverance.” — Samuel Johnson
  • “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.” — Samuel Johnson
  • “Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.” — Wendell Johnson
  • “The trouble with being punctual is that nobody’s there to appreciate it.” — Franklin P. Jones
  • “Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.” — Franklin P. Jones
  • “Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.” — Jones’s Motto, Murphy’s Law
  • “Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.” — Erica Jong
  • “You must expect great things of yourself before you can do them.” — Michael Jordan
  • “I can accept failure, but I can’t accept not trying.” — Michael Jordan
  • “We do not want churches because they will teach us to quarrel about God.” — Chief Joseph
  • “Kindness consists of loving people more than they deserve.” — Joubert’s Principle, Murphy’s Law
  • “To seek God without already having him is of all things the most impossible.” — Julian of Norwich
  • “Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.” — Carl Jung
  • “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” — Carl Jung
  • “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”— Carl Jung
  • “Whether invoked or not, God will be present.” — C.G. Jung
  • “Healing only comes from that which leads the patient beyond himself and beyond his entanglements with ego.” — C.G. Jung
  • “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” — C. G. Jung
  • “Who will watch the watchers themselves?” — Juvenal

K

  • “I believe that we are both individually responsible for our actions, and collectively responsible for conditions of harm and injustice that exist in our world.” — David Kaczynski
  • “Only the moment counts. It determines life.” — Franz Kafka
  • “Trouble is only opportunity in work clothes.” — Henry J. Kaiser
  • “Thinking should become your capital asset, no matter whatever ups and downs you come across in your life.” — A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
  • “Dream is not the thing what you see in sleep, dream is the thing that does not let you sleep.” — Adbul Kalam
  • “The day we think we know the answer is the day we stop searching for new insights.” — Kanazawa
  • “Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.” — Immanuel Kant
  • “He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.” — Kant
  • “Reading about enlightenment is like scratching an inch through your shoe.” — Philip Kapleau-Roshi
  • “Some people grumble that roses have thorns; I am grateful that thorns have roses.” — Alphonse Karr
  • “Mongo only pawn in game of life.” — Alex Karras
  • “Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.” — Alan Kay
  • “Everything in this world has a hidden meaning.” — Nikos Kazantzakis
  • “So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys – to woo women – and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do.” — John Keating, Dead Poets Society
  • “The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing — to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.” — John Keats
  • “What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think to ask.” — Sam Keen
  • “We have to move from the illusion of certainty to the certainty of illusion.” — Sam Keen
  • “No man or woman is uniformly successful… we must all expect a rather high percentage of failure in the things we attempt.” — Barnaby Keeney
  • “Skepticism is a stimulant, not to be repressed. It is an antidote to smugness and the great glow of satisfaction one gains from being right. You know the self-righteous—I’ve been one myself—the little extra topspin they put on the truth, their ostentatious modesty, the pleasure they take in being beautifully modulated and cool and correct when others are falling apart. Jesus was rougher on those people than He was on the adulterers and prostitutes.” — Garrison Keillor
  • “Since body and mind are indivisible, so are past and present.” — Keizan
  • “Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them; but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight.” —Helen Keller
  • “I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble.” — Helen Keller
  • “Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the face.” — Helen Keller
  • “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” — Helen Keller
  • “Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” — Helen Keller
  • “Convictions are the mainsprings of action, the driving powers of life. What a man lives are his convictions.” — Francis C. Kelley
  • “Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.” ― Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ
  • “You have to have been a Republican to know how good it is to be a Democrat.” — Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
  • “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind… War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.” — John F. Kennedy
  • “The one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is unchangeable or certain.” — John F. Kennedy
  • “You cannot negotiate with people who say what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.” — John F. Kennedy
  • “Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.” — John F. Kennedy
  • “Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital, quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.” — Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy
  • “Zen is the madman yelling, ‘If you wanta tell me that the stars are not words, then stop calling them stars!” — Jack Kerouac 
  • “An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn’t take his education too seriously.” — Charles F. Kettering
  • “It is much easier to suggest solutions when you know nothing about the problem.” — The Kibbitzer’s Rule, Murphy’s Law
  • “Riots work. And I’ve never said it in that way before. But I’m an American because of that riot’” Killer Mike says, citing the Boston Tea Party. “So When people say riots don’t work: Ferguson was over 60 percent as a black community.  They had less than 60 percent representation in politics, far less. Post-riots, they have two new black city council members, they have actual advocates in the community now, and the police chief retired. So if it was argued that riots worked for Ferguson, absolutely they did.” – Killer Mike, Rolling Stone, August 6, 2015
  • “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • “If a man is called a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • “When people get caught up with that which is right and they are willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping point short of victory.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • “It is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • “The question is not if we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or love?” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • “Well it’s often difficult—but when you live with it so long you almost become immune to being afraid as a result of these threats. I guess you have to come to the point of looking at these things philosophically—and this is where I have decided to stand. I believe that this cause it right—and that someone must have the courage and the fortitude to stand up for it—even if it means suffering, or even if it means death. And I have always felt that American suffering is redemptive—and even if I have to die for this cause, and physical death is a price that others will have to pay—then it is a price that is paid to free the soul of our nation, and to free our children from a permanent spiritual death. And in this sense, I think it is very redemptive (or it can be) even if it occurs.” — Martin Luther King Jr. (November 22, 1963)
  • “Education should equip us with the power to think effectively and objectively. To think is one of the hardest things in the world, and to think objectively is still harder. Yet this is the job of education. Education should cause us to rise beyond the horizon of legions of half truth, prejudices and propaganda. Education should enable us to ‘weigh and consider,’ to discern the true from the false, the relevant from the irrelevant, and the real from the unreal. The first function of education, therefore, is to teach man to think intensively. But this is not the whole of education. If education stops here it can be the most dangerous force in society. Some of the greatest criminals in society have been men {who} possessed the power of concentration and reason, but they had no morals. Perhaps the most dangerous periods in civilization have been those periods when there was no moral foundation in society.” — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “The Purpose of Education”, Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, The Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., January 1947
  • “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” — Martin Luther King Jr., Forbes
  • “Wisdom equals knowledge plus courage. You have to not only know what to do and when to do it, but you have to also be brave enough to follow through.” — Jarod Kintz
  • “He also commented the neoconservatives were ‘often clever, never wise.’” — Russel Kirk, Wikipedia
  • “Don’t let the fear of losing be greater than the excitement of winning.” — Robert Kiyosaki
  • “When you want a thing deeply, earnestly and intensely, this feeling of desire reinforces your will and arouses in you the determination to work for the desired object. When you have a distinct purpose in view, your work becomes of absorbing interest. You bend your best powers to it; you give it concentrated attention; you think of little else than the realization of this purpose; your will is stimulated into unusual activity, and as a consequence you do your work with an increasing sense of power.” — Grenville Kleiser
  • “Do what you have always done and you’ll get what you have always got.” — Sue Knight
  • “Our jobs not to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heatless world. Our job is to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless.” — L. R. Knost
  • “Don’t believe that your kindness will always be returned with kindness, but don’t let that stop you from giving it out as freely and as often as you can.” — Jake Kocurek
  • “The real conflict is inner conflict. Beyond the armies of occupation and the catacombs of concentration camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are victories on the battlefield if we ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves.” — Father Kolbe, sermon while under Nazi rule published in the Knight
  • “The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.” — Willem de Kooning
  • “Sometimes low self-esteem is earned. It’s the correct response if you are not trying your best.” — Michael Koppelman
  • “The more you can dream, the more you can do.” — Michael Korda
  • “There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.” — Kumi
  • “We now come to the very heart of Zen, which is, it might be said, to commit spiritual suicide.” — Kenneth Kramer
  • “Common Core’s Claims are False: Our schools are not broken. The problem is poverty. When researchers control for poverty, our test scores are among the best in [the] world. Our unspectacular overall scores are due to the fact that the US has the second highest level of child poverty among all 34 economically advanced countries (now over 23%, compared to high-scoring Finland’s 5.4%). Poverty means poor nutrition, inadequate health care, and lack of access to books, among other things. All of these negatively impact school performance.” — Stephen Krashen
  • “In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection. Indeed, they will be receding faster than the speed of light, so detection will be impossible. Future civilizations will discover science and all its laws, and never know about other galaxies or the cosmic background radiation. They will inevitably come to the wrong conclusion about the universe… We live in a special time, the only time, where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time.” — Lawrence M. Krauss
  • “A real entrepreneur is somebody who has no safety net underneath them.” — Henry Kravis
  • “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” — Krishnamurti
  • “To understand truth one must have a very sharp, precise, clear mind; not a cunning mind, but a mind that is capable of looking without any distortion, a mind innocent and vulnerable.” — J. Krishnamurti
  • “We all want to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.” — J. Krishnamurti
  • “Memory is incomplete experience.” — J. Krishnamurti
  • “In the cultivation of the mind, our emphasis should not be on concentration, but on attention. Concentration is a process of forcing the mind to narrow down to a point, whereas attention is without frontiers.” — J. Krishnamurti
  • “Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.” — Paul Krugman
  • “Rather than spend aeons without an awakening, have no second thoughts.” — Jakushitsu
  • “When the focus of your practice becomes like the light of the sun penetrating a magnifying glass so sharply that it makes a fire, it dissolves greed, anger, and ignorance, the three great obstacles to our original heart/mind.” — Jakusho Kwong
  • “Please enjoy your only life!” — Jakusho Kwong
  • “Breath sweeps mind.” — Jakusho Kwong
  • “It is through the essence of mind, which is unborn, indestructible, calm and clear, that we deliver ourselves within ourselves. This is the basic reality of dharma.” — Jakusho Kwong
  • “When a student is a student of Zen, their practice should help them forget that they are a Zen student.” — Jakusho Kwong
  • “When you give yourself to practice through and through, which means through and beyond feelings and thoughts, little by little you begin to allow something great to surface, something without beginning or end. That’s as it is!” — Jakusho Kwong
  • “It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it, and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.” — Daw Aung San Suu Kyi

L

  • “When we ask for advice we are usually looking for an accomplice.” — La Grange’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “After food and sex, man’s greatest drive is to tell the other fellow how to do his job.” — Lacopi’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “Man the media just hammers away at the people in this world. Creativity shouldn’t be a chase for riches. Creativity is gold in your hands. When life’s said and done your fans won’t matter it will be the condition of your heart.” — John Lacy
  • “It’s disquieting to see a lack of progress in culture and a lack of communication in personal relationships. What is more beautiful than genuine laughter? What is more entertaining than actual conversation between people? It would seem that most of us have traded our morality for entertainment, our honesty for image, and our empathy for ignorance.” — David Lam
  • “I believe that the very purpose of life is to be happy. From the very core of our being, we desire contentment. In my own limited experience I have found that the more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being. Cultivating a close, warmhearted feeling for others automatically puts the mind at ease. It helps remove whatever fears or insecurities we may have and gives us the strength to cope with any obstacles we encounter. It is the principal source of success in life. Since we are not solely material creatures, it is a mistake to place all our hopes for happiness on external development alone. The key is to develop inner peace.” — Dalai Lama
  • “What is meant … by the term ‘illusion’ is that phenomena do not exist independently of other phenomena, that their appearance of independent existence is illusory. This is all that is meant by ‘illusion,’ that something is not really there.” — Dalai Lama
  • “We must openly accept all ideologies and systems as a means of solving humanity’s problems. One country, one nation, one ideology, one system is not sufficient.” — The Dalai Lama
  • “What science finds to be nonexistent, a Buddhist must necessarily accept, but what science merely does not find is a completely different matter. It is quite clear that there are many, many mysterious things.” — The Dalai Lama
  • “Not only can I not recall my experience in previous lives, sometimes I can’t even remember what I did yesterday.” — The Dalai Lama
  • “I really admire bees’ sense of common responsibility… Although sometimes individual bees fight, basically there is a strong sense of unity and cooperation. We human beings are supposed to be much more advanced, but sometimes we lag behind even small insects.” — The Dalai Lama
  • “Tolerance and patience should not be read as signs of weakness. They are signs of strength.” — The Dalai Lama
  • “Nirvana may be the final object of attainment, but at the moment, it is difficult to reach. Thus, the practical and realistic aim is compassion, a warm hart, serving other people helping others, respecting others, being less selfish.” — Dalai Lama
  • “This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.” — Dalai Lama
  • “When you have full belief in yourself and the need to make things happen, that’s the powerful force behind being successful.” — Julia Landauer
  • “The difference between good and great is the mindset that feeds the appetite.” — Jarvis Landry
  • “God created the world just like a knife and left it up to us to take it by the handle or the blade.” — Langenhoven
  • “It’s better to have a horrible ending than to have horrors without end.” — The Last Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “There’s only us, there’s only this, forget regret, or life is yours to miss. No other road, no other way, no day but today.” — Jonathan Larson
  • “Mistrust the man who finds everything good, the man who finds everything evil and still more the man who is indifferent to everything.” — Johann K. Lavater
  • “If everything is coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane.” — Law of Life’s Highway, Murphy’s Law
  • “Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.” — Timothy Leary
  • “You will always find some Eskimos willing to instruct the Congolese on how to cope with heat waves.” — Stanislaus Lec, Forbes
  • “The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be.” —Bruce Lee
  • “A goal is not always meant to be reached; it often serves simply as something to aim at.” — Bruce Lee
  • “The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.” — Bruce Lee
  • “If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.” — Bruce Lee
  • “It’s not the daily increase but the daily decrease. Hack away at the inessential.” — Bruce Lee
  • “I cannot trust a man to control others who cannot control himself.” — Robert E. Lee
  • “When asked if my cup is half-full or half-empty my only response is that I am thankful I have a cup.” — Sam Lefkowitz
  • “To live is not to learn, but to apply.” — Legouve
  • “Remember, teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability.” — Patrick Lencioni
  • “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted.” — John Lennon
  • “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.” — Barry LePatner
  • “What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.” — Oscar Levant
  • “It’s so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don’t say it.” — Sam Levenson
  • “If you want truly to understand something, try to change it.” — Kurt Lewin
  • “This moment contains all moments.” — C.S. Lewis
  • “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”― C.S. Lewis
  • “I do not think I should value much the love of a friend who cared only for my happiness and did not object to my becoming dishonest.” — C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
  • “Friendship … is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .” — C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
  • “Whenever someone asks me if I want water with my Scotch, I say I’m thirsty, not dirty.” — Joe E. Lewis
  • “Like all ardent agnostics, Martin was a religious man.” — Sinclair Lewis, “Arrowsmith”
  • “Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.” — George Christoph Lichtenberg
  • “When hungry, eat your rice; when tired, close your eyes. Fools may laugh at me, but wise men will know what I mean.” — Lin-Chi
  • “The human spirit is stronger than anything that can happen. It’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” – Abraham Lincoln
  • “I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have.” — Abraham Lincoln
  • “The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity.” — Abraham Lincoln
  • “As I could not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” — Abraham Lincoln
  • “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to success is more important than any other one thing.” — Abraham Lincoln
  • “How many legs does a dog have, if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” — Abraham Lincoln
  • “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” — Abraham Lincoln
  • “When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.” — Abraham Lincoln
  • “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.” — Abraham Lincoln
  • “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” — Abraham Lincoln
  • “The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma.” — Abraham Lincoln
  • “Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.” — Abraham Lincoln
  • “To cause high prices, all the Federal Reserve Board will do will be to lower the rediscount rate…, producing an expansion of credit and a rising stock market; then when… business men are adjusted to these conditions, it can check… prosperity in mid career by arbitrarily raising the rate of interest. It can cause the pendulum of a rising and falling market to swing gently back and forth by slight changes in the discount rate, or cause violent fluctuations by a greater rate variation and in either case it will possess inside information as to financial conditions and advance knowledge of the coming change, either up or down. This is the strangest, most dangerous advantage ever placed in the hands of a special privilege class by any Government that ever existed. The system is private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profits from the use of other people’s money. They know in advance when to create panics to their advantage, They also know when to stop panic. Inflation and deflation work equally well for them when they control finance.” — Congressman Charles Lindbergh Sr.
  • “Slackers might look like the left-behinds of society, but they are actually one step ahead, rejecting most of society and the social hierarchy before it rejects them. The dictionary defines slackers as people who evade duties and responsibilities. A more modern notion would be people who are ultimately being responsible to themselves and not wasting their time in a realm of activity that has nothing to do with who they are or what they might be ultimately striving for.” — Richard Linklater
  • “In Timothy Levitch’s words, ‘The world is an exam, to see if we can rise into the direct experiences. Our eyesight is here as a test, to see if we can see beyond it. Matter is here as a test for our curiosity.’” — Richard Linklater, Waking Life, Main character sitting with a man in a bar/restaurant. University of Texas at Austin philosophy professor Louis Mackey.
  • “There are two kinds of sufferers in this world: those who suffer from a lack of life and those who suffer from an overabundance of life. I’ve always found myself in the second category. When you come to think of it, almost all human behavior and activity is not essentially any different from animal behavior. The most advanced technologies and craftsmanship bring us, at best, up to the super-chimpanzee level. Actually, the gap between, say, Plato or Nietzsche and the average human is greater than the gap between that chimpanzee and the average human. The realm of the real spirit, the true artist, the saint, the philosopher, is rarely achieved. Why so few? Why is world history and evolution not stories of progress but rather this endless and futile addition of zeroes? No greater values have developed. Hell, the Greeks 3,000 years ago were just as advanced as we are. So what are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question, and that’s this: Which is the most universal human characteristic – fear or laziness?” — Richard Linklater, Waking Life, Scene 17, The Overman, Louis Mackey
  • “Exercise your human mind as fully as possible, knowing that it is only an exercise.” — Richard Linklater, Waking Life
  • “There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is in having lots to do and not doing it.” — Mary Wilson Little
  • “Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company and reflection must finish him.” — John Locke
  • “Even the best of friends cannot attend each other’s funeral.” — Logan’s Lament, Murphy’s Law
  • “A man can be as great as he wants to be. If you believe in yourself and have the courage, the determination, the dedication, the competitive drive and if you are willing to sacrifice the little things in life and pay the price for the things that are worthwhile, it can be done.” — Vince Lombardi
  • “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” — Vince Lombardi
  • “The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack in will.” — Vince Lombardi
  • “Remember that your brain isn’t built for happiness. It’s built for survival. Happiness is something you have to create after-the-fact.” — Tai Lopez
  • “When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” — Audre Lorde
  • “You’ve got to get up every morning with determination if you’re going to go to bed with satisfaction.” — George Horace Lorimer
  • “Misery is wasted on the miserable.” — Louis C. K., “Louie”
  • “The worst part of telling a lie is when someone you love accepts it.” — Louis C.K., Horace and Pete Episode 3
  • “Offending people is a necessary and healthy act. Every time you say something that’s offensive to another person, you just caused a discussion. You just forced them to have to think.” — Louis C. K.
  • “I never am really satisfied that I understand anything; because, understand it well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand.” — Ada Lovelace
  • “There is no sincerity like a politician telling a lie.” — Lovka’s First Political Principle, Murphy’s Law
  • “The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do.” — E.V. Lucas, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “The fewer words, the better prayer.” — Martin Luther
  • “If at first you don’t succeed, find out if the loser gets anything.” — Bill Lyon

