Quotations about Summer

What is one to say about June, the time of perfect young summer, the fulfillment of the promise of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that its fresh young beauty will ever fade. ~Gertrude Jekyll


In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer quite the other way
I have to go to bed by day.
~Robert Louis Stevenson


In June, as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them. ~Aldo Leopold


I question not if thrushes sing,
If roses load the air;
Beyond my heart I need not reach
When all is summer there.
~John Vance Cheney


Oh, the summer night
Has a smile of light
And she sits on a sapphire throne.
~Barry Cornwall


In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. ~Albert Camus


There shall be eternal summer in the grateful heart. ~Celia Thaxter


The summer night is like a perfection of thought. ~Wallace Stevens


In summer, the song sings itself. ~William Carlos Williams


Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability. ~Sam Keen


Summer has set in with its usual severity. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge


People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy. ~Anton Chekhov


A life without love is like a year without summer. ~Swedish Proverb


Press close, bare-bosomed Night! Press close, magnetic,
nourishing Night!
Night of south winds! Night of the large, few stars!
Still, nodding Night! Mad, naked, Summer Night!
~Walt Whitman


Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you. ~Erma Bombeck


The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. ~Author unknown, commonly misattributed to Mark Twain


Do what we can, summer will have its flies. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Heat, ma'am! it was so dreadful here, that I found there was nothing left for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones. ~Sydney Smith, Lady Holland's Memoir


Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time. ~John Lubbock


No price is set on the lavish summer;
June may be had by the poorest comer.
~James Russell Lowell, The Vision of Sir Launfal, 1848


Summer afternoon - summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language. ~Henry James


Love is to the heart what the summer is to the farmer's year - it brings to harvest all the loveliest flowers of the soul. ~Author Unknown


Then followed that beautiful season... Summer....
Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape
Lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world. ~Ada Louise Huxtable


This was one of those perfect New England days in late summer where the spirit of autumn takes a first stealing flight, like a spy, through the ripening country-side, and, with feigned sympathy for those who droop with August heat, puts her cool cloak of bracing air about leaf and flower and human shoulders. ~Sarah Orne Jewett

Quotations about Trust

I trust everyone. I just don't trust the devil inside them. ~Troy Kennedy-Martin, The Italian Job


Many people say that government is necessary because some men cannot be trusted to look after themselves, but anarchists say that government is harmful because no men can be trusted to look after anyone else. ~Nicolas Walter, About Anarchism


Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear. ~William E. Gladstone, 1866


Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country - and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians. ~Charles Krauthammer


Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's. ~Billy Wilder


Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement. ~Alfred Adler


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


A skeptic is a person who would ask God for his ID card. ~Edgar A. Shoaff


Deciding whether or not to trust a person is like deciding whether or not to climb a tree, because you might get a wonderful view from the highest branch, or you might simply get covered in sap, and for this reason many people choose to spend their time alone and indoors, where it is harder to get a splinter. ~Lemony Snicket


Few delights can equal the mere presence of one whom we trust utterly. ~George MacDonald


Government is an unnecessary evil. Human beings, when accustomed to taking responsibility for their own behavior, can cooperate on a basis of mutual trust and helpfulness. ~Fred Woodworth, The Match!, No. 79


A wedding anniversary is the celebration of love, trust, partnership, tolerance and tenacity. The order varies for any given year. ~Paul Sweeney


In God we trust, all others we virus scan. ~Author Unknown


Never trust a husband too far, nor a bachelor too near. ~Helen Rowland

Quotations about Truth

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths. ~William James


Men ardently pursue truth, assuming it will be angels' bread when found. ~W. MacNeile Dixon


There is no god higher than truth. ~Mahatma Gandhi


Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple. ~Rebecca West


It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth. ~Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy


Truth is rarely writ in ink; it lives in nature. ~Martin H. Fischer


When I tell any truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do. ~William Blake


Truth only reveals itself when one gives up all preconceived ideas. ~Shoseki


There is no Truth. There is only the truth within each moment. ~Ramana Maharshi, attributed


Truth is after all a moving target
Hairs to split,
And pieces that don't fit
How can anybody be enlightened?
Truth is after all so poorly lit.
~Neil Peart, Turn the Page
(Thank you, Ryan)


Theories are private property, but truth is common stock. ~Charles Caleb Colton


It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. ~Oscar Wilde


My truths do not last long in me. Not as long as those that are not mine. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