M

  • “Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, and the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.” — Jack Ma
  • “The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.” — Lord Macaulay
  • “The measure of a man’s real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.” — Thomas Macaulay
  • “No one wants to be preached to.” — Macklemore
  • “The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.” — Joanna Macy
  • “What have been the fruits of Christianity? Superstition, bigotry, and persecution.” — James Madison, 4th president of the U.S.
  • “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” — James Madison
  • “The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.” — Bishop W.C. Magee
  • “Men may buy pornography but women pay for it — in terms of exploitation, rape, violence, and a society that sees them as disposable sexual objects.” — Rosalie Maggio
  • “You carry heaven and hell with you.” — Sri Ramana Maharshi
  • “You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.” — Naguib Mahfouz
  • “I always felt like a hypocrite watching porn. Here I was, a man who is striving to be an ally to women, perpetuating the very culture of violence and misogyny that I was ostensibly trying to fight. The reality was that most of the videos I found online had titles that included words like “bitch” or “slut” and showcased controlling behaviors that were rooted in a culture of subjugation and objectification, where women are nothing more than sexual bodies to be exploited and dominated by men.” — Dan Mahle
  • “There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.” — Norman Mailer
  • “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” — Nelson Mandela
  • “A leader … is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.” — Nelson Mandela
  • “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” — Nelson Mandela
  • “In Iroquois society, leaders are encouraged to remember seven generations in the past and consider seven generations in the future when making decisions that affect the people.” — Wilma Mankiller
  • “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” — Thomas Manne
  • “Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised.” — Marilyn Manson
  • “To win takes a complete commitment of mind and body. When you can’t make that commitment, they don’t call you a champion anymore.” — Rocky Marciano
  • “Laziness is often mistaken for patience.” — Mark’s Rule, Murphy’s Law
  • “People trust their eyes above all else – but most people see what they wish to see, or what they believe they should see; not what is really there” ― Zoë Marriott, Shadows on the Moon
  • “Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.” — Carl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Philosophy
  • “Those are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others.” — Groucho Marx
  • “Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana. Ah, the imprecision of language.” — Groucho Marx
  • “The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” — Groucho Marx
  • “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.” — Groucho Marx
  • “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” — Groucho Marx
  • “Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted.” — Groucho Marx
  • “There’s one way to find out if a man is honest — ask him. If he says, ‘Yes,’ you know he is a crook.” — Groucho Marx, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “The state of being without a system of values is psychopathogenic, we are learning. The human being needs a framework of values, a philosophy of life, a religion or religion-surrogate to live by and understand by, in about the same sense he needs sunlight, calcium or love. This I have called the ‘cognitive need to understand.’ The value- illnesses which result from valuelessness are called variously anhedonia, anomie, apathy, amorality, hopelessness, cynicism, etc., and can become somatic illness as well. Historically, we are in a value interregnum in which all externally given value systems have proven failures (political, economic, religious, etc.) e.g., nothing is worth dying for. What man needs but doesn’t have, he seeks for unceasingly, and he becomes dangerously ready to jump at any hope, good or bad. The cure for this disease is obvious. We need a validated, usable system of human values that we can believe in and devote ourselves to (be willing to die for), because they are true rather than because we are exhorted to ‘believe and have faith.’ Such an empirically based Weltanschauung seems now to be a real possibility, at least in theoretical outline.” — Maslow, 1968, p. 206.
  • “Self Actualization is the intrinsic growth of what is already in the organism, or more accurately, of what the organism is.” — Abraham Maslow
  • “Feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision, the feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and also more helpless than one ever was before, the feeling of ecstasy and wonder and awe, the loss of placement in time and space with, finally, the conviction that something extremely important and valuable had happened, so that the subject was to some extent transformed and strengthened even in his daily life by such experiences.” — Abraham Maslow
  • “To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.” — Abraham Maslow
  • “They must find it difficult, those who have taken authority as truth, rather than truth as authority.” — Gerald Massey
  • “It is bad luck to be superstitious.” — Andrew W. Mathis
  • “The Zen expression ‘Kill the Buddha’ means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from yourself. To kill the Buddha is to be the Buddha.” — Peter Matthiessen
  • “It’s always difficult to make conversation with a drunk, and there’s no denying it, the sober are at a disadvantage with him.” — W. Somerset Maugham
  • “Life is 10% of what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.” — John Maxwell
  • “Successful and unsuccessful people do not vary greatly in their abilities. They vary in their desires to reach their potential.” — John Maxwell
  • “Success is … knowing your purpose in life, growing to reach your maximum potential, and sowing seeds that benefit others.” — John Maxwell
  • “A good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit.” — John Maxwell
  • “People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision.” — John Maxwell
  • “Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.” — John Maxwell
  • “Leadership is not about titles, positions, or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.” — John Maxwell
  • “If you’re gonna dance with the devil, you might as well lead.” — Ralphie May
  • “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.” – Rollo May
  • “A person [needs] just one change of clothes to remain clean.” — John McCain with Mark Salter, concerning Mother Teresa in “Character is Destiny”
  • “An atheist doesn’t have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can’t be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question.” — John McCarthy, inventor of Lisp
  • “Mr. Chairman, we have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks, hereinafter called the Fed. The Fed has cheated the Government of the United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the Nation’s debt… The wealth of these United States and the working capital have been taken away from them and has either been locked in the vaults of certain banks and the great corporations or exported to foreign countries for the benefit of foreign customers of these banks and corporations. So far as the people of the United States are concerned, the cupboard is bare. When the Federal Reserve Act was passed, the people of these United States did not perceive that a world banking system was being set up here. A super-state controlled by international bankers and industrialists, acting together to enslave the world. Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers but the truth is—the Fed has usurped the government.” — Congressman Louis T. McFadden, Former Chairman of the Committee on Banking and Currency
  • “Leadership is an action, not a position.” — Donald McGannon
  • “One thing we know for certain is that chasing meaning is better for your health than trying to avoid discomfort. And so I would say that’s really the best way to make decisions: is go after what it is that creates meaning in your life and then trust yourself to handle the stress that follows.” — Kelly McGonigal
  • “When you think about your identity, when you think about what it means to be alive, when you think about why you deserve to exist, you’re not your thoughts, because you think them, and you can’t be your feelings, because otherwise who’s the you that feels them? You’re not what you have, you’re not what you do, you’re not even who you love or who loves you. There has to be something underneath all that.” — Caroline McHugh
  • “Wisdom is knowing the right path to take… Integrity is taking it.” — M. H. McKee
  • “You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.” — Greg McKeown
  • “I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.” — Marshall McLuhan
  • “My father started to give me the ‘Why don’t you find a soulmate?’ speech again the other night. I told him he’s been watching too many eHarmony.com commercials. There’s no such thing as a soulmate, just an I-tolerate-your crap-because-I-can’t-do-any-better-mate.” — Jenn McNanna.
  • “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” — Herman Melville
  • “A great man is he who has not lost the heart of a child.” — Mencius
  • “The trouble about fighting for human freedom is that you have to spend much of your life defending sons of bitches; for oppressive laws are always aimed at them originally, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” — H.L. Menken  
  • “The thing about Zen is that is pushes contradictions to their ultimate limit where one has to choose between madness and innocence.” — Thomas Merton
  • “Zen is consciousness unstructured by a particular form or particular system, a transcultural, transretligious, transformed consciousness.” — Thomas Merton
  • “The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” — Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
  • “Patience is not the ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting.” — Joyce Meyner
  • “Don’t fix your problems, fix your thinking. The problems then fix themselves.” — Brandon Michael
  • “If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.” — Michelangelo
  • “In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.” — Michelangelo
  • “My religion is to live—and die—without regret.” — Milarepa
  • “I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it.” — John Stuart Mill
  • “Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of witnesses.” — Margaret Millar
  • “If there is to be any peace, it will come through being, not having.” — Henry Miller
  • “The world is not to be put in order. The world is order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.” — Henry Miller
  • “Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.” — Henry Miller
  • “You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.” — Olin Miller
  • “The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.” — A. Milne
  • “The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.” — John Milton
  • “Never frown because you never know who might be falling in love with your smile.” — Justine Milton
  • “All machines have an innate sense of irresponsibility.” — Milroy’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’” — Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut
  • “Until you’ve lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was.” — Margaret Mitchell
  • “I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.” — Wilson Mizner
  • “Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most.” — Clement Mok
  • “A lie has speed, but truth has endurance.” — Edgar J. Mohn, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.” — Moliere
  • “It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do.” — Moliere
  • “Some people bring out the worst in you, others bring out the best, and then are those remarkably rare, addictive ones who just bring out the most. Of everything. They make you feel so alive that you’d follow them straight into hell just to keep getting your fix.” — Karen Marie Moning
  • “I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they’re right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.” — Marilyn Monroe
  • “When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates. “ — Thomas Monson
  • “A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.” — Montaigne
  • “Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress.” — Alfred A. Montapert
  • “Reputation is what folks think you are. Personality is what you seem to be. Character is what you really are.” — Alfred Armand Montapert
  • “Always remember, son, the best boss is the one who bosses the least. Whether it’s cattle or horses or men, the least government is the best government.” — Ralph Moody
  • “The only lack or limitation is in your own mind.” – N. H. Moos
  • “A man always has two reasons for what he does — a good one, and the real one.” — John Pierpont Morgan
  • “Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice.” — Robin Morgan
  • “PC stands for plain courtesy.” — Robin Morgan
  • “The big shots are only the little shots who keep shooting.” — Christopher Morley
  • “Opposing the rentiers, in all their forms, is not the same as opposing wealth, honestly earned.” — Charles R. Morris
  • “If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.” — Jim Morrison
  • “‘There are no atheists in foxholes’ isn’t an argument against atheism, it’s an argument against foxholes.” — James Morrow
  • “Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.” — Murphy’s First Law of Technology, Murphy’s Law
  • “Things get worse under pressure.” — Murphy’s Law of Thermodynamics, Murphy’s Law
  • “Being punctual means only that your mistake will be made on time.” — Murphy’s Law of Punctuality, Murphy’s Law
  • “The worst is enemy of the bad.” — Murphy’s Saving Grace, Murphy’s Law
  • “The only thing that you can carry with you on your travels is your heart. So fill your heart with good things and good things will follow you for the rest of your life.” — Scott Murray
  • “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans. That the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves, too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.” — William H. Murray
  • “Zen Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things.” — Miyamoto Musashi
  • “The important thing in strategy is to suppress the enemy’s useful actions but allow his useless actions.” — Miyamoto Musashi
  • “The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him.” — Miyamoto Musashi
  • “Constantly think about how you could be doing better and keep questioning yourself.” — Elon Musk
  • “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.” — Elon Musk
  • “I want to be remembered after I die. That’s why I try to borrow 5 bucks from everyone I meet. I mean, face it, I’m never gonna be president or anything. — Mystic7

N

  • “The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” — Ralph Nader
  • “You can make it foolproof, but you can’t make it damnfoolproof.” — Naeser’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “Murphy’s Law was not propounded by Murphy, but by another man of the same name.” — Nagler’s Comment on the Origin of Murphy’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.” —Napoleon (Hanlon’s Razor)
  • “Fortune does not change men, it unmasks them.” — Suzanne Necker
  • “Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you is determinism; the way you play it is free will.” — Jawaharlal Nehru
  • “Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will.” — Jawaharlal Nehru
  • “The ultimate test of a man’s conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.” — Gaylord Nelson
  • “When did the lemons learn the same creed as the sun?” — Pablo Neruda
  • “Nobody believes the official spokesman… but everybody trusts an unidentified source.” — Ron Nesen
  • “In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.” — Johann von Neumann
  • “Some people, profess guilt to claim credit for the sin.” — John von Neumann on the scientists who created the atomic bomb
  • “People can be divided into three groups: Those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happened.” — John W. Newbern.
  • “The probability of being observed is in direct proportion to the stupidity of your actions.” — Newchy’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “It is more important to know where you are going than to get there quickly.” — Mabel Newcomber
  • “An acceptable level of unemployment means that the government economist to whom it is acceptable still has a job.” — Newlan’s Rule, Murphy’s Law
  • “America; first we fight for our freedom, then we make laws to take it away.” — Alfred E. Newman
  • “Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.” — Howard W. Newton
  • “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” — Isaac Newton
  • “You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are the echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles after a carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
  • “If this essay is incomprehensible to anyone and jars on his ears, the fault, it seems to me, is not necessarily mine.” — Nietzsche
  • “Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
  • “The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
  • “I want, once and for all, not to know many things. Wisdom sets limits to knowledge, too.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
  • “We become what we think about most of the time, and that’s the strangest secret.” — Earl Nightingale
  • “Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.” — Earl Nightingale
  • “We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.” — Anais Nin
  • “Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” ― Anaïs Nin
  • “Everything not saved will be lost.” — Nintendo ‘Quit Screen’ message
  • “Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.” — Bill Nye

O

  • “I think it’s important to understand that you can’t have 100 percent security and then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.” — Barack Obama
  • “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” — Barack Obama
  • “Expect the dawn of a new beginning in the dark nights of life.” — Lloyd John Ogilvie
  • “Tell me, what is it you plan to dowith your one wild and precious life?”
  • (From “The Summer Day”) — Mary Oliver
  • “Those who think it is permissible to tell white lies soon grow color-blind.” Austin O’Malley, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because the have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago” — J. R. Oppenheimer
  • “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.” — George Orwell
  • “In times of Universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” — George Orwell
  • “Before I fuck my girlfriend on the hood of my car, I always run the engine for a few minutes to warm it up — because that’s the kind of thing you do when you care.” — Brad Osberg.
  • “If you love a flower, don’t pick it up. Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love. So if you love a flower, let it be. Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.” — Osho
  • “When I inhale,/ I don’t dwell upon things./ When I exhale,/ I don’t pursue thoughts./ Thus I breathe the sutra,/ As-it-is-ness./ Hundreds of thousands of millions of times.” — Osho
  • “Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars … and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy. Trees are happy for no reason; they aren’t going to become first ministers or presidents and they aren’t going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance. Look at the flowers — for no reason. It’s simply unbelievable how happy flowers are.” — Osho
  • “False humbleness is just repressed ego, pretending to be humble but desiring to be at the top. Authentic humbleness has nothing to do with ego. It is absence of the ego. It has no claim of being superior to anybody. It is a simple and pure understanding that there is no one who is superior and there is no one who is inferior. People are just themselves; incomparably unique. You cannot compare them as superior or inferior.” — Osho
  • “Murphy was an optimist.” — O’Toole’s Commentary on Murphy’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.” — Ovid (43 BC-18 AD)
  • “Be patient and tough; some day this pain will be useful to you.” — Ovid

P

  • “Attention comes from nowhere. It has no cause. It belongs to no one. When it functions effortlessly, there is no duality.” — Toni Packer
  • “Those who believe they have plenty of time get ready only at the time of death. Then they are ravaged by regret. But isn’t it far too late?” — Padmasambhava
  • “The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheaply, we esteem too lightly; ’tis dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brace by reflection. ’Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles until death.” — Thomas Paine, Forbes
  • “That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only which gives everything it’s value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price on its goods.” — Thomas Paine
  • “Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.” — Thomas Paine
  • “It is a fraud of the Christian system to call the sciences human invention; it is only the application of them that is human. Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles, he can only discover them.” — Thomas Paine.
  • “A long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.” — Common Sense, Thomas Paine
  • “It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.” — Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “For while avarice and ambition have a place in the heart of man, the weak will become a prey to the strong.” — Common Sense, Thomas Paine
  • “Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home… It’s your responsibility to love it, or change it.” — Chuck Palahniuk
  • “The things you own end up owning you.” — Chuck Palahniuk, Tyler Durden in Fight Club
  • “Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I’ve ever known.” — Chuck Palahniuk
  • “You who are vivative, love life, and have no fears of death,/Know what it is to live, or to die, and are ready for either,Willing to go, or willing to stay and meet the consequences,Having no fear of wrath, or fire, or annihilation,Attached to life, here and elsewhere, now and forever,Desiring it for the love, pleasure, and blessing it may bring,Loving it for these luxuries upon any terms.” — Daniel Parker, Phrenology, 1859
  • “I don’t care what is written about me so long as it isn’t true.” — Dorothy Parker
  • “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” — Ellen Parr
  • “By a peculiar prerogative, not only each individual is making advances in the sciences, and may make advances in morality (which is the science, by way of eminence, of living well and being happy), but all mankind together is making a continual progress in proportion as the universe grows older. So that the whole human race, during the course of so many ages, may be considered as one man who never ceases to live and learn.” — Blaise Pascal, Forbes
  • “We must learn our limits. We are all something, but none of us are everything.” — Blaise Pascal
  • “Don’t try to add more years to your life. Better add more life to your years.” — Blaise Pascal
  • “I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.” — Blaise Pascal
  • “Contradiction is not a sign of the falsity, nor the lack of a contradiction a sign of truth.” — Blaise Pascal
  • “To ridicule philosophy, that is to be a real philosopher.” — Blaise Pascal
  • “The power of a man’s virtue should be measured not by his special efforts, but by his ordinary doing.” — Blaise Pascal
  • “The last thing we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.” — Blaise Pascal
  • “Chance favors the prepared.” — Pasteur’s Principal, Murphy’s Law
  • “If a man does his best, what else is there?” — General George S. Patton Jr.
  • “The object of war is not to die for your country, but make the other son-of-a-bitch die for his.” — General George S. Patton Jr.
  • “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” — General George S. Patton Jr.
  • “Don’t tell people how to do things; tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.” — General George S. Patton Jr.
  • “But particularly on the Internet, where much of pornography today is consumed, the type of sexuality depicted often has more to do with violence, extreme fetishes and mutual degradation than with sexual or emotion pornography, is a comercialized produce, devoid of emotion, stripped of humanity, an essentially empty experience.” — Pamela Paul
  • “If I understand Dirac correctly, his meaning is this: there is no God, and Dirac is his Prophet.” — Wolfgang Pauli
  • “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” — Linus Pauling
  • “Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error.” — Linus Pauling
  • “You can’t fall off the floor.” — Paul’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “By the time you’re old enough to know your way around, you’re not going anywhere.” — Paul’s Principle, Murphy’s Law
  • “Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don’t move, today is today, always is today.” — Octavio Paz
  • “Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution. If you don’t have any problems, you don’t have any seeds.” — Norman Vincent Peale
  • “We tend to get what we expect.” — Norman Vincent Peale
  • “The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you.” — Stephanie Perkins
  • “There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.” — Dr. Laurence J. Peter
  • “Traditions are solutions for which we have forgotten the problems.” — Peterson’s Principle, Murphy’s Law
  • “You never realize how good you got until you see or hear somebody else’s story. Sometimes your problems are not as you make them.” — Brittany Phelps
  • “You may only succeed if you desire succeeding; you may only fail if you do not mind failing.” — Philippos
  • “The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what others have done.” — Piage
  • “Action is the foundational key to all success.” — Pablo Picasso
  • “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” — Pablo Picasso
  • “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” — Pablo Picasso
  • “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” — Picasso
  • “Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” — Pablo Picasso
  • “I do not evolve, I am.” — Pablo Picasso
  • “If you’re coasting, you’re going downhill.” — Pierson’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.” — Robert M. Pirsig
  • “It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth.’ and so it goes away. Puzzling.” — Robert M. Pirsig
  • “Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.” — Plato
  • “Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” — Plato
  • “There is always something new out of Africa.” — Pliny the Elder
  • “Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.” — Plutarch
  • “Since water still flows, though we cut it with swords,/ And sorrow returns, though we drown it with wine,/ Since the world can in no way satisfy our cravings,/ Let us loosen our hair tomorrow and go fishing.” — Li Po
  • “Without the use of a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to make a parody of Fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.” — Poe’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “[A website comment section] seems to be a global incarnation of that old, sad rule: If you can’t feel good about yourself, at least you can make somebody else feel worse.” — David Pogue
  • “Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.” — Henri Poincare
  • “Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.” — Alexander Pope
  • “Some people will never learn anything … because they understand everything too soon.” — Alexander Pope
  • “When you put together deep knowledge about a subject that intensely matters to you, charisma happens. You gain courage to share your passion, and when you do that, folks follow.” — Jerry Porras
  • “People usually get what’s coming to them… unless it’s been mailed.” — Postal Principle, Murphy’s Law
  • “Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.” — Colin Powell
  • “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, learning from failure.” — Colin Powell
  • “People say your life flashes before your eyes before you die. That’s true—it’s called life.” — Terry Pratchett
  • “In the end, it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.” — Max De Pree
  • “We cannot get grace from gadgets.” — J. B. Priestly
  • “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.” — Marcel Proust
  • “It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.” — Marcel Proust
  • “If there is no enemy within, then the enemy outside can do us no harm.” — Proverb, African
  • “Do not look where you fell, but where you slipped.” — Proverb, African
  • “The people who wear their dirt the best are the healthiest.” — Proverb, African
  • “Trust in Allah, but tie your camel.” — Proverb, Arabian
  • Nasrudin walked into a teahouse and announced, “The moon is more useful than the sun.” “Why?” he was asked. “Because at night we need the light more.” — Proverb, Arab
  • “Who lies for you will lie against you.” — Bosnian Proverb, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “When the student is ready the teacher will appear.” — Proverb, Buddhist
  • “The greatest achievement is selflessness. The greatest worth is self-mastery. The greatest quality is seeking to serve others. The greatest precept is continual awareness. The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything. The greatest action is not conforming with the world’s ways. The greatest magic is transmuting the passions. The greatest generosity is non-attachment. The greatest goodness is a peaceful mind. The greatest patience is humility. The greatest effort is not concerned with results. The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go. The greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances.” — Proverb, Buddhist
  • “You have come here to find what you already have.” — Proverb, Buddhist
  • “We are the ancestors of generations yet unborn.” — Proverb, Cherokee
  • “He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.” —Proverb, Chinese
  • “The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it.” —Proverb, Chinese
  • “Better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.” — Proverb, Chinese
  • “One dog barks at something. And a hundred dogs bark at the sound.” — Proverb, Chinese
  • “I hear, I forget; I see, I remember; I do, I understand.” — Proverb, Chinese
  • “When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.” — Proverb, Chinese
  • “He who carves the Buddha never worships him.” — Proverb, Chinese
  • “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” — Proverb, Chinese
  • “To question as a wise man is the beginning of wisdom.” — Proverb, German
  • “No answer is also an answer.” — Proverb, German
  • “Gods are immortal but not eternal.” — Proverb, Greek
  • “You are teaching a dolphin to swim.” — Proverb, Greek
  • “A good laugh and a long sleep are the two best cures for anything.” — Proverb, Irish
  • “Once the game is over, the King and the pawn go back in the same box.” — Proverb, Italian
  • “Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.” — Proverb, Japanese
  • “If you believe everything you read, you’d better not read.” — Proverb, Japanese
  • “The reverse side also has a reverse side.” — Proverb, Japanese
  • “To know and toast are one and the same.” — Proverb, Japanese (Samurai)
  • “However fickle I seem, my heart is never unfaithful: Out of the slime itself, spotless the lotus grows.” — Proverb, Japanese folk song
  • “A human life is like a single letter in the alphabet. It can be meaningless. Or it can be part of a great meaning.” — Proverb, Jewish
  • “There is no room for God in him who is full of himself.” — Proverb, Jewish
  • “If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.” — Proverb, Jewish
  • “Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.” — Proverb, Native American
  • “A hero is one who knows how to hang on one minute longer.” — Proverb, Norwegian
  • “A half truth is a whole lie.” — Yiddish Proverb, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “Just when the caterpillar thought the world was ending, he turned into a butterfly.” — Proverb
  • “It’s not an easy road, but give thanks to the road.” — Proverb
  • “Faith will move mountains.” — Proverb
  • “Let the gods avenge themselves.” — Proverb, Roman law maxim
  • “As you sow so will you reap.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “Repetition is the mother of studies.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “The absent one will not be heir.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “Qui audet adipiscitur.” (He who dares, wins) — Proverb, Roman
  • “Yield not to misfortunes, but advance all the more boldly against them.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “One conquers who conquers oneself.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “Don’t speak against the sun.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “Art is the reward of art.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “Tomorrow we believe, but not today.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “I believe it because it is impossible.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “Eggs today are better than chickens tomorrow.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “Beware of what you say, when, and to whom.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “Custom is another law.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “One corrects customs by laughing at them.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “They condemn what they do not comprehend.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “Teach in order to learn.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “Abuse of a right does not invalidate use.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “Consent makes the law.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “Hunger sweetens the beans.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “No one is free who is a slave to his body.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “It will not always be summer.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “Do not take as gold everything that shines like gold.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “Flatterers are the worst type of enemies.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “Who is silent gives consent.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “We may expect the gods to approve virtue, but not to endow us with it.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “The gods were handed down to us, but we created the Caesars ourselves.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “Give to faith that which belongs to faith.” — Proverb, Roman
  • “With lies you may get ahead in the world — but you can never go back.” Russian Proverb, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • Russian proverb: The tallest blade of grass is the first cut by the scythe NYT Oped 2020/02/05, Sherrod Brown
  • “Speak the truth, but leave immediately after.” — Slovenian Proverb, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week.” — Proverb, Spanish
  • “Of that which you see, believe only a little. Of that which you are told, nothing.” — Proverb, Spanish
  • “When the axe came into the woods, many of the trees said, ‘At least the handle is one of us.’” — Proverb, Turkish
  • “Things never go so well that one should have no fear, and never so ill that one should have no hope.” — Proverb, Turkish
  • “Before enlightnment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightnment, chop wood, carry water.” — Proverb, Zen
  • “While walking, examine the walking; while sitting, the sitting…” — Proverb, Zen
  • “It is easier to calm a wild tiger than it is to quiet the mind, which is itself like a drunken monkey that has been bitten by a scorpion.” — Proverb, Zen
  • “If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we’d be too simple to understand it.” — Emerson Pugh
  • “Some men become what they were born for.” — Sheenagh Pugh
  • “The reason people use a crucifix against vampires is that vampires are allergic to bullshit.” — Richard Pryor, 1971.

Q

R

  • “It may be agreeable for certain people to live a retired life in a quiet place away from noise and disturbance. But it is certainly more praiseworthy and courageous to practice Buddhism living among your fellow beings, helping them and being of service to them.” — Walpola Sri Rahula
  • “The world is impermanent. One should constantly remember death.” — Sri Ramakrishna
  • “Many people think that a suicide attempt is a selfish move because the person just does not care about the people left behind. I can tell you that when a person gets to that point, they truly believe that their loved ones will be much better off with them gone. This is mental illness not selfishness. TRUTH: Depression is a terrible disease and seems relentless. A lot of us have been close to that edge, or dealt with family members in a crisis, and some have lost friends and loved ones. Let’s look out for each other and stop sweeping mental illness under the rug. If I don’t see your name, I’ll understand. May I ask my family and friends wherever you might be, to kindly copy and paste this status for one hour to give a moment of support to all those who have family problems, health struggles, job issues, worries of any kind and just need to know that someone cares. Do it for all of us, for nobody is immune. Hope to see this on the walls of all my family and friends just for moral support. I know some will!!! I did it for a friend and you can too. You have to copy and paste this one, no sharing. Thank you.” — Isaac Ramos, perhaps a repost.
  • “Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.” — Ayn Rand
  • “The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.” — Ayn Rand
  • “Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.” — Ayn Rand
  • “The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.” — Ayn Rand
  • “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” — Ayn Rand
  • “No one’s happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy.” — Ayn Rand
  • “I hope that while so many people are out smelling the flowers, someone is taking the time to plant some.” — Herbert Rappaport
  • “If you spend your life trying to be good at everything, you will never be great at anything.” — Tom Rath
  • “Thought is useful when it motivates for action, and a hindrance when it substitutes for action.” — Bill Raeder
  • “Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.” — Ronald Reagan
  • “Surround yourself with great people; delegate authority; get out of the way.” — Ronald Reagan
  • “The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets people to do the greatest things.” — Ronald Reagan
  • “If you’re in a coalition and you’re comfortable, you know it’s not a broad enough coalition.” — Bernice Johnson Reagon
  • “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.” —Ambrose Redmoon
  • “If human progress had been merely a matter of leadership we should be in Utopia today.” — Thomas B. Reed, Forbes
  • “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; In practice, there is.” — Chuck Reid
  • “I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn’t.” — Jules Renard
  • “Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.” — Jules Renard
  • “I need so much time for doing nothing that I have no time for work.” — Pierre Reverdy
  • “Power isn’t control at all—power is strength, and giving that strength to others. A leader isn’t someone who forces others to make him stronger; a leader is someone willing to give his strength to others that they may have the strength to stand on their own.” — Beth Revis
  • “A language is a map of our failures.” — Adrienne Rich
  • “The moment of change is the only poem.” — Adrienne Rich
  • “The tooth fairy teaches children that they can sell body parts for money.” — David Richerby
  • “Do continue to believe that with your feeling and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
  • “You are also the physician who must watch over yourself. But in the course of every illness there are many days in which the physician can do nothing but wait.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
  • “I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
  • “To embody the transcendent is why we are here.” — Sogyal Rinpoche
  • “Nothing beats a good hat, so long as it is removed when indoors.” — Ryan Riordan
  • “People who succeed have momentum. The more they succeed, the more they want to succeed, and the more they find a way to succeed. Similarly, when someone is failing, the tendency is to get on a downward spiral that can even become a self-fulfilling prophecy.” — Tony Robbins
  • “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” — Tony Robbins
  • “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”— Stephen F Roberts.
  • “Each of us is great insofar as we perceive and act on the infinite possibilities which lie undiscovered and unrecognized about us.” — James Harvey Robinson
  • “We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones.” — Francois de La Rochefoucauld
  • “Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.” — John D. Rockefeller
  • “Never do anything you wouldn’t be caught dead doing.” — The Rockefeller Principle, Murphy’s Law
  • “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” — Will Rogers
  • “We’re making progress. Things are getting worse at a slower rate.” — Will Rogers
  • “Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do. Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better.” — Jim Rohn
  • “If you are not willing to risk the usual, you will have to settle for the ordinary.” — Jim Rohn
  • “If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.” — Jim Rohn
  • “We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.” — Jim Rohn
  • “Pain that is not transformed is transmitted.” — Richard Rohr
  • “Cacoethes carpendi.” (A compulsive habit for finding fault) — Roman Saying
  • “To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
  • “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
  • “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
  • “Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual, but you have an obligation to be one.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
  • “You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
  • “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country… By living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level – I mean the wages of a decent living.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt
  • “When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt
  • “that progressive government by its very terms, must be a living and growing thing, that the battle for it is never ending and that if we let up for one single moment or one single year, not merely do we stand still but we fall back in the march of civilization.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt
  • Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.” — Theodore Roosevelt
  • “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” — Theodore Roosevelt
  • “The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” — Theodore Roosevelt
  • It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” — Theodore Roosevelt, “The Man in the Arena”, excerpt from the speech “Citizenship In A Republic” delivered at the Sorbonne, in Paris, France on 23 April, 1910
  • “Progress is not made by taking pride in our present standards but by critically examining these standards, hypothetically setting higher standards and attempting to achieve them.” — Juda L. Rosenstein, Forbes
  • “My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists.” — Jean Rostand
  • “Silence is so accurate.” — Mark Rothko
  • “A fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a man of wit, and a pebble in the hand of a fool.” — Joseph Roux
  • “Great deeds are not mandated—they come from within. Responsibility belongs to those who are willing to accept it.” — Ron F. Rowley
  • “To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try to understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.” — Arundhati Roy
  • “The only dream worth having … is to live while you’re alive and die only when you’re dead.” — Arundhati Roy
  • “In crises that force people to choose among alternative courses of action, most people will choose the worst one possible.” — Rudin’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.” ― Jalaluddin Rumi, The Essential Rumi
  • “By definition, human beings do not see or hear. I broke loose from definition.” — Jelaluddin Rumi
  • “Give up owning things and being somebody. Quit existing.” — Jelaluddin Rumi
  • “If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.” — Donald H. Rumsfeld
  • “What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.” — John Ruskin
  • “The highest reward for a man’s toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it.” — John Ruskin
  • “The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasure themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasure of others.” —  Bertrand Russell (1872—1970), British philosopher.
  • “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” — Bertrand Russell
  • “No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.” — Bertrand Russell
  • “If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.” — Bertrand Russell
  • “The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.” — Bertrand Russell
  • “Matter is less material and the mind less spiritual than is generally supposed. The spiritual separation of physics and psychology, mind and matter, is metaphysically indefensible.” — Bertrand Russell
  • “Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.” — Babe Ruth
  • “Lonely, I left my hut,/ and gazing out over the scene,/ saw everywhere/ the same autumnal evening.” — Ryosen
  • “Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.” — Jim Ryun