Truth breeds hatred. ~Bias of Priene, Maxims


If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it? ~Dogen


People always think something's all true. ~J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye


Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch, nay, you may kick it all about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast Table


Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold. ~Leo Tolstoy


Truth is the breath of life to human society. It is the food of the immortal spirit. Yet a single word of it may kill a man as suddenly as a drop of prussic acid. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes


I am the fellow citizen of every being that thinks; my country is Truth. ~Alphonse de Lamartine, "Marseillaise of Peace," 1841


Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth. ~Jean-Paul Sartre


Truth is a great flirt. ~Franz Liszt


I am of the Buddhists. The great Teacher comes periodically. He is followed by pupils who corrupt the texts and then a new Buddha must be born to reëstablish the truth. ~Martin H. Fischer


We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter. ~Denis Diderot


All great truths begin as blasphemies. ~George Bernard Shaw, Annajanska, 1919


...Science and mathematics
Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it,
They never touch it: consider what an explosion
Would rock the bones of men into little white fragments and unsky the world
If any mind for a moment touch truth.
~Robinson Jeffers, "The Silent Shepherds," The Beginning & the End


The greatest truths are the simplest: so likewise are the greatest men. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me. ~Simone de Beauvoir


Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives... by make-believe. ~W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, 1938


When one has one's hand full of truth it is not always wise to open it. ~French Proverb


Truth is no Doctoresse, she takes no degrees at Paris or Oxford... but oftentimes to such an one as myself, an Idiota or common person, no great things, melancholizing in woods where waters are, quiet places by rivers, fountains, whereas the silly man expecting no such matter, thinketh only how best to delectate and refresh his mynde continually with Natura her pleasaunt scenes, woods, water-falls, or Art her statelie gardens, parks, terraces, Belvideres, on a sudden the goddesse herself Truth has appeared, with a shyning lyghte, and a sparklyng countenance, so as yee may not be able lightly to resist her. ~Charles Lamb


We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable. ~Alexander Solzhenitsyn


The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable. ~Attributed to James A. Garfield


Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first, it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self-evident. ~Arthur Schopenhauer


There is no truth. There is only perception. ~Gustave Flaubert


If a thousand old beliefs were ruined in our march to truth we must still march on. ~Stopford Brooke

Quotations about War

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


"There are no atheists in foxholes" isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes. ~James Morrow


Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up close and get to know him before you can shoot him. ~M*A*S*H, Colonel Potter
We have failed to grasp the fact that mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide. ~Havelock Ellis


Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen? ~Thomas Carlyle, "Sartor Resartus"


The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution. ~John F. Kennedy


War is the only game in which it doesn't pay to have the home-court advantage. ~Dick Motta


War. The dark time of valour, loss and hope where a man is controlled by his gun; where a gun is controlled by his hatred. Completely uncontrollable. ~Daniel Ha


If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say "no" to war. For one does not create a human society on mounds of corpses. ~Louis Lecoin


War is fear cloaked in courage. ~William Westmoreland


War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered. ~Thomas de Quincey


No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time. ~Henry Kissinger


Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood. ~Gandhi, Non-violence in Peace and War, 1948


I would like it if men had to partake in the same hormonal cycles to which we're subjected monthly. Maybe that's why men declare war - because they have a need to bleed on a regular basis. ~Brett Butler


We saw the lightning and that was the guns and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped. ~Harriet Tubman


It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passions, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace. ~André Gide, Journals, 13 September 1938


Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner. ~Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, vol 1, book VII, chapter 4


The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars. ~William Westmoreland


I have never advocated war except as a means of peace. ~Ulysses S. Grant


We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower


In the name of peace
They waged the wars
Ain't they got no shame
~Nikki Giovanni


Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity. ~Author Unknown


What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood. ~Aldous Huxley


Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder. ~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Declaration of Rights"


Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private individuals. ~Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1955


To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man. ~Michael Servetus


A day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in museums, just as instruments of torture are now, and the people will be astonished that such a thing could have been. ~Victor Hugo


Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war. ~Otto Von Bismark


The draft is white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from red people. ~Gerome Gragni and James Rado, 1967


War hath no fury like a noncombatant. ~Charles Edward Montague, Disenchantment


What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war. Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat. ~Simone Weil, Ecrits historiques et politiques, 1960