S

  • “To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.” — Marquis de Sade.
  • “The desire to create more leaders rather than amass more followers… [is one of the top 5 characteristics of a good leader.]” – Peter Sage
  • “Knowing and not doing is the same as not knowing.” — Peter Sage
  • “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” — Carl Sagan
  • “The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.” ― Carl Sagan
  • “Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” — Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World
  • On the Earth as imagined from the Voyager 1 spacecraft, as it exited the solar system in 1990. Earth was nearly 4 billion miles away in the image: “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you have ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our job and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” — Carl Sagan, 1934-1996
  • “Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.” — Carl Sagan
  • “But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” — Carl Sagan
  • “Put it down!” — Seung Sahn
  • “Throwing away Zen mind is correct Zen mind. Only keep the question, ‘What is the best way of helping other people?’” — Seung Sahn
  • “Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections, but instantly set about remedying them—every day begin the task anew.” — Saint Francis De Sales
  • “The mark of a great man is one who knows when to set aside the important things in order to accomplish the vital ones.” — Brandon Sanderson
  • “I respectfully say to those who wish to be enlightened, do not waste your time by night or day.” — The Sandokai
  • “Each thing has its own intrinsic value.” — The Sandokai
  • “Having failed to distinguish thoughts from things, we then fail to distinguish words from thoughts. We think that if we can label a thing we have understood it.” — Maha Sthavira Sangarakshita
  • “To know what we do not know is the beginning of wisdom.” — Maha Sthavira Sangarakshita
  • “Sanity is madness put to good use.” — Santayana’s First Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.” ― George Santayana
  • “A genius! For 37 years I’ve practised fourteen hours a day, and now they call me a genius!” — Pablo Sarasota, Spanish Violinist
  • “Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know… One who doesn’t try cannot fail and become wise.” — William Saroyan
  • “When I am alone the flowers are really seen.” — May Sarton
  • “I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.” — Sartre
  • “To eat is to appropriate by destruction.” — Sartre
  • “Commitment is an act, not a word.” — Jean-Paul Sartre
  • “The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.” — Vidal Sassoon
  • “To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.” — Marilyn vos Savant
  • “Gain is delusion, loss is enlightenment.” — Kodo Sawaki-Roshi
  • Unplugged“Drugged and unpluggedFrom the American Dream.Rottin’ and forgottenFeeling forced to scheme. In each of these cellsThere’s a separate hellAnd each bears a taleOf a nation that failed.” – Christopher J. Scarver
  • “Uninformed people commonly go to prison for making uninformed decisions, which are the only kind of decisions uninformed people are prepared to make.” — Christopher J. Scarver
  • “The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” — Edwin Schlossberg
  • “Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.” — Arthur Schopenhauer
  • “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” — Arthur Schopenhauer
  • “If you put a spoonful of wine in a barrel full of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a spoonful of sewage in a barrel full of wine, you get sewage.” — Schopenhauer’s Law of Entropy, Murphy’s Law
  • “Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes; this is partly because it gets unobstructed hold of the hearer’s mind without his being distracted by secondary thoughts, and partly because he feels that here he is not being corrupted or deceived by the arts of rhetoric, but that the whole effect is got from the thing itself.” — Arthur Schopenhauer, translated from German, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “Indecision is the basis for flexibility.” — Schroeder’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “What would you attempt to do if you knew you would not fail?” — Robert Schuller
  • “Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.” — Charles M. Schulz
  • “Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, you reach your destiny.” — Carl Schurz
  • “Three men were laying brick. The first was asked: ‘What are you doing?’ He answered: ‘Laying some brick.’ The second man was asked: ‘What are you working for?’ He answered: ‘Five dollars a day.’ The third man was asked: ‘What are you doing?’ He answered: ‘I am helping to build a great cathedral.’ Which man are you?” — Charles M. Schwab, Forbes
  • “The worst thing I can be is the same as everybody else.” — Arnold Schwarzenegger
  • “The mind always fails first, not the body. The secret is to make your mind work for you, not against you.” — Arnold Schwarzenegger
  • “Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.” — Albert Schweitzer
  • “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!” — Sir Walter Scott, “Marmion”
  • “Teach self-denial and make its practice pleasure, and you can create for the world a destiny more sublime than ever issued from the brain of the wildest dreamer.” — Sir Walter Scott
  • “Why not go out on a limb? Isn’t that where the fruit is?” – Frank Scully
  • “Try out your ideas by visualizing them in action.” – David Seabury
  • “Human kind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.” — Chief Seattle, 1854
  • “Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason.” — Jerry Seinfeld
  • “Timendi causa est nescire.” (Ignorance is the cause of fear.) — Lucius Annaeus Seneca
  • “What you think of yourself is much more important than what others think of you.” — Seneca
  • “Begin at once to live, and count each day as a separate life.” — Seneca
  • “It is not goodness to be better than the worst.” — Seneca
  • “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” — Seneca the Younger
  • “He who can be forced has not learned how to die.” — Seneca the Younger
  • “There must be more to life than having everything!” — Maurice Sendak
  • “Happiness is where we find it, but very rarely where we seek it.” — J. Petit Senn
  • “If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.” — Sent-ts’an, c. 700 C.E.
  • “There are three kinds of disciples: those who impart Zen to others, those who maintain the temples and shrines, and then there are the rice bags and clothes hangers.” — Nyogen Senzaki
  • “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
  • “Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment.” — Dr. Seuss
  • “Whenever you see a successful person, you only see the public glories, never the private sacrifices to reach them.” — Vaibhav Shah
  • “Nothing is good or evil, thinking makes it so.” — Shakespeare
  • “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night of the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” — William Shakespeare
  • “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.” — William Shakespeare
  • “My friends tell me I have an intimacy problem. But they don’t really know me.” — Garry Shandling
  • “The only way to impede sex trafficking is to end demand—to stop buyers from buying.” — Shared Hope International
  • “When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.” — George Bernard Shaw
  • “The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.” — George Bernard Shaw
  • “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” — George Bernard Shaw
  • “A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.” — George Bernard Shaw
  • “Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.” — George Bernard Shaw
  • “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.” — George Bernard Shaw
  • “Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.” — George Bernard Shaw
  • “Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.” — George Bernard Shaw
  • “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” — John A. Shedd
  • “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” — Percy Shelley
  • “You never regret being kind.” — Nicole Shepherd
  • “War is cruelty. There’s no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” — William Tecumseh Sherman.
  • “No matter what road I travel, I’m going home.” — Shinso
  • “If you are aware of your weaknesses and are constantly learning, your potential is virtually limitless.” — Jay Sidhu
  • “To a brave man, good and bad luck are like his left and right hand. He uses both.” — St. Catherine of Siena
  • “Love poetry is the only type of poetry that can be put into practical use.” — Charles Simic
  • “What information consumes is rather obvious; it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” — Herbert Simon, Nobel laureate
  • “Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.” — Lee Simonson
  • “I never apologize. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way I am.” — Homer Simpson
  • “If something goes wrong… blame the guy who can’t speak English.” — Homer Simpson
  • “The three little sentences that will get you through life: 1) Cover for me. 2) Oh, good idea, Boss! 3) It was like that when I got here.” — Homer Simpson
  • “The true law of the race is progress and development. Whenever civilization pauses in the march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian.” — William Simms, Forbes
  • “The best revenge is massive success.” — Frank Sinatra
  • “Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.” — Frank Sinatra
  • “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” — Sinclair’s Rule, Murphy’s Law
  • “I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.” — Edith Sitwell
  • “The changes in new models should be so attractive as to create dissatisfaction with past models.” — Sloan’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principles contain it or stand against it.” — Jane Smiley
  • “There are two things to aim at in life: first to get what you want; and after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.” — Logan Pearsall Smith
  • “You better stand for something, or you’ll fall for anything.” — Rick Smith
  • “To do anything in this world worth doing, we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger; but jump in, and scramble through as well as we can.” — Sydney Smith
  • “Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.” — Sydney Smith
  • “There is equal credit in being criticized by fools than praised by the wise.” — Smith’s Rule, Murphy’s Law
  • “It was seeing a continuing litany of lies from senior officials to Congress—and therefore the American people—and the realization that that Congress, specifically the Gang of Eight, wholly supported the lies that compelled me to act. Seeing someone in the position of James Clapper—the Director of National Intelligence—baldly lying to the public without repercussion is the evidence of a subverted democracy. The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.” — Snowden
  • “Arguing you don’t care about privacy because you’ve got nothing to hide is no different than saying that you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” — Snowden
  • “The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority.” — Ralph W. Sockman
  • “The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.” — Socrates
  • “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” — Socrates
  • “It seems strange enough to me that a herdsman who lets his cattle decrease and go to the bad should not admit that he is a poor cowherd; but stranger still that a statesman when he causes the citizens to decrease and go to the bad, should feel no shame nor think himself a poor statesman.” — Socrates
  • “By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher… and that is a good thing for any man.” — Socrates
  • “The unexamined life is not worth living.” — Socrates
  • “True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.” — Socrates
  • “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” — Socrates
  • “You get in life what you have the courage to ask for.” — Nancy D. Solomon
  • On Hoffman’s death: “He did not die from an ‘overdose of heroin — he died from heroin. We should stop implying that if he’d just taken the proper amount then everything would have been fine.’” — Aaron Sorkin
  • “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. Obstacles can’t stop you, and other people can’t stop you, these barriers are temporary, they come and go. Why is why, over the course of a lifetime, the only barriers that can stop you,… ‘Is You’. So don’t give up, because sometimes you have to journey through ‘Hell On Earth.’” — Mark Sorrendino
  • “The only people with whom you should try to get even are those who have helped you.” — John E. Southard
  • “There are only two ways of telling the complete truth–anonymously and posthumously.” — Thomas Sowell
  • “I won’t rule out voting for either a republican or a democrat… But I can pretty safely rule out ever getting political information or opinions from a meme.” — Alan Spackman
  • “I’m not an asshole I just don’t give a fuck a lot.” — Alan Spackman
  • “The hardest part of being an opinionated person is remembering that most of the time, no one asked, and almost all of the time, no one cares.” — Alan Spackman
  • “This isn’t a popular belief, but I don’t think that all opinions need to be respected, or even regarded. Opinions that have absolutely no logical or factual support are not worth listening to, and they definitley aren’t worth accomodating. Logic should always trump sensationalism. Facts should always beat out anger. Humanity should always matter more than tradition.” — Alan Spackman
  • “Reading political news feels like watching a bad horror movie where the idiotic protagonists are making such stupid decisions in lieu of the more obvious solutions right in front of them. You keep wanting to yell at the screen to point out the escape route right in front of them, but you know they can’t hear you and you’re pretty sure that they are just too stupid to actually do any better even if they could hear you.” — Alan Spackman
  • “Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.” — Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology
  • “Rarely have I seen a situation where doing less than the other guy is a good strategy.” — Jimmy Spithill
  • “A man who has studied at many metaphysical schools came to Nasrudin. … ‘I hope that you will accept me, or at least tell me your ideas,’ he said, ‘because I have spent so much of my time in studying at these schools.’/ ‘Alas!’ said Nasrudin, ‘you have studied the teachers and the teachings. What should have happened is that the teachers and their teachings should have studied you.’” — Sufi Wisdom, from The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin
  • “The first time Nasrudin addressed the congregation, he asked: ‘Oh people, do you know what I have come to tell you?’ The crowd answered: ‘No.’ Nasrudin replied: ‘Then you are too ignorant to understand what I was going to say.’ But the people invited him back to the mosque, and when Nasrudin asked if they knew what he was going to tell them, they said: ‘Yes!’/‘Fine,’ Nasrudin replied, ‘then I don’t need to waste your time.’ Once again the people invited him back, and this time when Nasrudin asked if they knew what he was going to say, half the people said no and half said yes./ ‘Good,’ said Nasrudin. ‘Then those who know should tell those who don’t, and I will leave.’” — Sufi Story
  • “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” — Joseph Stalin
  • “There is no traffic jam along the extra mile.” — Roger Staubach
  • “Do not think that what your thoughts dwell on does not matter. Your thoughts are making you.” —Bishop Steere
  • “Silent gratitude isn’t very much to anyone.” — Gertrude Stein
  • “When you get there, there isn’t any there there.” — Gertrude Stein
  • “Some people make things happen, some people watch things happen, and some ask what happened.” — Casey Stengel
  • “There is a great difference between worry and concern. A worried person sees a problem, and a concerned person solves a problem.” — Harold Stephens
  • “’Tis known by the name of perseverance in a good cause, and obstinacy in a bad one.” — Laurence Sterne
  • “After the final no, there comes a yes, and on that yes the future world depends.” — Wallace Stevens
  • “My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.” — Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
  • “The cruelest lies are often told in silence.” — Adlai Stevenson, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
  • “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
  • “To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
  • “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.” — Robert L. Stevenson
  • “Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
  • “[I] may be many things, my emotions may be [uncontrollable],  [I] may make unconvential and stupid decisions, but [I] have never pretended to be anything other than myself and for that [I] cannot be ashamed.” — Lizzie Stewart
  • “I find that when you have a real interest in life and a curious life, that sleep is not the most important thing.” — Martha Stewart
  • “If two corollaries of Murphy’s Law contradict each other, the one with the greater potential for damage takes precedence.” — Stewart’s Fifth Murphy Corollary, Murphy’s Law
  • “The only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust.” — Stimson
  • “There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights.” — Bram Stoker, Dracula
  • “Age is a high price to pay for maturity.” — Stoppard’s Rule, Murphy’s Law
  • “The greater the dignity of the angels in the celestial hierarchy, the fewer words they use; so that the most elevated of all pronounces only a single syllable.” — Igor Stravinsky
  • “If you control yourself, you control life. You should not give in to every little problem. Be open, be determined, never play the cripple, but control yourself. Be the master of your pain and problems. Force yourself to be cheerfully faithful. Then you will find strength you did not know you had. Command yourself so that you can master yourself. Do something every day that you do not like to do, and avoid doing something every day that you would gladly have done. That is the secret of every great personality.” — Glauben und Handeln. Ein Bekenntnis der jungen Nation by Helmut Stellrecht
  • “After you have heard two eyewitness accounts of an auto accident you begin to worry about history.” — Strong’s Observation, Murphy’s Law
  • “If your philosophy doesn’t grow corn, I don’t want to hear about it.” — Sun Bear
  • “Mind, Buddha, and sentient beings are not three different things.” — Avatamsaka Sutra
  • “As this illusory body vanishes, This illusory mind also vanishes. As this illusory mind vanishes, Illusory sense objects also vanish. As illusory sense objects vanish, This illusory vanishing vanishes. As this illusory vanishing vanishes, That which is not illusory does not vanish.” — The Complete Enlightenment Sutra
  • “Zen teaches nothing; it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach, it points.” — D.T. Suzuki
  • “Zen has no business with ideas.” — D.T. Suzuki
  • “Unless we agree to suffer we cannot be free from suffering.” — D. T. Suzuki
  • “Among the most remarkable features characterizing Zen we find these: spirituality, directness of expression, disregard of form or conventionalism, and frequently an almost wanton delight in going astray from respectability.” — D.T. Suzuki
  • “To Zen, time and eternity are one.” — D. T. Suzuki
  • “We can think of the soul not as an entity but as a principle.” — D. T. Suzuki
  • “The ultimate standpoint of Zen … is that we have been led astray through ignorance to find a split in our own being, that there was from the very beginning no need for a struggle between the finite and the infinite, that the peace we are seeking so eagerly has been there all the time.” — D. T. Suzuki
  • “When the sun first comes up and shines on you, your shadow is big behind you. But as you continue to sit, your shadow gets smaller and smaller, until finally it’s just Buddha sitting there. Just the sitting Buddha. You and he are exactly the same.” — Hoitsu Suzuki
  • “For Zen students a weed is a treasure.” — Shunryu Suzuki
  • “No teaching could be more direct than just to sit down.” — Shunryu Suzuki
  • “Just to be ourselves.” — Shunryu Suzuki on Zen Sayings
  • “To have some deep feeling about Buddhism is not the point; we just do what we should do, like eating supper and going to bed. This is Buddhism.” — Shunryu Suzuki
  • “What we call ‘I’ is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and exhale.” — Shunryu Suzuki
  • “If you do things because you should do them, then this is real practice.” — Shunryu Suzuki
  • “It is always with you, whether you realize it or not—Buddha nature is always with you.” — Shunryu Suzuki
  • “Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine.” — Shunryu Suzuki
  • “Observe things as it is.” — Shunryu Suzuki
  • “The point we emphasize is strong confidence in our original nature.” — Shunryu Suzuki
  • “We should find perfect existence through imperfect existence.” — Shunryu Suzuki
  • “A master who cannot bow to his disciple cannot bow to Buddha.” — Shunryu Suzuki
  • “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” — Shunryu Suzuki
  • In the beginner’s mind there is no thought, “I have attained something.” All self-centered ideas limit our vast mind… The beginner’s mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless… Then we are always true to ourselves, in sympathy with all beings, and can actually practice. Whatever we see is changing, losing its balance. The reason everything looks beautiful is because it is out of balance, but its background is always in perfect harmony. This is how everything exists in the realm of Buddha nature… Without realizing the background of Buddha-nature, everything appears to be in the form of suffering. …Suffering itself is how we live, and how we extend our life. To stop your mind does not mean to stop the activities of mind. It means that your mind pervades your whole body. When your practice is calm and ordinary, everyday life itself is enlightenment. If you do not lose yourself, then even though you have difficulty, there is actually no problem whatsoever… When your life is always a part of your surroundings – in other words, when you are called back to yourself, in the present moment – then there is no problem. When you start to wander about in some delusion which is something apart from yourself, then your surroundings are not real anymore, and your mind is not real anymore… Once you are in the midst of delusion, there is no end to delusion… To solve the problem is to be part of it, to be one with it. We do not seek for something besides ourselves. We should find the truth in this world, through our difficulties, through our suffering. Mindfulness is, at the same time, wisdom. …It is the readiness of the mind that is wisdom. Our true nature is beyond our conscious experience. …firm conviction in the original emptiness of your mind is the most important thing in your practice… Even though you think you are in delusion, your pure mind is there. To realize pure mind in your delusion is practice. If you have pure mind… the delusion will vanish. …This is to attain enlightenment before you realize it. True nature is watching water. When you say, “My zazen is very poor”, here you have true nature, but … do not realize it. Nothing exists but momentarily in its present form and color. One thing flows into another and cannot be grasped. The true purpose is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. This is to put everything under control in its widest sense. Zen practice is to open up our small mind. So concentrating is just an aid to help you realize “big mind”, or the mind that is everything. That everything is included within your mind is the essence of mind… Even though waves arise, the essence of your mind is pure… Waves are the practice of the water… Big mind and small mind are one… As your mind does not expect anything from the outside, it is always filled. A mind with waves in it is not a disturbed mind, but actually an amplified one… In one sense our experiences coming by one by one are always fresh and new, but in another sense they are nothing but a continuous unfolding of the one big mind… With big mind we accept each of our experiences as if recognizing the face we see in a mirror as our own… with this imperturbable composure of big mind we practice zazen. — Shunryu Suzuki-roshi (1905-71), Frank Florianz from various sources in 1981 and succeeding years. http://viewoftheblue.com/frankspage/zenquo.html
  • “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” Svent-Gyorgyi’s Axiom, Murphy’s Law
  • “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it…” — Jonathan Swift, 1710, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “I cannot give you a formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is: Try to please everybody.” — Herbert Bayard Swope
  • “To quarrel with a drunk is to wrong a man who is not even there.” — Publilius Syrus
  • “Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time … serenity, that nothing is.” — Thomas Szasz
  • “If you really want the key to success, start by doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing.” — Brad Szollose