War is never a solution; it is an aggravation. ~Benjamin Disraeli


The stench of the trail of Ego in our History. It is ego - ego, the fountain cry, origin, sole source of war. ~George Meredith, Beauchamp's Career


Dress it as we may, feather it, daub it with gold, huzza it, and sing swaggering songs about it, what is war, nine times out of ten, but murder in uniform? ~Douglas Jerrold


If you wish to be brothers, drop your weapons. ~Pope John Paul II


Law never made men a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.... In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. ~Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience


Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die. ~Herbert Hoover


A day of battle is a day of harvest for the devil. ~William Hooke


There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it. ~Havelock Ellis


All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers. ~François Fénelon


War should belong to the tragic past, to history: it should find no place on humanity's agenda for the future. ~Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla)


Men were made for war. Without it they wandered greyly about, getting under the feet of the women, who were trying to organize the really important things of life. ~Alice Thomas Ellis


Will... the threat of common extermination continue?... Must children receive the arms race from us as a necessary inheritance? ~Pope John Paul II, speech at the UN, 1979


War is nothing less than a temporary repeal of the principles of virtue. It is a system out of which almost all the virtues are excluded, and in which nearly all the vices are included. ~Robert Hall


Traditional nationalism cannot survive the fissioning of the atom. One world or none. ~Stuart Chase


Wars usually have the effect of speeding up the process of history. ~Pieter Geyl, Debates With Historians


Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong? ~Holly Near


The pioneers of a warless world are the [youth] who refuse military service. ~Albert Einstein


O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it. ~Mark Twain, "The War Prayer"


The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic. ~Joe Stalin, comment to Churchill at Potsdam, 1945


Men like war: they do not hold much sway over birth, so they make up for it with death. Unlike women, men menstruate by shedding other people's blood. ~Lucy Ellman


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. ~John Stewart Mill


The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it. ~Louis Simpson


The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his. ~George Patton


The expendability factor has increased by being transferred from the specialised, scarce and expensively trained military personnel to the amorphous civilian population. American strategists have calculated the proportion of civilians killed in this century's major wars. In the First World War 5 per cent of those killed were civilians, in the Second World War 48 per cent, while in a Third World War 90-95 per cent would be civilians. ~Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action


You can't say civilization don't advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way. ~Will Rogers, New York Times, 23 December 1929


Organized slaughter, we realize, does not settle a dispute; it merely silences an argument. ~James Frederick Green


I recoil with horror at the ferociousness of man. Will nations never devise a more rational umpire of differences than force? Are there no means of coercing injustice more gratifying to our nature than a waste of the blood of thousands and of the labor of millions of our fellow creatures? ~Thomas Jefferson


War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals. ~Charles Evans Hughes


War is a game which were their subjects wise, kings would not play at. ~William Cowper


Borders are scratched across the hearts of men
By strangers with a calm, judicial pen,
And when the borders bleed we watch with dread
The lines of ink across the map turn red.
~Marya Mannes, Subverse: Rhymes for Our Times, 1959


War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery


They should pick a dry year to fight the war. Better yet, civilize the moronic races and have no wars at all. ~Clair J. Clark, letter to wife, March 1944


I don't know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace an interlude during war. ~Georges Clemenceau


As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of exalted characters. ~Edward Gibbon


There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams


War! When I but think of this word, I feel bewildered, as though they were speaking to me of sorcery, of the Inquisition, of a distant, finished, abominable, monstrous, unnatural thing. When they speak to us of cannibals, we smile proudly, as we proclaim our superiority to these savages. Who are the real savages? Those who struggle in order to eat those whom they vanquish, or those who struggle merely to kill? ~Guy de Maupassant, Sur l'Eau


The bomb that fell on Hiroshima fell on America too. It fell on no city, no munition plants, no docks. It erased no church, vaporized no public buildings, reduced no man to his atomic elements. But it fell, it fell. ~Hermann Hagedorn, "The Bomb That Fell on America"


I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it. I hate war, and never again will I sanction or support another. ~Harry Emerson Fosdick


It seems like such a terrible shame that innocent civilians have to get hurt in wars, otherwise combat would be such a wonderfully healthy way to rid the human race of unneeded trash. ~Fred Woodworth