T

  • “The gods aid the stronger.” — Tacitus
  • “Will you stop for a while, stop trying to pull yourself together for some clear ‘meaning’ —some momentary summary? No one can have poetry or dances, prayers or climaxes all day; the ordinary blankness of little dramatic consciousness is good for the health sometimes.” — John Tagliabue
  • “If you shut your door to all errors, truth will be shut out.” — Rabindranath Tagore
  • “The mind should be nowhere in particular.” — Takuan
  • “The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.” — Andrew S. Tanenbaum
  • “Although gold dust is precious, when it gets in your eyes, it obstructs your vision.” — Hsi-Tang
  • “God prefers kind atheists over hateful Christians.” — Pastor Tom Tate, Rose City Park United Methodist Church
  • “You just do it. You force yourself to get up. You force yourself to put one foot in front of the other, and God damn it, you refuse to let it get to you. You fight. You cry. You curse. Then you go about the business of living. That’s how I’ve done it. There’s no other way.” — Elizabeth Taylor
  • “The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they’re going to have some pretty annoying virtues.” — Liz Taylor
  • “So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their times come they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.” — Tecumseh, Shawnee Nation
  • “Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.” — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
  • “There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it reluctantly.” — Terence
  • “When we are healthy, we all have advice for those who are sick.” — Terence
  • “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.” — Mother Teresa
  • “All peoples everywhere should have FREE energy sources. … Electric Power is everywhere present in unlimited quantities and can drive the world’s machinery without the need for coal, oil or gas.” — Nikola Tesla
  • “A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes in Nature. In no way can we get such an overwhelming idea of the grandeur of Nature than when we consider, that in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy, throughout the Infinite, the forces are in a perfect balance, and hence the energy of a single thought may determine the motion of a universe.” — Nikola Tesla
  • 98. From ‘The Ancient Sage’IF thou would’st hear the Nameless, and wilt dive Into the Temple-cave of thine own self,There, brooding by the central altar, thouMay’st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice,By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise,                                               5As if thou knewest, tho’ thou canst not know;For Knowledge is the swallow on the lakeThat sees and stirs the surface-shadow thereBut never yet hath dipt into the abysm,The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within                                            10The blue of sky and sea, the green of earth,And in the million-millionth of a grainWhich cleft and cleft again for evermore,And ever vanishing, never vanishes,To me, my son, more mystic than myself,                                               15Or even than the Nameless is to me.And when thou sendest thy free soul thro’ heaven,Nor understandest bound nor boundlessness,Thou seest the Nameless of the hundred names.And if the Nameless should withdraw from all                                       20Thy frailty counts most real, all thy worldMight vanish like thy shadow in the dark.‘And since—from when this earth began—The Nameless never cameAmong us, never spake with man,                                                           25And never named the Name’—Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone,                                       30Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:Nor yet that thou art mortal—nay my son,Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,Am not thyself in converse with thyself,For nothing worthy proving can be proven,                                             35Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,And cling to Faith beyond the forms of FaithShe reels not in the storm of warring words,She brightens at the clash of ‘Yes’ and ‘No’,                                           40She sees the Best that glimmers thro’ the Worst,She feels the Sun is hid but for a night,She spies the summer thro’ the winter bud,She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,She hears the lark within the songless egg, She finds the fountain where they wail’d ‘Mirage’!”  — Alfred, Lord Tennyson  (1809–1892)
  • “Do you know that one of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas.” –Margaret Thatcher
  • “Consensus: the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: ‘I stand for consensus?’” — Margaret Thatcher
  • “You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.” — Margaret Thatcher
  • “The sound conclusion is that what is ‘right’ is the same everywhere: the interest of the stronger party.” — Thrasymachus
  • “Dear lord, if it be within your great wisdom and mercy, please grant us the strength and courage to beat the hell out of the central high muskrats and- excuse me, coach.We’re in the middle of a prayer.-Do you think we should be bothering god over a basketball game?This is important.- The other team’s praying, too. So our god is stronger than their god?There’s only one god, Solomon.-Am I the only one seeing a conflict of interest here?” — Third Rock from the Sun
  • “The average adult has one ovary and one testicle.” — Evan Thomas
  • “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” — Howard Thurman
  • “We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.” — Frank Tibolt
  • “Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.” — Henrik Tikkanen
  • “Try a thing you haven’t done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time, to figure out whether you like it or not.” — Virgil Garnett Thomson
  • “A man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance. So if you now number yourself among the disenchanted, then you have no choice but to accept things as they are, or to seriously seek something else. But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life. But you say, ‘I don’t know where to look; I don’t know what to look for.’” — Hunter S. Thompson
  • “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow! What a ride!’” — Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway
  • “Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.” — Hunter S. Thompson
  • If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. Henry David Thoreau
  • “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.” — Henry David Thoreau
  • Never look back unless you are planning to go that way. Henry David Thoreau
  • Every oak tree started out as a couple of nuts who stood their ground. Henry David Thoreau
  • As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives. Henry David Thoreau
  • Life isn’t about finding yourself; it’s about creating yourself. So live the life you imagined. Henry David Thoreau
  • The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. Henry David Thoreau
  • Simplify your life. Don’t waste the years struggling for things that are unimportant. Don’t burden yourself with possessions. Keep your needs and wants simple and enjoy what you have. Don’t destroy your peace of mind by looking back, worrying about the past. Live in the present. Simplify! Henry David Thoreau
  • be yourself- not your idea of what you think somebody else’s idea of yourself should be.Henry David Thoreau
  • Time is like a handful of sand – the tighter you grasp it, the faster it runs through your fingers. Henry David Thoreau
  • Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify. Henry David Thoreau
  • I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. Henry David Thoreau
  • You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this. Henry David Thoreau
  • “It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?” — Henry David Thoreau
  • “This world is but canvas to our imaginations”. — Henry David Thoreau
  • “None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.” — Henry David Thoreau
  • “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.” — Henry David Thoreau
  • “In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.” — Henry David Thoreau
  • “Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.” — Henry David Thoreau
  • “If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.” –Henry David Thoreau
  • “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.” — Henry David Thoreau
  • “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.” — Henry David Thoreau
  • “Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.” — Henry David Thoreau
  • “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” — Henry David Thoreau
  • “What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?” –Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” 1862
  • “When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.” — Henry David Thoreau
  • “A gun gives you the body, not the bird.” — Henry David Thoreau
  • “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.” — Henry David Thoreau
  • “The universe is not user friendly.” — Throop’s Axiom, Murphy’s Law
  • “The society which separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.” — Thucydides
  • “Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.” — James Thurber
  • “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” — Leo Tolstoy
  • “I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific.” — Lily Tomlin
  • “The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.” — Lily Tomlin
  • “At any moment, you have the ability to dramatically change any area of your life, or follow your heart’s deepest desires. It’s yours to create, any way you want it.” — Craig Townsend
  • “No matter what is going on in our life, there remains a part of us that is silent, powerful, wise and untouched by the external noise.” — Craig Townsend
  • “You are totally unique. There has never been anyone like you, ever before – and there will never be anyone like you ever again. So do it your way – because no-one else can.” — Craig Townsend
  • “Most stress comes from thinking of the past or the future. The present moment is always the most powerful time in your life.” — Craig Townsend
  • “Your mind can just as easily show you an ocean of abundant opportunities, as it can the opposite. It just depends what you focus upon.” — Craig Townsend
  • “Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.” — Brian Tracy
  • “Education… has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.” — G. M. Trevelyan
  • “I’ve been trying for some time to develop a lifestyle that doesn’t require my presence.” — Gary Trudeau
  • “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” — Harry Truman
  • “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a Republican. But I repeat myself.” — Harry Truman
  • “Republicans approve of the American farmer, but they are willing to help him go broke. They stand four-square for the American home — but not for housing. They are strong for labor — but they are stronger for restricting labor’s rights. They favor minimum wage — the smaller the minimum wage the better. They endorse educational opportunity for all — but they won’t spend money for teachers or for schools. They think modern medical care and hospitals are fine — for people who can afford them. They consider electrical power a great blessing — but only when the private power companies get their rake-off. They think American standard of living is a fine thing — so long as it doesn’t spread to all the people. And they admire of Government of the United States so much that they would like to buy it.” — Harry S. Truman
  • “‘Much as it pays to emphasize the positive, there are times when the only choice is confrontation.’ #TheArtofTheDeal” — Donald Trump
  • “Hope and fear cannot alter the seasons.” — Chogyam Trungpa
  • “We tend to wear suits of armor one over the other … We hope we will not have to completely undress.” — Chogyam Trungpa
  • “In fact, it is dubious that one can even speak of ‘experiencing’ reality since this would imply a separation between the experiencer and the experience.” — Chogyam Trungpa
  • “Anyone can be a millionaire, but it takes a smart man to keep it.” — James Tucker?
  • “I’m not saying I’m going to rule the world or I’m going to change the world, but I guarantee you that I will spark the brain that will change the world.” Tupac Shakur
  • “If I only had a little humility, I’d be perfect.” — Ted Turner
  • “In love, there are only the pursues, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.” — Sam Turvey
  • “As soon as you have made a thought, laugh at it.” — Lao-Tsu
  • “A Tree that is unbending is easily broken.” — Lao-Tsu
  • “Stop thinking, and end your problems.” — Lao-Tsu
  • “Therefore the sage keeps to the deed that consists in taking no action and practices the teaching that uses no words.” — Lao-Tsu
  • “He who conquers others is strong, he who conquers himself is mighty.” — Lao Tsu
  • “An integral being knows without going, sees without looking, and accomplishes without doing.” — Lao Tsu
  • “There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns.” — Sun Tsu, Art of Warfare
  • “No ruler should put troops into the field merely to gratify his own spleen; no general should fight a battle simply out of pique.” — Sun Tsu, Art of Warfare
  • ”Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.”—Mark Twain
  • “I can live for 2 months on a good compliment.” — Mark Twain
  • “Conservatism is the blind and fear-filled worship of dead radicals.” — Mark Twain
  • “If you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always got.” — Mark Twain
  • “All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence — and then success is sure.” — Mark Twain
  • “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” — Mark Twain
  • “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear–not absence of fear.” — Mark Twain
  • “Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” — Mark Twain
  • “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.” — Mark Twain
  • “In the beginning of a change, the Patriot is a scarce man – brave, hated, and scorned. When his cause succeeds, however, the timid join him; for then, it costs nothing to be a Patriot.” — Mark Twain
  • “I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit.”    — Mark Twain.
  • “During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for 800 years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry.” — Mark Twain.
  • “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” — Mark Twain
  • “Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.” — Mark Twain
  • “Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.” — Mark Twain
  • “To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did; I ought to know because I’ve done it a thousand times.” — Mark Twain
  • “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” — Mark Twain
  • “If you eat a frog first thing in the morning, the rest of your day will be wonderful.” — Mark Twain
    • corollary: “If you have to eat two frogs, eat the bigger one first.” — Unknown
  • “If you have to eat a frog, don’t look at it for too long.” — Mark Twain
  • “If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.” — Mark Twain
  • “It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.” — Mark Twain
  • “Never put off until tomorrow, what you can put off until the day after tomorrow.” — Mark Twain
  • “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” — Mark Twain
  • “It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.” — Mark Twain
  • “I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” — Mark Twain
  • “Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.” — Mark Twain
  • “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” — Mark Twain
  • “What does it mean to succeed? Most people see success as being rich and famous or powerful and influential. Others see it as being at the top of their profession and standing out from the rest. The wise see success in a more personal way; they see it as achieving the goals they have set for themselves, and then feeling pride and satisfaction in their accomplishments. True success is felt in the heart, not measured by money and power. So be true to yourself and achieve the goals you set. For success is reaching those goals and feeling proud of what you have accomplished.” — Tim Tweedie
  • “‘slut’ is attacking women for our right to say yes. ‘friend zone’ is attacking women for our right to say no.” — Twitter, @plantandmineral
  • “Telling black folks to be ‘respectful’ to police to avoid dying is like telling women to dress ‘appropriately’ to avoid rape.” — Twitter, @ImNoRoleModel
  • “When you blame a poor person for not getting a better job, you accept that while their job is necessary, whoever does it should be poor.” Twitter, @existentialcomics
  • “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” — Mike Tyson
  • “I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday, and lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson
  • “One thing is for certain: the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson
  • “In whatever you choose to do, do it because it’s hard, not because it’s easy. Math and physics and astrophysics are hard. For every hard thing you accomplish, fewer other people are out there doing the same thing as you. That’s what doing something hard means. And in the limit of this, everyone beats a path to your door because you’re the only one around who understands the impossible concept or who solves the unsolvable problem.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson
  • “The reason kids cheat is because the school values grades more than kids value learning.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson
  • “It’s odd that the word ‘atheist’ even exist. I don’t play golf, is there a word for non-golf players?” — Neil DeGrasse Tyson
  • “The purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish, and when the fish is caught the trap is forgotten. The purpose of a rabbit snare is to catch rabbits, and when the rabbits are caught the snare is forgotten. The purpose of words is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words? He is the one I would like to talk to.” — Chuang-tzu, circa 369-286 BC
  • “Perfect happiness is the absence of happiness.” — Chuang-Tzu
  • “Happiness is the absence of striving for happiness.” — Chang-Tzu
  • “To be truly ignorant, be content with your own knowledge.” —  Chuang-tzu, circa 369-286 BC
  • “Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.” — Chuang-Tzu
  • “Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.” — Lao-Tze
  • “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” — Lao Tzu
  • “Opportunities multiply as they are seized.” — Sun Tzu