In an incredible perversion of justice, former soldiers who sprayed festeringly poisonous chemicals on Vietnam, and now find today that they themselves have been damaged by them, appeal to the people for sympathy and charity. The effects of the defoliant "Agent Orange" are discussed at length, but not one single newspaper article or hearing that we are aware of has even mentioned the effects of the people who still live in those regions of Vietnam. It's as outlandish as if Nazis who gassed Jews were now to come forward and whine that the poisons they utilized had finally made them sick. The staggering monstrousness goes unlaughed at and even unnoticed, as in a Kafka novel. ~Fred Woodworth, The Match, No. 79


A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war. ~Herbert V. Prochnow


Studies by Medical Corps psychiatrists of combat fatigue cases... found that fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure, and that fear of failure ran a strong second. ~S.L.A. Marshall


You're an old-timer if you can remember when setting the world on fire was a figure of speech. ~Franklin P. Jones, referring to the atomic bomb


All the arms we need are for hugging. ~Author Unknown


A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon. ~Napoleon


If we do not end war - war will end us. Everybody says that, millions of people believe it, and nobody does anything. ~H.G. Wells, Things to Come (the "film story"), Part III, adapted from his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come, spoken by the character John Cabal (Thanks Bill!)


A great war leaves the country with three armies - an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves. ~German Proverb


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 that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living. ~Omar Bradley


Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953


The most persistent sound which reverberates through men's history is the beating of war drums. ~Arthur Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up


What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world. ~Robert E. Lee, letter to his wife, 1864


Everyone's a pacifist between wars. It's like being a vegetarian between meals. ~Colman McCarthy


Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both. ~Abraham Flexner


Draft beer, not people. ~Attributed to Bob Dylan


The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower


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


In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
~John McCrae


What this planet needs is more mistletoe and less missile-talk. ~Author Unknown


Join the Army, see the world, meet interesting people - and kill them. ~Pacifist Badge, 1978


Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. ~Ernest Hemingway


War makes thieves and peace hangs them. ~George Herbert


You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake. ~Jeanette Rankin


You are not going to get peace with millions of armed men. The chariot of peace cannot advance over a road littered with cannon. ~David Lloyd George


Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come. ~Carl Sandburg


In war, there are no unwounded soldiers. ~José Narosky


We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage. ~James Russell Lowell


If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war. ~Pentagon official explaining why the U.S. military censored graphic footage from the Gulf War


I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy.... If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago. ~Sir George Porter, quoted in The Observer, 26 August 1973


War would end if the dead could return. ~Stanley Baldwin


War! that mad game the world so loves to play. ~Jonathan Swift


It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. ~Voltaire, War


We need a new law that owners of SUVs are automatically in the military reserve. Then they can go get their own goddamn oil. ~Jello Biafra, quoted in The Guardian, 3 November 2007


If it's natural to kill, why do men have to go into training to learn how? ~Joan Baez, "What Would You Do If....?"


I couldn't help but say to [Mr. Gorbachev], just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from another planet. [We'd] find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together. ~Ronald Reagan, 1985


[John] Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war. ~Isaac Asimov


The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst. ~Henry Fosdick


All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones. In my opinion, there never was a good war or a bad peace. When will mankind be convinced and agree to settle their difficulties by arbitration? ~Benjamin Franklin


In war, truth is the first casualty. ~Aeschylus (Thanks, Dan)


Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself. ~Francis Meehan


Only the dead have seen the end of war. ~Plato


No country is so wild and difficult but men will make it a theater of war. ~Ambrose Bierce


Man, in his sensitivity, does not give names to animals he intends to eat but goes on giving names to children he intends to send to war. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man. ~Napoleon Hill


We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace. ~Jeane J. Kirkpatrick


Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man" - with his mouth. ~Mark Twain


Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country. ~Bertrand Russell, attributed


It doesn't require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder, and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed, it won't be U.S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the Senate. ~George McGovern


I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in. ~George McGovern


When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die. ~Jean-Paul Sartre


The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one. ~Albert Einstein, "Atomic War or Peace," Atlantic Monthly, November 1945


You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time. ~Albert Einstein


We kill because we are afraid of our own shadow, afraid that if we used a little common sense we'd have to admit that our glorious principles were wrong. ~Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart, 1941


The refuge of the morally, intellectually, artistically and economically bankrupt is war. ~Martin H. Fischer


They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason. ~Ernest Hemingway


The ability and inclination to use physical strength is no indication of bravery or tenacity to life. The greatest cowards are often the greatest bullies. Nothing is cheaper and more common than physical bravery. ~Clarence Darrow, Resist Not Evil