U

  • “To grasp Zen, you must experience it. …You should withdraw inwardly and search for the ground upon which you stand; thereby you will find out what Truth is.” — Ummon [Yun-men Wen-yen] (?-849)
  • “I don’t ask you about yesterday. Nor do I ask you about the next day. Can you say something.” — Ummon
  • “To fall into habit is to cease to be.” — Miguel De Unamuno
  • “Talented, passionate people don’t want to follow you to create a better future; they want to co-create it with you.” — Unknown, Bill at Google, Scientific American Mind
  • “Should everything be questioned?” — Unknown
  • “You cant run the walk, you have to walk the walk.” — Unknown
  • “Some people will not tolerate such emotional honesty in communication. They would rather defend their dishonesty on the grounds that it might hurt others. Therefore, having rationalized their phoniness into nobility, they settle for superficial relationships.” — Author Unknown, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “Beware of the half truth. You may have gotten hold of the wrong half.” — Unknown, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “Into the forest I go to lose my mind and find my soul.”– muir
  • “The point of life lies in the question of whether or not you are just living to die. We all are trying to find a place where we are happy, be it by earning money, gaining fame, or getting married. Even a person who commits suicide is trying to be happy, thinking that it will end their misery. The meaning of life is to grow physically, mentally, and spiritually. It’s about traveling down different paths and making decisions. You will make some mistakes, as all of us do. We learn from them and grow stronger. Life is about being true to yourself, standing alone sometimes when you really believe in something and not fearing retribution. It means loving those around you, helping where you can, being known as a person that can be trusted and just doing the best you can. If we didn’t feel sadness we could never experience happiness; if we didn’t get angry on occasion we would never know peace; and if we didn’t trust our hearts we’d never know love./ A person who cannot find contentment, cannot find peace. A person, who cannot find peace, cannot find fulfillment. Prosperity, power, and popularity are not the solutions to human suffering, because you may have them all and still feel incomplete. Striving to be the best can be our purpose for now as we live our day to day lives, but being the best should not include becoming famous, because if you are not trying to be the best, but trying to be known as the best, that is failure to be true to yourself, and you will eventually become dissatisfied. So the time you spend bothered by what could or should be is time wasted in imagination and fantasy. Finding your purpose therefore will be determined by your ability to appreciate every moment and make the most positive use of it. Because for every breath of life you take, you come one breath closer to death. So live right, do good, and always enjoy the existence you have now. For if you awaken and realize that this was all a dream, then make it a sweet one.” — Unknown, piecemeal of a variety of quotes appearing in different forums as I attempted to find the original
  • “You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.” — Unknown
  • “You cant lose what you dont have, poverty is economic security.” — Unknown
  • “Life doesn’t happen to you, it happens for you, and it is always presenting you with the lessons you most need to learn in order to be the fullest, most positive expression of who you really are.” — Unknown
  • “Close the doors that cause you the pain, anger, and suffering so you can open the ones that bring you love, acceptance, and inner peace.” — Unknown
  • “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.” — Unknown
  • “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” — Unknown
  • “All great changes are preceded by chaos.” — Unknown
  • “Life is way too short to spend another day at war with yourself.” — Unknown
  • “I admire someone who has been through a lot and still keeps their head up.” — Unknown
  • “Life is about balance. Be kind, but don’t let people abuse you. Trust, but don’t be deceived. Be content, but never stop improving yourself.” — Unknown
  • “‘Choice. Chance. Change.’ You must make a ‘choice’ to take a ‘chance’ or your life will never ‘change’.” — Unknown
  • “Love when you’re ready, not when you’re lonely.” — Unknown
  • “A good life is when you assume nothing, do more, need less, smile often, dream big, laugh a lot, and realize how blessed you are.” — Unknown
  • “Don’t let your struggle become your identity.” — Unknown
  • “The bird who dares to fall is the bird who learns to fly.” — Unknown
  • “When everything feels like an uphill struggle, just think of the view from the top.” — Unknown
  • “You attract people by the qualities you display. You keep them by the qualities you possess.” — Unknown
  • “Three simple rules in life. 1. If you do not go after what you want, you’ll never have it. 2. If you do not ask, the answer will always be no. 3. If you do not step forward, you will always be in the same place.” — Unknown
  • “Remember, people will judge you by your actions, not your intentions.” — Unknown
  • “People aren’t against you; they are for themselves.” — Unknown
  • “The most dangerous risk of all — the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.” — Unknown
  • “When you realize that no one really knows what they are doing and that everyone is doing the best they can according to their own level of consciousness, life gets a lot easier.” — Unknown
  • “What you do today is important, because you are sacrificing a day of your life for it.” — Unknown
  • “Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is. The only problem in your life is your mind’s resistance to life as it unfolds.” — Unknown
  • “No matter how long you have traveled in the wrong direction, you can always turn around.” — Unknown
  • “We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.” — Unknown
  • “Every conversation you have, including your best friend, start off saying ‘this is off the record.’” —  Unknown
  • “Everything happens for a reason, and that reason is usually physics.” — Unknown
  • “Telling someone with a mental illness to snap out of it is like telling someone who is deaf to listen harder.” — Unknown
  • “Go to work, send your kids to school, follow fashion, act normal, walk on the pavement, watch T.V., save for your old age, obey the law. Repeat after me: I am free.” — Unknown
  • “The world’s 10 most powerful 2 letter worlds: ‘If it is to be it is up to me.’” — Unknown, dougsandler.com
  • “Don’t cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.” — Unknown
  • “Why do we kill people who kill people to show killing people is wrong?” — Unknown
  • “The true measure of a man is seen in what he does behind closed doors.”  — Unknown
  • “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.” — Unknown
  • “Never let idealism go, never lose it.” — Unknown
  • “If the process of forgiveness is to be real, the one seeking to forgive must identify themselves with the behavior of the one who has done the injury just as thought it could have been their own. One must also rid themselves of the negative attitudes and postures toward such situations. Without doing so, one will be kept miserable. By just looking at it from the transgressor’s point of view, the forgiver has no ability to identify the feelings that are making them miserable, resentment, indignation, self pity, and more. Even though these feelings may be thought of as thoroughly justifiable, they are still harmful to the person’s own well being.” — Unknown (Maybe from a book on alcoholism?)
  • “All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers.” — Unknown
  • “When it’s all said and done, will you have said more than you’ve done?” — Unknown
  • “If happiness was the national currency, what kind of work would make you rich?” — Unknown
  • “If you could offer a newborn child only one piece of advice, what would it be?” — Unknown
  • “What’s something you know you do differently than most people?” — Unknown
  • “The courage to be great lies deep within each of us.” — Unknown
  • “Good luck is the result of good planning.” — Unknown
  • “If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.” — Unknown
  • “I want freedom from freedom, which ironically is accountability.” — Unknown
  • “The Two Rules for Ultimate Success in Life     1) Never tell everything you know     2)                                                    ” — Unknown, Murphy’s Law
  • “Pain is your friend; it is your ally. Pain reminds you to finish the job and get the hell home. Pain tells you when you have been seriously wounded. And you know what the best thing about pain is? It tells you you’re not dead yet.” — Unknown
  • “Dare to see the world not as it is, but how it could be.” — Unknown
  • “Champions in any field have made a habit of doing what others find boring or uncomfortable.” — Unknown
  • “Do not wait for your ship to come in – swim out to it.” – Unknown
  • “If you want to achieve greatness stop asking for permission.” – Unknown
  • “Life is like a camera. Just focus on what’s important, capture the good times, develop from the negatives, and if things don’t turn out – take another shot.” – Unknown
  • “Always focus on the long term, because the short term is by definition short.” — Unknown, ESPN article on Gurly
  • “I [will] refuse to believe that corporations are people until Texas executes one.” — Unknown, DemocraticUnderground’s Earth First.
  • “People may say you are going the wrong way, when it is simply a path of your own.” – Unknown
  • “The line between confidence and arrogance is very thin.” – Unknown
  • “The secret to achieve true success is found in your daily routine.” – Unknown
  • “Worry is a think stream of fear which, if encouraged, becomes a wide channel into which all other thoughts flow. Assume an attitude of positive expectancy!” – Unknown
  • “When the milk’s gone bad, its gone forever…” – Unknown
  • “Beware the quiet man. For while others speak, he watches. And while others act, he plans. And when they finally rest, he strikes.” — Unknown
  • “If you are willing to do more than you are paid to do, eventually you will be paid to do more than you do.” – Unknown
  • “You cant lose what you don’t have, poverty is economic security.” – Unknown
  • “Your altitude is determined by your attitude.” – Unknown
  • “It never gets easier, you just go faster.” — Unknown
  • “To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” – Unknown
  • “Trust because you are willing to accept the risk, not because it’s safe or certain.” – Unknown
  • “Good things come to people who wait, but better things come to those who go out and get them.” – Unknown
  • “If you do what you always did, you will get what you always got.” – Unknown
  • “Successful entrepreneurs are givers and not takers of positive energy.” – Unknown
  • “The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” – Unknown
  • “Don’t raise your voice, improve your argument.” – Unknown
  • “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” – Unknown
  • “No masterpiece was ever created by a lazy artist.” – Unknown
  • “Blessed are those who can give without remembering and take without forgetting.” – Unknown
  • “Do one thing every day that scares you.” – Unknown
  • “What’s the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable.” – Unknown
  • “Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent.” – Unknown
  • “Knowledge is being aware of what you can do. Wisdom is knowing when not to do it.” – Unknown
  • “Your problem isn’t the problem. Your reaction is the problem.” – Unknown
  • “I sure would like to meet whoever that person named Anonymous was, because they sure did say some pretty insightful things.” – Unknown
  • “You can do anything, but not everything.” – Unknown
  • “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” – Unknown
  • “History is just one damn thing after another.” – Unknown
  • “If the lessons of history teach us anything it is that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.” – Unknown
  • “You know what’s funny? The human brain named itself” – Unknown
  • “Those who follow the crowd are quickly lost in it.” – Unknown
  • “No individual raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood.” – Unknown
  • “The real issue is not whether to grow, it is how to grow and for what purpose.” – Unknown
  • The only significant difference between a kitten and a tiger is that a tiger is bigger.” — Unknown
  • Ignorance is a self-inflicted misfortune. — Unknown
  • “Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.” — Unknown
  • “Morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told, religion is doing what you are told regardless of what is right.” — Unknown
  • “We can’t live without eating, but we don’t live to eat.” — Unknown
  • “If you’re not where you think you should be at this particular time, it has nothing to do with the system or your competition, but everything to do with the fact that you’re not making the sacrifice. Greatness is a lot of little things done well – day after day after day. So stop running from your pain, but chase it and let it be a part of your prize.” — Unknown
  • “Maybe god doesn’t believe in you” — Unknown
  • “Q: ‘Why do you hit yourself on the head with that hammer?’ A: ‘Because it feels so good when I stop!’” — Unknown
  • “What one fool can do, another can.” — Unknown
  • “So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.” — Unknown
  • “Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours.” — Unknown
  • “Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.” — Unknown
  • “Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people.” — Unknown
  • “Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.” — Unknown
  • “Show respect to all people and grovel to none.” — Unknown
  • “When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living.” — Unknown
  • “If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself.” — Unknown
  • “A civilization is born stoic, but it dies epicurean.” — Unknown
  • “How much deeper into darkness do you need to go to arrive at light?” — Unknown
  • “You who are vivative, love life, and have no fears of death,Know what it is to live, or to die, and are ready for either,Willing to go, or willing to stay and meet the consequences,Having no fear of wrath, or fire, or annihilation,Attached to life, here and elsewhere, now and forever, Desiring it for the love, pleasure, and blessing it may bring,Loving it for these luxuries upon any terms.” – Unknown
  • “Kinky is using a feather — perverted is using the whole chicken.” — Unknown
  • “Carpe diem, cras.” — Unknown
  • “Happiness is not the absence of problems, but the willingness to deal with them joyfully.” — Unknown
  • “Don’t depend too much on anyone in this world. Because even your shadow leaves you when you’re in darkness.” — Unknown
  • “People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.” — Unknown
  • “Always have a plan and believe in it. Learn how to listen and you will prosper even from those who talk badly.” — Unknown
  • “Where everything seems uncertain, only one thing is definite. You’ll always be my friend, beyond words, beyond time and beyond distance.” — Unknown
  • “Truth is not defined by how many people believe something. Ask. Question. Think. Decide – for yourself.” — Unknown
  • “Beware of false knowledge, it is more dangerous than ignorance.” — Unknown
  • “Nothing is easy when you are lazy.” — Unknown
  • “Sometimes you don’t realize your own strength until you come face t o face with your greatest weakness.” — Unknown
  • “The wise man doesn’t give the right answers, he poses the right questions.” — Unknown
  • “Simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.” — Unknown
  • “Don’t Wait! Start on your dreams, your impulses, your longings, your special occasions today. Because this is your moment.” — Unknown
  • “Little minds have little worries, Big minds have no time for worries.” — Unknown
  • “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” — Unknown
  • “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you can not do.” — Unknown
  • “Forgiveness is not always easy. At times, it feels more painful than the wound we suffered, to forgive the one that inflicted it. And yet, there is no peace without forgiveness.” — Unknown
  • “We must remember that one determined person can make a significant difference, and that a small group of determined people can change the course of history.” — Unknown
  • “Remember to be aware in this moment right now. Being aware is seeing everything around you, hearing everything around you, feeling everything around you, and being completely focused on what you are doing right now. When you remember to be aware, you are aware immediately. And the best part is that as you become more aware, your life will increase and expand with more wonderful things!” — Unknown
  • “THINK BIG: There is no passion to be found playing small — in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living. Focus on the future, rather than the past. You can mold a future you choose. Be optimistic, dream and take action. Don’t allow anyone to talk you out of your passions. No matter how crazy people in your life think you are, your passions belong to you. Do not be afraid to follow your dreams. Life has no pause button, dreams have no expiration date, and time has no holiday. So don’t waste a single moment in your life, today will never come again.” — Unknown
  • “Take care of your thoughts when you are alone, and take care of your words when you are with people.” — Unknown
  • “You are what you do, not what you say you will do. Let the world know you as you are, not as you think you should be, because sooner or later, if you are posing, too much ego will kill your talent.” — Unknown
  • “Stop waiting on someone to acknowledge your gifting to validate you.” — Unknown
  • “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry.” — Unknown
  • “The secret of patience is doing something else in the meantime.” — Unknown
  • “The point of life is to keep on trying no matter what, never let failures define you.” — Unknown
  • “Never try and teach a pig to think … It doesn’t work, and will only upset the pig.” — Unknown
  • “Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better.” — Unknown
  • “Opportunity may knock only once, but temptation leans on the doorbell.” — Unknown
  • “Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.” or “Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.” — Unknown
  • “There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.” — Unknown
  • “Be kind to unkind people – they need it the most.” — Unknown
  • “Some people have nothing very well organized. And some people have nothing, very well organized.” — Unknown
  • “What if this weren’t a hypothetical question?” — Unknown
  • “Discipline is just choosing between what you want now and what you want most.” — Unknown
  • “When an ordinary man attains knowledge he is a sage; when a sage attains understanding he is an ordinary man.” — Unknown
  • “Everyone is entitled to be stupid, but some abuse the privilege.” — Unknown
  • “The richest man is not he who has the most, but he who needs the least.” — Unknown
  • “When I die, I want to be thrown out of an airplane wearing a Superman costume.” — Unknown
  • “When I die, I want my last words to be: ‘I left a million dollars under the …’” — Unknown
  • “It’s always easier to make a point than it is to make a difference.” — Unknown, Hand Hug (Facebook page)
  • “Never try to fit in when you are meant to stand out.” — Unknown
  • “Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.” — Unknown
  • “In reaping for so long where we have not sown, perhaps we have forgotten the need to sow.” — Unknown
  • “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” — Unknown
  • “What if ai failed the Turing test so we wouldn’t know how smart it is…” — Unknown
  • “Once in one’s life, for one mortal moment, one must make a grab for immortality; if not, one has not lived.” — Unknown
  • “Why can’t atheists solve exponential equations? Because they don’t believe in higher powers.” — Unknown
  • “Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden…” — Unknown
  • “We accept the love we think we deserve.” — Unknown
  • “If there is a god, he will ask to beg my forgiveness.” — Unknown, carved into a concentration camp cell by a jewish prisoner.
  • “Living up to your own expectations can be the hardest part of life.” — Unknown
  • “Just keep walking.” — Unknown
  • “You really do need to know when to
 hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.” — Unknown
  • “The road to becoming a gentleman begins with character.” — Unknown
  • “Your style is defined by what makes you feel most comfortable.” — Unknown
  • “Your outlook on life defines how you react to those life changing moments.” — Unknown
  • “The quality of your friends always matters more than the quantity.” — Unknown
  • “Everyday people shape and influence your life. Find the right people and you’ll be a better person for it.” — Unknown
  • “Ties are meant to complement a wardrobe, it should never be a main focal point.” — Unknown
  • “When you’re with someone you love, make sure in that moment they know they’re the center of your world.” — Unknown
  • “Never let the sun catch you in bed.” — Unknown
  • “America invariably does the right thing after exhausting all other possibilities.” — Unknown
  • “Sometimes you reach a point where you have to accept that in life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate…” — Unknown
  • “All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.” — Unknown
  • “Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time.” — Unknown
  • “I’ll never forget what a wise man once told me. He said, ‘Robert, never…’ no, wait, he said, ‘Robert, always carry a litter bag in your car. It doesn’t take up much room, and when it’s full, you can just toss it out the window.’” — Unknown
  • “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.” — Unknown, refrigerator magnet
  • “When you are tired, lie down.” — Unknown
  • “We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.” — Unknown
  • “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” — Unknown
  • “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” — Unknown
  • “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” — Unknown
  • “Sex is natural, but not if it’s done right.” — Unknown
  • “When you are in it up to your ears, keep your mouth shut.” — Unknown
  • “It’s only premarital sex if you’re going to get married.” — Unknown
  • “I once knew a woman who offered her honor, so I honored her offer. And all night long I was on her and off her.” — Unknown
  • “Atheists aren’t those who don’t believe in got, but those who are annoyed that other people do.” — Unknown
  • “I wrote a to do list. Now I can procrastinate more efficiently.” — Unknown
  • “Treading on thin ice is safer than trying to walk on water.” — Unknown
  • “Choose any two: 1) Enjoy your job.2) Work within the law.3) Make lots of money.” — Unknown
  • “Announcing ‘I’m offended’ is basically telling the world you can’t control your own emotions, so everyone else should do it for you.” — Unknown
  • “If I’ve ever offended you, just know from the bottom of my heart that I really don’t give a shit.” — Unknown
  • “The zealot doesn’t mind being refuted, he can invent new justifications. What is a fatal to the zealot? Not being taken seriously.” — Unknown
  • “Wouldn’t you say suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem? I’m a Buddhist, I’d say suicide is a temporary solution to a permanent problem.” — Unknown
  • “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely; God is all-powerful. Draw your own conclusions.” — Unknown
  • “Morals are for people not intelligent enough to have ethics.” — Unknown
  • “No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well.” — Unknown
  • “The world is NOT any worse; it is just that the news coverage is better.” — Unknown
  • “Nothing is quite so annoying as to have someone go right on talking when you’re interrupting.” — Unknown
  • “Desire is the starting point of all achievements.” — Unknown
  • “Take time to laugh. It is the music of the soul. Take time to think. It is the source of power. Take time to play. It is the source of perpetual youth. Take time to read. It is the fountain of wisdom. Take time to pray. It is the greatest power on Earth. Take time to love and be loved. It is a God-given privilege. Take time to be friendly. It is the road to happiness. Take time to give. It is too short a day to be selfish. Take time to work. It is the price of success.” — Unknown
  • “Don’t lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset.” — Unknown
  • “Don’t spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” — Unknown
  • “Give thanks: ‘He who can give thanks for little will always find he has enough.’” — Unknown
  • “Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.” — Unknown
  • “Don’t talk too much when a wise man is talking, or when a stupid man is listening.” — Unknown
  • “Be content with what you have, rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” — Unknown
  • “When I Honor myself, I am confident of my being and I am gentle with myself.” — Unknown
  • “Hard times don’t create heroes. It is during the hard times when the ‘hero’ within us is revealed.” — Unknown
  • “All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them. Believe in yourself. Set important goals. Take action on those goals.” — Unknown
  • “Once we accept our limits, we can go beyond them.” — Unknown
  • “Peace is not something you wish for; it’s something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away.” — Unknown
  • “There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” — Unknown
  • “Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.” — Unknown
  • “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.” — Unknown
  • “The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.” — Unknown
  • “What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.” — Unknown
  • “When you find peace within yourself, you become the kind of person who can live at peace with others.” — Unknown
  • “Success comes from knowing that you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.” — Unknown
  • “If you want to feel rich, just count all of the things you have that money can’t buy.” — Unknown
  • “With realization of one’s own potential and self-confidence in one’s ability, one can build a better world.” — Unknown
  • “Learn to admit your mistakes before someone exaggerates the story.” — Unknown
  • “Regrets are the tears of choices not made and of good deeds left undone.” — Unknown
  • “You can’t live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you [and in a way in which they don’t feel a need to.]” — Unknown, me?
  • “Google Before You Tweet is the new Think Before You Speak.” — Unknown
  • “A questioner wants the truth. A doubter wants to be told there isn’t any such thing.” — Unknown
  • “I used to think it would be cool to be able to read other people’s mind. Then I joined Facebook and got over that.” — Unknown
  • “Aiming for the least common denominator sometimes causes division by zero.” — Unknown
  • “No amount of advance planning will ever replace dumb luck.” — Unknown
  • “If it wasn’t for the last minute, would anything ever get done?” — Unknown
  • “The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was.” — Unknown
  • “Nothing is fool-proof to a sufficiently talented fool.” — Unknown
  • “I have just run into your car in the parking lot. Several people are watching me and they think I am writing down my name and number…” — Unknown
  • “It doesn’t matter what you do, it only matters what you say you’ve done and what you’re going to do.” — Unknown
  • “If you are good, you will be assigned all the work. If you are really good, you will get out of it.” — Unknown
  • “At work, the authority of a person is inversely proportional to the number of pens that person is carrying.” — Unknown
  • “Following the rules will not get the job done.” Corollary “Getting the job done is no excuse for not following the rules.” — Unknown
  • “My mind not only wanders, sometimes it leaves completely.” — Unknown
  • “It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.” — Unknown
  • “Quidam, autem, dicunt mortem esse dulciorem quam vitam.” (Certain men, however, say that death is sweeter than life.”  — Unknown
  • “A family of solutions of Einstein’s field equations exists such that a set of comoving observers see the same history of the Universe; for each of them, the Universe appears isotropic.” — Unknown
  • “Good friends don’t let you do stupid things alone.” — Unknown
  • “He was a quiet man, and in the end, as always, it came down to timing. It’s the only thing that matters.” — Unknown, movie
  • “A white horse is not a horse.” — Unknown
  • “Don’t worry about anything, do something about it.” — Unknown
  • “Most ghosts are white, and most stick figures are black…” — Unknown
  • “Literally literally means figuratively.” — unknown
  • “Persistence breeds success.” — unknown
  • “Therefore, when [the world] is observed with an eye freed from itself and from the Earth, myself is no longer necessarily myself (ware mo kanarazushimo warenarazu) and external things can also be myself. The heaven is no longer necessarily the heaven, the Earth should also be the heaven.” — Unknown
  • “I am a creationist. I believe man created god.” — Unknown, bumper sticker
  • “[One of the most destructive things we have been let to believe] — That you should settle, because not having something is worse than having something mediocre.” — Unknown
  • “Atheism: the arrogant belief that the entire billion-galaxy universe was not created for us.” — Unknown
  • “If atheism is a religion, then: Silence is a language. Dead is a state of mind. Hunger is a gourmet meal. Health is a disease. Bald is a hair colour.” — Unknown
  • “It’s not whether you win or lose; it’s how you place the blame.” — Unknown
  • “Belief in heaven is very difficult without a greedy desire for it: All scams need a hook.” — Unknown
  • “Some people are wise, and some are otherwise.” — Unknown
  • “God put me on earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I am so far behind, I will live forever.” — Unknown
  • “He who fears not death is immortal. He who feels no pain is relentless.” — Unknown
  • “The Earth is degenerating these days. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer mind their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.” — Unknown, Assyrian Stone Tablet, c.2800BCE?
  • “Although it is said that faith can move mountains, experience has shown that dynamite works better.” — Unknown
  • “Thank God I’m an atheist.” — Unknown
  • “Militant Agnostic: I Don’t Know And You Don’t Either.” — Unknown, bumper sticker
  • “You never see headlines like ‘15000 atheists in London rioted after a blank sheet of paper was found on a cartoonist’s desk.’” — Unknown
  • “Knock Knock/ ‘Who’s There?’/ The guy that finished second./ ‘The guy that came in second who?/ ‘Exactly.” — Unknown
  • “Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there’s footprints on the moon.” — Unknown
  • “The person who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” — Unknown
  • “Put most simply: Do what is right, let the consequence follow.” — Unknown
  • “Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream. The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready. It is hard work, but there is happiness in it.” — Unknown
  • “There’s no need to have a plan B because it just distracts from plan A.” — Unknown
  • “May the change in momentum be with you.” — Unknown
  • “Life is what happens when we are busy making other plans.” — Unknown
  • “Nothing anyone has ever told you can diminish your value as a human being.” — Unknown
  • “Nerve cells that fire together, wire together.” — Unknown
  • “May your actions speak louder than your words. May your life preach louder than your lips. May your success be your noise in the end.” — Unknown
  • “Life is based on perception; perception is based on opinion; opinion is based on thought; thought comes from the mind. Change your mind, change your life.” — Unknown
  • “The reductionist aims to ‘cut nature at its joints, like a good butcher.’ The whole can be understood only by breaking it apart, dissecting reality until it dissolves. This is all we are: parts, acronyms, atoms.” — Unknown, Proust was a neuroscientist
  • “I am amazed, O wall, that you have not collapsed and fallen, since you must bear the tedious stupidities of so many scrawlers.” — Unknown, Graffiti on a wall of Pompeii.
  • “Jehovah witness: ‘But sir, don’t you want eternal life? —Yeah, but not if it’s gonna be with a bunch of Jehovah Witnesses, I mean what kind of heaven is that?’    — Classic ‘how to get rid of Jehovah Witness’ trick.” — Unknown
  • “If the Bible proves that God exists then comic books prove the existence of Superman.” — Unknown
  • “You never know the true meaning of pacman till you are underaged driving around after curfew with an expired license plate and a broken taillight.” — Unknown
  • “Argue not with individuals but with ideas.” — Unknown
  • “You are not required to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm.” — Unknown
  • “Do it to do it, not to have done it.” — unknown
  • “The meaning of life is to make life meaningful.”— Unknown
  • “‘Don’t interrupt if an introvert does get to talking. Listen closely. Being overlooked is a really big issue for introverts,’ Laney says. Introverts are unlikely to repeat themselves; they will not risk making the same mistake twice.” — Unknown
  • “‘Strike at the enemy at a time and place or in a manner for which he is unprepared,’ reads one US Air Force formulation of the old military doctrine of surprise.” — Unnamed
  • “Unlike food and drugs, for which there is a limit to consumption, there are no physical limitations to internet porn consumption. The brain’s natural satiation mechanisms are not activated, unless one climaxes. Even then, the user can click to something more exciting to become aroused again.” — Unnamed, Your Brain on Porn
  • “Addiction isn’t damage—it’s pathological learning.” — Unnamed, Your Brain on Porn
  • “I’m the oldest of three kids. I’m older than my little brother by 2.5 years and my little sister by 9.5. When I was about fourteen or so, arguing with my dad in private about something I don’t remember, he, being the second-oldest of eight kids, told me: ‘Any decision you make in this household, you make three times. Once when you make it, once when your brother makes the same decision after watching you do it, and once when your sister makes the same decision after watching you and your brother do it. How you treat your brother will tell him how he can treat your sister; and how you treat your sister tells her how she will expect to be treated for the rest of her life, even as far as her future boyfriends.’ That kinda shook me up and made me rethink my role as the oldest child; I started taking my responsibilities as the role model a lot more seriously after that.” — Unnamed, Mutericator, Knowable
  • I met a person who was in a wheelchair. He related a story about how a person once asked if it was difficult to be confined to a wheelchair. He responded, ‘I’m not confined to my wheelchair – I am liberated by it. If it wasn’t for my wheelchair, I would be bed-bound and never able to leave my room or house.’” — Unnamed, RedheadBanshee, Knowable
  • “If you are not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you are not really hungry.” — Unnamed, Northcoaster, Knowable
  • “Social constructionism is thus consistent with feminists theory which understands patriarchy as instilling a set of normative expectations that lead women to regulate their own behavior (Foucault, 1978; Bartky, 1990; Butler, 1995).” — Unnamed, Do Internalized Feminine Norms Depress Girls’ STEM Attitudes & Participation? 
  • “A man without a vision for his future, always returns to his past.” — Unnamed, _EGYPT_, thegoodvibe.co
  • “An intelligent person does not need the promise of heaven to see the merit of good deeds.” — Unnamed, Facebook group We Fucking Love Atheism
  • “Happiness depends on ourselves. Maybe it’s not about the happy ending, maybe it’s about the story. The purpose of life is a life of purpose. The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra. Happiness is a direction not a destination. Thank you for existing. Be happy, be free, believe, forever young. You know my name, not my story. You have heard what I’ve done, but not what I’ve been through. Love is like glass, looks so lovely, but it’s easy to shatter. Every day is special, so make the most of it. You could get a life-ending illness tomorrow so make the most of every day. Life is only bad if you make it bad. Love is rare, life is strange, nothing lasts and people change. Life is a game for everyone but love is the only prize. If someone loves you then they wouldn’t let you slip away no matter how hard the situation is. Remember that life is full of ups and downs, without the downs the ups don’t mean anything. I’m waiting to fall in love with someone I can open my heart to. Love is not about who you can see spending your future with it’s about who you can’t see spending your life without. There is no reason to cry, because I’ll know you’ll be by my side.” — Unnamed, Girl who recently died…, likes.com
  • “You never really know the true quality of someone’s character until the road gets rocky.” — Unnamed, Kushandwizdom
  • “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear.” — Unnamed, Toni Morrison’s friend
  • “Our Founding fathers got it. They understood that nothing good in life–religious freedom, economic freedom, freedom of speech–can be enjoyed if people fear for their physical safety.” #TimeToGetTough 2012/05/01 — Unnamed
  • “Great innovation leaders see their role not as visionaries but as social architects. This does not mean they lack vision. To the contrary, many are quite visionary. But because they understand how innovation really happens, they reject that leadership ideal. They understand that their job is to set the stage, not to perform on it.” — Unnamed, Scientific American Mind article
  • “When you realize that by changing your perspective, big things can be seen as little things, it becomes much harder to worry about anything.” — Unnamed, PBH Network
  • “If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.” — Unnamed, PBH Network
  • “The narrow path twists ever upward past lands of vast deep experience until through the majestic portals he passes into immortality.” (Anonymous, circa 1985) WL Epstein, The Journal of Investigative Dermatology
  • “Choose early and clearly. And put all your effort in it, switching weakens your chance of fixing the problem. Switching takes time and wastes valuable resources 1 part is better than 2.” — Unnamed, Buddhaline.net
  • “Two small jumps are sometimes better than one big leap.” — Unnamed, Fortune Cookie
  • “The courage to be great lies deep within each of us.” — Unnamed, Fortune Cookie
  • “Endurance and persistence will be rewarded.” — Unnamed, Fortune Cookie
  • “Newton believed both in God and that the Bible was a revelation from God. He also believed that God was not bound by time as are humans, allowing Him to see the “end from the beginning”. (If he could see end to beginning, then the end is already there and there is destiny) Thus, to use Newton’s own words, he was convinced that “the holy Prophecies” of the Scripture are nothing else than “histories of things to come” (Yahuda MS 1.1, folio 16 recto). At the same time, biblical prophecy is written in highly symbolic language that requires skilled interpretation. Newton rose to this challenge as he attempted to discover the future of the world in the words of the prophets.” “Newton’s famous concepts of absolute space and time were fundamentally based on his notion of God’s omnipresence and eternal duration. It is also clear from his private manuscripts that Newton believed the ideal natural philosopher would also be a priest of nature. For Newton, there was no impermeable barrier between religion and what we now call science. Throughout his long life, Newton laboured to discover God’s truth – whether in Nature or Scripture. Although he recognized disciplinary distinctions, Newton believed that truth was one. Thus, Newton’s study of Nature and Scripture were in a certain sense two halves of a whole: the discovery of the mind of God.” — Unnamed, http://www.isaac-newton.org/update.html
  • “Everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something, and has lost something.” — Unnamed, PBH Network
  • “You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day, unless you’re too busy, then you should sit for an hour.” — Unnamed, PBH Network
  • “If Tetris taught me anything it’s that errors pile up and accomplishments disappear.” — Unnamed, PBH Network
  • “Male privilege is ‘I have a boyfriend’ being the only thing that can actually stop someone from hitting on you because they respect another male-bodied person more than they respect your rejection/lack of interest.” — Unnamed,The Sociological Cinema
  • One who knows the Self puts death to death. — The Upanishads
  • “It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.” — John Updike, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html

V

  • “Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable.” — Theodore N. Vail
  • “The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.” — Paul Valery
  • “A poem is never finished, only abandoned” – Valery’s Rule of Poetry, Murphy’s Law
  • “An optimist stays up to see the New Year in. A pessimist waits to make sure the old one leaves.” — Bill Vaughan
  • “We learn something every day, and lots of times it’s that what we learned the day before was wrong.” — Bill Vaughan
  • “When a thought is too weak to be expressed simply, simply drop it.” — Marquis de Vauvenargues
  • “Invention is the mother of necessity.” — Thorstein Veblen
  • “It is better to get nowhere fast than to get nowhere slowly.” — Ver der Byl’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “The people with whom you work reflect your own attitude. If you are suspicious, unfriendly and condescending, you will find these unlovely traits echoed all about you. But if you are on your best behavior, you will bring out the best in the persons with whom you are going to spend most of your working hours.” — Beatrice Vincent
  • “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” — Leonardo da Vinci
  • “Make your work to be in keeping with your purpose.” — Leonardo da Vinci
  • “I am not evil… I am simply a primate trying to do the least amount of damage and experience the most happiness on this rock until I am recycled back into the universe.” — Michael Vinciguerra
  • “Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life—think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success.” — Swami Vivekananda
  • “The first sign of your becoming religious is that you are becoming cheerful.” — Swami Vivekananda
  • “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” — Voltaire
  • “It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.” — Voltaire
  • “A long dispute means both parties are wrong.” — Voltaire
  • “The more I read, the more I meditate; and the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.” — Voltaire
  • “I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of regards or punishments after I’m dead.” —  Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007).
  • “Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.” — Kurt Vonnegut
  • “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” — Kurt Vonnegut, “Mother Night”
  • Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. — Kurt Vonnegut
  • “There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.” — Kurt Vonnegut