Where is the indignation about the fact that the United States and Soviet Union have accumulated thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world? ~Norman Cousins


I think war might be God's way of teaching us geography. ~Paul Rodriguez


The era of true peace on earth will not come as long as a tremendous percentage of your taxes goes to educate men in the trades of slaughter. ~Reginald Wright Kauffman


Are bombs the only way of setting fire to the spirit of a people? Is the human will as inert as the past two world-wide wars would indicate? ~Gregory Clark

Quotations about Wisdom

Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself. ~Tom Wilson


How can you be a sage if you're pretty? You can't get your wizard papers without wrinkles. ~Bill Veeck


The years teach much which the days never knew. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


When I can look Life in the eyes,
Grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth,
And taken in exchange - my youth.
~Sara Teasdale


The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. ~Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations, 1988


Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another. ~Juvenal, Satires


A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top. ~Author Unknown


I believe that all wisdom consists in caring immensely for a few right things, and not caring a straw about the rest. ~John Buchan


It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it. ~A.A. Hodge


A child can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer. ~Author Unknown


A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study. ~Chinese Proverb


Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences. ~Norman Cousins


He dares to be a fool, and that is the first step in the direction of wisdom. ~James Gibbons Huneker


Wisdom comes by disillusionment. ~George Santayana


Wisdom is the quality that keeps you from getting into situations where you need it. ~Doug Larson


Some folks are wise and some are otherwise. ~Tobias Smollett


Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar. ~William Wordsworth


The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.


Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. ~Alfred Lord Tennyson


Wisdom outweighs any wealth. ~Sophocles


If wisdom and diamonds grew on the same tree we could soon tell how much men loved wisdom. ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911


The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.. ~William Shakespeare, As You Like It


One must spend time in gathering knowledge to give it out richly. ~Edward C. Steadman


The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. ~William James


It is more easy to be wise for others than for ourselves. ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld


Learning sleeps and snores in libraries, but wisdom is everywhere, wide awake, on tiptoe. ~Josh Billings


Wisdom is never on the menu, you have to own the restaurant. ~Carrie Latet


There are subjects in which I wish to become knowledgeable, and subjects in which I wish to remain wise. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


The child, offered the mother's breast,
Will not in the beginning grab it;
But soon it clings to it with zest.
And thus at wisdom's copious breasts
You'll drink each day with greater zest.
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Every wise man lives in an observatory. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification. ~Martin H. Fischer


A man begins cutting his wisdom teeth the first time he bites off more than he can chew. ~Herb Caen


There is a wisdom of the head, and... a wisdom of the heart. ~Charles Dickens


Common-sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge


No man was ever wise by chance. ~Seneca


We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future. ~George Bernard Shaw

Quotations about Money

They who are of the opinion that Money will do everything, may very well be suspected to do everything for Money. ~George Savile, Complete Works, 1912


I cannot afford to waste my time making money. ~Louis Agassiz


There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either. ~Robert Graves


When I have money, I get rid of it quickly, lest it find a way into my heart. ~John Wesley


It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach. ~Franklin Delano Roosevelt


After a visit to the beach, it's hard to believe that we live in a material world. ~Pam Shaw


The real measure of your wealth is how much you'd be worth if you lost all your money. ~Author Unknown


Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money. ~Cree Indian Proverb


The only reason a great many American families don't own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments. ~Mad Magazine


I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money. ~Pablo Picasso


No matter how hard you hug your money, it never hugs back. ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.


There are no pockets in a shroud. ~Author Unknown


Waste your money and you're only out of money, but waste your time and you've lost a part of your life. ~Michael Leboeuf


There are people who have money and people who are rich. ~Coco Chanel


This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. ~Douglas Adams


Life shouldn't be printed on dollar bills. ~Clifford Odets


There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail. ~Logan Pearsall Smith, "Life and Human Nature," Afterthoughts, 1931


Mammon, n.: The god of the world's leading religion. ~Ambrose Bierce


It's good to have money and the things that money can buy, but it's good, too, to check up once in a while and make sure that you haven't lost the things that money can't buy. ~George Horace Lorimer


"Your money, or your life." We know what to do when a burglar makes this demand of us, but not when God does. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut you used to get for five dollars when you had hair. ~Sam Ewing


A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don't need it. ~Bob Hope


Business is the art of extracting money from another man's pocket without resorting to violence. ~Max Amsterdam


O Gold! I still prefer thee unto paper,
Which makes bank credit like a bark of vapour.
~Lord Byron


Always borrow money from a pessimist, he doesn't expect to be paid back. ~Author Unknown


If you lend someone $20, and never see that person again, it was probably worth it. ~Author Unknown


Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work. ~Robert Orben


Money is neither my god nor my devil. It is a form of energy that tends to make us more of who we already are, whether it's greedy or loving. ~Dan Millman


My old father used to have a saying: If you make a bad bargain, hug it all the tighter. ~Abraham Lincoln


If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments. ~Earl Wilson


Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. ~Woody Allen


I don't like money, actually, but it quiets my nerves. ~Joe Louis


Budget: a mathematical confirmation of your suspicions. ~A.A. Latimer


Money is like manure. You have to spread it around or it smells. ~J. Paul Getty


We may see the small value God has for riches, by the people he gives them to. ~Alexander Pope, Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1727


Too much money is as demoralizing as too little, and there's no such thing as exactly enough. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money. ~Albert Camus


When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion. ~Voltaire


A bank book makes good reading - better than some novels. ~Harry Lauder


Women prefer men who have something tender about them - especially the legal kind. ~Kay Ingram


There are a handful of people whom money won't spoil, and we count ourselves among them. ~Mignon McLaughlin


Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy you the kind of misery you prefer. ~Author Unknown


Money often costs too much. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


When a fellow says it hain't the money but the principle o' the thing, it's th' money. ~Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard, Hoss Sense and Nonsense, 1926


The waste of money cures itself, for soon there is no more to waste. ~M.W. Harrison


They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price. ~Kahlil Gibran


I'm so poor I can't even pay attention. ~Ron Kittle, 1987


If you make money your god, it will plague you like the devil. ~Henry Fielding


It frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy. ~Groucho Marx


We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings. ~Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present


We live by the Golden Rule. Those who have the gold make the rules. ~Buzzie Bavasi


A man's soul may be buried and perish under a dungheap or in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne


There are several ways in which to apportion the family income, all of them unsatisfactory. ~Robert Benchley


Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband. ~H.L. Mencken


...existence has become an unreasoning, wild dance around the golden calf, a mad worship of God Mammon. In that dance and in that worship man has sacrificed all his finer qualities of the heart and soul - kindness and justice, honor and manhood, compassion and sympathy with his fellowman. ~Alexander Berkman, What Is Communist Anarchism?


When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is. ~Oscar Wilde


The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters. ~Jean-Paul Kauffmann
If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning. ~Aristotle Onassis


Money is much more exciting than anything it buys. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance. ~Oscar Wilde


Money isn't the most important thing in life, but it's reasonably close to oxygen on the "gotta have it" scale. ~Zig Ziglar


The little money I have - that is my wealth, but the things I have for which I would not take money, that is my treasure. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us,
The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in,
The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us,
We bargain for the graves we lie in;
At the devil's booth are all things sold,
Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold;
For a cap and bells our lives we pay.
Bubbles we buy with a whole soul's tasking,
'Tis heaven alone that is given away,
'Tis only God may be had for the asking,
No price is set on the lavish summer;
June may be had by the poorest comer.
~James Russell Lowell, The Vision of Sir Launfal, 1848


Money is human happiness in the abstract; and so the man who is no longer capable of enjoying such happiness in the concrete, sets his whole heart on money. ~Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851


Money is the last enemy that shall never be subdued. While there is flesh there is money - or the want of money; but money is always on the brain so long as there is a brain in reasonable order. ~Samuel Butler, Notebooks, 1912


Money will buy you a pretty good dog, but it won't buy the wag of his tail. ~Henry Wheeler Shaw


When you let money speak for you, it drowns out anything else you meant to say. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


People are living longer than ever before, a phenomenon undoubtedly made necessary by the 30-year mortgage. ~Doug Larson


October: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February. ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar for 1894


Few are aware that they want any thing, except pounds schillings and pence. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


I wish I'd said it first, and I don't even know who did: The only problems that money can solve are money problems. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


He that wants money, means, and content is without three good friends. ~William Shakespeare


Every one, even the richest and most munificent of men, pays much by cheque more light-heartedly than he pays little in specie. ~Max Beerbohm, "Hosts and Guests," 1918


If inflation continues to soar, you're going to have to work like a dog just to live like one. ~George Gobel


I once met an economist who believed that everything was fungible for money, so I suggested he enclose himself in a large bell-jar with as much money as he wanted and see how long he lasted. ~Amory Lovins


Money does not pay for anything, never has, never will. It is an economic axiom as old as the hills that goods and services can be paid for only with goods and services. ~Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, 1943


I'm tired of Love: I'm still more tired of Rhyme.
But Money gives me pleasure all the time.
~Hilaire Belloc, "Fatigued," Sonnets and Verse, 1923


In the old days a man who saved money was a miser; nowadays he's a wonder. ~Author Unknown


Money may be the husk of many things but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintance, but not friends; servants, but not loyalty; days of joy, but not peace or happiness. ~Henrik Ibsen


How quickly nature falls into revolt
When gold becomes her object!
For this the foolish over-careful fathers
Have broke their sleep with thoughts, their brains with care,
Their bones with industry.
~William Shakespeare


[T]hose who live by numbers can also perish by them and it is a terrifying thing to have an adding machine write an epitaph, either way. ~George J.W. Goodman, The Money Game


A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., speech, Boston, 8 January 1897


Inflation is taxation without legislation. ~Milton Friedman


Those who believe money can do everything are frequently prepared to do everything for money. ~Author Unknown


I hire tea by the tea bag. ~Martin Amis, on renting the essentials of life after breaking up with a lover, Money: A Suicide Note (Thanks to bartleby.com for verifying the details of the source.)


Foul cankering rust the hidden treasure frets,
But gold that's put to use more gold begets.
~William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, 1593


Lack of money is the root of all evil. ~George Bernard Shaw


Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1857


If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability. ~Henry Ford


We all know how the size of sums of money appears to vary in a remarkable way according as they are being paid in or paid out. ~Julian Huxley, Essays of a Biologist, 1923


A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to us than the 99 which we had to work for, and the money won at Faro or in the stock market snuggles into our hearts in the same way. ~Mark Twain


It is natural that affluence should be followed by influence. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


A woman's mink coat represents the sacrifice of a lot of little animals, including her husband. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Money doesn't talk, it swears. ~Bob Dylan, "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)"


The best way for a person to have happy thoughts is to count his blessings and not his cash. ~Author Unknown


A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore. ~Yogi Berra


It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. ~Oscar Wilde


Do not value money for any more nor any less than its worth; it is a good servant but a bad master. ~Alexandre Dumas fils, Camille, 1852


To suppose as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and stay sober. ~Logan Pearsall Smith


If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion. ~George Bernard Shaw


If the nation's economists were laid end to end, they would point in all directions. ~Arthur H. Motley


Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a refund from the IRS, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with. ~From a Washington Post word contest


Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that. ~Norman Vincent Peale


A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money. ~W.C. Fields


He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has. ~Henry Ward Beecher


By the time I have money to burn, my fire will have burnt out. ~Author Unknown


That money talks
I'll not deny,
I heard it once:
It said, "Goodbye."
~Richard Armour


Money and women. They're two of the strongest things in the world. The things you do for a woman you wouldn't do for anything else. Same with money. ~Satchel Paige


Wallets are the fabricated items into which we put our fabricated money, which most people believe to be their possession of the realest value. ~Terri Guillemets


Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there is no God. ~Logan Pearsall Smith


But tell me: how did gold get to be the highest value? Because it is uncommon and useless and gleaming and gentle in its brilliance; it always gives itself. Only as an image of the highest virtue did gold get to be the highest value. The giver's glance gleams like gold. A golden brilliance concludes peace between the moon and the sun. Uncommon is the highest virtue and useless, it is gleaming and gentle in its brilliance: a gift-giving virtue is the highest virtue. ~Friedrich Nietzsche


We ought to change the legend on our money from "In God We Trust" to "In Money We Trust." Because, as a nation, we've got far more faith in money these days than we do in God. ~Arthur Hoppe, 1963


Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you. ~Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism, 1891

Quotations about Literature

I doubt if anything learnt at school is of more value than great literature learnt by heart. ~Richard Livingstone


What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us! ~James Russell Lowell


The duty of literature is to note what counts, and to light up what is suited to the light. If it ceases to choose and to love