W

  • “By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong.” —  Charles Wadsworth
  • “After all, what is reality anyway? Nothin’ but a collective hunch….a primitive method of crowd control that got out of hand.…I made some studies, and reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it.” — Jane Wagner, “Trudy the Bag Lady” performed by Lily Tomlin
  • “The only limits on human achievement are self-imposed.” — Dr. Denis Waitley
  • “The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don’t define them, or ever seriously consider them as believable or achievable. Winners can tell you where they are going, what they plan to do along the way, and who will be sharing the adventure with them.” — Denis Waitley
  • “The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well.” — Horace Walpole
  • “Success at the highest level comes down to one question: Can you decide that your happiness can come from someone else’s success?” — Bill Walton
  • “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” — William Arthur Ward
  • “The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” — William Arthur Ward
  • “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” — William Arthur Ward
  • “Progressiveness is looking forward intelligently, looking within critically, and moving on incessantly.” — Waldo Pondray Warren, Forbes
  • “I’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.” — Andy Warhol
  • “You measure the size of the accomplishment by the obstacles you had to overcome to reach your goals.” — Booker T. Washington
  • “Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life, as by the obstacles one has overcome trying to succeed.” — Booker T. Washington
  • “You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.” — Booker T. Washington
  • “The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” — George Washington, Letter to Morocco during the Barbary Wars
  • “It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible.” — George Washington
  • “Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak, and esteem to all.” — George Washington.
  • “It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition he would abuse it.” — George Washington
  • “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence, I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens, the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.” — Washington
  • “It’s funny how the people who think they know the most about you, really know nothing.” — Shawn Wassgren
  • “Ultimately, to support the death penalty, you must support the killing of innocent people from time to time.”  —  Shawn Wassgren’s political science professor
  • “We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.” — John Waters
  • “The way to succeed is to double your error rate.” — Thomas J. Watson
  • “If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.” — Thomas J. Watson
  • “Good is the enemy of great. Never be satisfied with anything, never be happy with just good. Every single day you need to do something to make yourself better than everybody else. You can’t go to your workout everyday and just go through the motions and be happy with what you’re doing. Every single day we need to be the best we can possibly be, cause that’s our style. You represent the city of Houston, we’re gonna work our asses off to be a great football team.” — J.J. Watt
  • “The very best thing you can do for the whole world is to make the most of yourself.” — Wallace Wattles
  • “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth” — Alan Watts
  • “Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.” — Alan Watts
  • “The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.” — Simone Weil
  • “Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn’t have to do it himself.” — Weiler’s Law, Murphy’s Law
  • “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” — Steven Weinberg
  • “The ego, being a flimsy construction and being bound up in time and space, will have to fall apart. The ego, in fact, continuously falls apart and has to be reinforced by vanity, greed, jealousy, and evil.” — Janwillem Van Der Wetering
  • Q: “So, why do you write these strong female characters?” A: “Because you’re still asking me that question.” — Joss Whedon
  • “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” — E. B. White
  • “Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.” — E. B. White
  • “The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.” — Alfred North Whitehead
  • “First things first, but not necessarily in that order.” — Dr. Who’s Rule, Murphy’s Law
  • “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” — Elie Wiesel
  • “There is no chance, no destiny, no fate, that can hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul.” — Ella Wheeler Wilcox
  • “True friends stab you in the front.” — Oscar Wilde
  • “I can resist everything except temptation.” — Oscar Wilde
  • “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” — Oscar Wilde
  • “I am not young enough to know everything.” — Oscar Wilde
  • “Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.” — Oscar Wilde
  • “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.” — Oscar Wilde
  • “What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.” — Oscar Wilde
  • “Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.” — Oscar Wilde
  • “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.” — Oscar Wilde
  • “Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.” — Oscar Wilde
  • “I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.” — Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories
  • “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.” — Oscar Wilde
  • “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.” — Oscar Wilde
  • “There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” — Oscar Wilde
  • “I think it’s very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not defined by another person.” — Oscar Wilde
  • “We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.” — Robert Wilensky
  • “The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.” — George F. Will
  • “Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.” — George Will
  • “He said, ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.’” — Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit
  • “You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.” — Robin Williams
  • “I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy. Because they know what it’s like to feel absolutely worthless and they don’t want anybody else to feel like that.” — Robin Williams
  • “We tell lies when we are afraid… afraid of what we don’t know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.” — Tad Williams, http://www.quotegarden.com/honesty.html
  • “Meaning doesn’t lie in things. Meaning lies in us. When we attach value to things that aren’t love—the money, the car, the house, the prestige—we are loving things that can’t love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless. Money, of itself, means nothing. Material things, of themselves, mean nothing. It’s not that they’re bad. It’s that they’re nothing.” — Marianne Williamson, “A Return To Love”
  • “The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man…only five hundred.” — Meredith Willson
  • “A conservative is someone who makes no changes and consults his grandmother when in doubt.” — Woodrow Wilson
  • “Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance.” — Woodrow Wilson
  • “I believe that the only courage anybody ever needs is the courage to follow your own dreams.” — Oprah Winfrey
  • “Be thankful for what you have, you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you do not have, you will never have enough.” — Oprah Winfrey
  • “Upon meeting a friend in the corridor: ‘Tell me, why do people always say that it was natural for men to assume that the sun went around the earth rather than the earth was rotating?’His friend said: ‘Well, obviously, because it just looks as if the sun is going around the earth.’To which the philosopher replied: ‘Well, what would it look like if it had looked as if the earth were rotating?’” — Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
  • “In order for a proposition to be capable of being true, it must also be capable of being false.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • “A cult is a religion with no political power.” — Tom Wolfe
  • “The most powerful leadership tool you have is your own personal example.” — John Wooden
  • “Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out.” — John Wooden
  • “Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.” — John R. Wooden, Murphy’s Law
  • “Talent is God-given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful.” — John Wooden
  • “Average leaders raise the bar on themselves; good leaders raise the bar for others; great leaders inspire others to raise their own bar.” — Orrin Woodward
  • “Late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” — William Wordsworth
  • “Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change.” — Frank Lloyd Wright
  • “[In the] age of information, [it is] harder to educate people.” — Michael Wright
  • “I think the difference between me and most people is I don’t care if I’m happy, I care if I’m useful. Just a thought I keep having.” – Michael Wright
  • “On radicals: ‘Incrementalism is sin. Perfection is the enemy of the better.’” — Michael Wright
  • “Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.” — Stephen Wright
  • “On the other hand, you have different fingers.” — Steven Wright.
  • “It’s just cheaper to be pro-active and pay for the healthcare and feed the kids for those people who are crippled, crazy, addicted, or just plain too stupid to take care of themselves.” — James Wygant
  • “Constant resistance is the only route to personal freedom.” — James Wygant

X

Y

  • “In one shrill cry/ the pheasant has swallowed/ the broad field.” — Yamei
  • “When you are deluded and full of doubt, even a thousand books of scripture are not enough. When you have realized understanding, even one word is too much.” — Fen-yang
  • “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” — William Butler Yeats
  • “Do or not do. There is no try.” — Yoda
  • “Best advice I ever received: Listen to good advice, don’t listen to bad advice.” — CTY
  • “People who say they are perfectionists are liars. The world is too imperfect of a place to be the living space of as many perfectionists as is commonly purported. By concept, any true perfectionist could and would only ever claim that they were a part time perfectionist at their best.” — CTY
  • “When life gives you lemons, and you don’t have sugar or water, find a way to enjoy lemons as they are.” — CTY
  • “If god gives you lemons, make lemonade. If god gives you limes, drink some tequila.” — CTY
  • “It’s funny, regardless of skin color, everyone looks the same when the sun is shining directly in your eyes.” — CTY
  • “An artist enables appreciation.” — CTY
  • “Luck is the ability to hang on to the good things in life that grace us daily.” — CTY
  • “Every game is a zero sum game. The ones that most obviously are also seem to be the most immaterial. What does that say about our vision?” — CTY
  • “No one can tell you how to see the world, but if you listen to them try, you may be able to see how they do.” — CTY
  • “Why hit the breaks when you can let off the gas?” — CTY
  • “One of the hardest things in life to learn is to what extent you will allow yourself to hurt another for the sake of self-interest.” — CTY
  • “Assumptions are in direct relation to limited perspective.” — CTY
  • “Change is hard for a frequent procrastinator.” — CTY
  • “When it is damn near already too late a person has little option of what to do next. They can either accept the system and it’s right to stay in place, deny the system while acknowledging it will stay in place, or deny the system and try to fight it and fix it. Trying is all a person can do when things get to be too late. Give up completely or retain hope and work harder and faster. The former is cerebral suicide, the latter is the only possibility for a truly contented life.” — CTY
  • “We don’t need to be on the same side; we just need to be on the same page.” — CT
  • “Is the optimist half asleep or half awake?” — CTY
  • “Apathy could never change the world, and even if it did, no one would care.” — CTY
  • “If we had one instinct above all else,/ One no other life possessed,/ One that makes us ourselves./ Would it not be our drive to preserve our past?/ To save our knowledge and make it last?” — CTY
  • “Knowledge is the ability to define an object, intelligence is the ability to construct different objects into new ideas.” — CTY
  • “Don’t look for an alternative frame of mind—lose the frame altogether.” — CTY
  • “The truth is that there is nothing noble in being superior to somebody else. The only real nobility is in being superior to your former self.” — Whitney Young
  • “When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.” — Henny Youngman
  • “I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up—they have no holidays.” — Henny Youngman
  • “My Grandmother is over eighty and still doesn’t need glasses. Drinks right out of the bottle.” — Henny Youngman
  • “They can’t agree with you if you don’t agree with them.” — Young’s Rule of Argument, Murphy’s Law
  • “If I should give you a statement that would teach you how to achieve Zen immediately, dirt would already be spread on top of your head. … To grasp Zen you must experience it. If you have not experienced it, do not pretend to know. You should withdraw inwardly and search for the ground upon which you stand. Thereby you will find out what Truth is.” — Master Yun-Men
  • “When sitting, just sit. Above all, don’t wobble.” — Yun-men
  • “Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials.” — Lian Yutang
  • “‘I have done my best.’ That is about all the philosophy of living that one needs.” — Lin Yutang

Z

  • “Routine is the housekeeper of inspiration.” — Carlos Ruiz Zafon
  • “What time would it be if all the clocks were stopped? — Zen Koan
  • “A new arrival said apologetically to the Master, ‘I have come here empty handed.’The Master said: ‘Lay it down, then!’‘Since I have brought nothing with me, what can I lay down?’ asked the visitor‘Then go on carrying it!’ said the Master.” — Koan
  • “One day a student asked Ike no Taiga: ‘What is the most difficult part of painting?’Taiga answered: ‘The part of the paper where nothing is painted is the most difficult.’” — Koan
  • “Firewood turns into ash and does not turn into firewood again. But do not suppose that ash is after and firewood before. We must realize that firewood is in a state of being firewood and it has its before and its after. … Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash, so after one’s death one does not become alive again. Thus that life does not become death is an unqualified fact of the Buddha dharma. … Life is a period of itself. Death is a period of itself. They are like winter and spring. We do not think that winter becomes spring. Nor do we say that spring becomes summer.” — Zen Koan, The Benjo Koan
  • “A monk asked: ‘Master, how do you put enlightenment into action? How do you practice it in everyday life?’ The master replied: ‘By eating and by sleeping.’ The monk said: ‘But Master, everybody eats and everybody sleeps.’ The master replied: ‘But not everybody eats when they eat and not everybody sleeps when they sleep.’” — Zen Mondo
  • “Monk: ‘Mountain and hills—aren’t they all forms of the body of Buddha?’ Master: ‘Yes, they are, but it’s a pity to say so.’” — Zen Mondo
  • “When all discrimination is abandoned, when contact with things is broken, the mind is brighter than sun and moon together, cleaner than frost and snow.” — Zen Prayer
  • “If you wish to know the road up the mountain, You must ask the man who goes back and forth on it.” — Zen saying
  • “The light of the jewel illuminates the jewel itself.” — Zen Saying, The Third Ancestor
  • “The three worlds are only mind; All things are simply perception.” — Zen saying
  • “The water a cow drinks turns to milk; The water a snake drinks turns to poison.” — Zen saying
  • “Better to see the face than to hear the name.” — Zen Saying
  • “Stones rise up in the sky, Fire burns down through the water.” — Zen saying
  • “The dharma is good in the beginning, the dharma is good in the middle, the dharma is good in the end.” — Zen saying
  • “The wooden man/ sings and dances,/ the stone woman/ gives birth in the night.” — Zan Saying
  • “The bird in a forest can perch but on one bough. This should be the wise man’s pattern.” — Zen Saying
  • “Do not vainly pass through sunshine and shadows.” — Zen Saying
  • “Your ordinary mind, that is the way.” — Zen Saying
  • “When it is hot, you should be hot Buddha. When it is cold you should be cold Buddha.”  — Zen Saying
  • “Never let go of the reins of the wild colt of the heart.” — Zen Saying
  • “Zen is the madman yelling ‘If you want to tell me that the stars are not words, then stop calling them stars!’” — Zen Saying
  • “Once when the Buddha was staying at the Garden of Jetavana, an intoxicated Brahman staggered up to the Buddha and asked to be his disciple. The Buddha agreed, and instructed the monks to shave the Brahman’s head and give him monk’s robes. The next morning the Brahman woke up and was horrified to find his head shaved and wearing stage clothes, and he ran away. Soon after the monks approached the Buddha and asked why he allowed the drunken Brahman to receive the precepts. The Buddha said, ‘I knew he had no intention of renouncing the world and receiving the precepts, and that he did so last night only because he was drunk. Nevertheless, because he did it for that very brief time, he will someday become a true monk.’” — Zen Story
  • “One day Chao-chou fell down in the snow and called out, ‘Help me up! Help me up!’ A monk came and lay down beside him. Chao-chou got up and went away.” — Zen story
  • “Haven’t you heard? Wu Hsieh went to see Shih T’ou. He had made an agreement with himself beforehand saying ‘If there’s accord at the first word I’ll stay; otherwise, I’ll go.’ Shih T’ou just sat on his seat; Hsieh shook out his sleeves and went out. Shih T’ou knew that Wu Hsieh was a vessel of the truth, so he had extended his teaching to him. But Hsieh hadn’t understood his meaning; he had announced his departure and gone out. When he got to the gate Shih T’ou called out to him, ‘Reverend!’ When Hsieh looked back, Shih T’ou said, ‘From birth to death it’s only this; don’t seek anymore for anything else by turning your head and revolving your brain.’ At these words Hsieh was greatly enlightened.” — Zen story
  • “The Master asked: ‘Do you smell the mountain laurel?’/ ‘Yes,’ replied the student./ ‘There,’ the Master answered. ‘I have held nothing back from you.’” — Zen Story
  • “A new arrival said apologetically to Chao-chu: ‘I have come here empty-handed.’ Chao-chus said: ‘Lay it down, then!’ The visitor then asked: ‘Since I have brought nothing with me, what can I lay down?’ The master replied: ‘Then go on carrying it!’” —  Zen Story
  • “A monk asked Chao-chou: ‘When a beggar comes, what shall we give him?’ The Master answered: ‘He lacks nothing.’” — Zen Story
  • “The monk asked the Master: ‘What is mind?’ ‘Mind,’ the Master replied. ‘I do not understand,’ said the monk. ‘Neither do I,’ said the Master.” — Zen Story
  • “A man named Seiko loved dragons. He built his house in the shape of a dragon. He made paper dragon kites and told dragon stories to children. He also loved to carve dragons. His reputation grew far and wide. Then one day a dragon flew by, and saw Seiko’s house in the shape of a dragon and thought it would be a good idea to visit this man who, he was sure, would be pleased to meet a real dragon. So the dragon descended and knocked on Seiko’s door. When Seiko opened it he was so startled he screamed and this scared the dragon away.” — Zen Story
  • A monk asked Fa-yen: “As for the finger I will not ask about it. But what is the moon?” The Master said: “Where is the finger that you don’t ask about?” So the monk asked: “As for the moon, I will not ask about it. But what is the finger?” The Master said: “The moon!” The monk challenged him: “I asked about the finger. Why did you answer, ‘the moon’? The Master replied: “Because you asked about the finger.” — Zen Story
  • “One night during a very late practice the monk next to Dogen began dozing off. The master walked over and struck the monk with his slipper, saying: ‘Zazen is not sleeping! Zazen is mind and body dropping off. Body and mind drop off.’ As soon as the master said that, Dogen was enlightened.” — Zen Story
  • “One day counselor Wang visited Lin-chi. He asked: ‘Do the monks of this monastery read the sutras?’ ‘No, they don’t,’ Lin-chi replied. ‘Do they learn meditation?’ the counselor asked. ‘No,’ answered the Master. ‘If they neither read sutras nor learn meditation, what is it they do?’ The Master replied: ‘All I do is to make them become buddhas and patriarchs.’” — Zen Story
  • “A monk once drew four lines in front of Ma-tsu. The top line was long and the remaining three were short. He then demanded of the Master, ‘Besides saying that one line is long and the other three are short, what else could you say?’ Ma-tsu drew one line on the ground and said: ‘This could be called either long or short. That is my answer.’” — Zen Story
  • “There was once an ancient Chinese Zen master who never gave teisho, or dharma talks. The monks, however, pleaded with him to give teisho, and one day, finally, he agreed. When it was time, he walked into the dharma hall, offered incense and prostrations in front of the altar, and then took his seat. After a few minutes he slowly got up, bowed, and left the dharma hall. The poor monks were all puzzled, and next time they saw him asked: ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’/ ‘I’m not a dharma teacher,’ he responded. ‘I am a Zen master.’” — Zen Story
  • “All the Buddhas of the past, present, and future have renounced the world and found the true Way.” — The Zennen Shingi
  • “There is no place to seek the mind. It is like footprints of birds in the sky.” — Zenrin
  • “Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the sky? No! Are they innate in the mind? No! They come from social practice, and from it alone.” — Mao Ze-Dong
  • “Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help with man with the wrong mental attitude.” — W.W. Ziege
  • “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” — Zig Ziglar
  • “People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing–that’s why we recommend it daily.” — Zig Ziglar
  • “Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.” ― Zig Ziglar
  • “You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win and expect to win.” — Zig Ziglar
  • “How can you have war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?” — Howard Zinn
  • “Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience… Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.” — Howard Zinn, 1922-2010
  • “The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.” — Emile Zola
  • “Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion. Rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science.” — Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters.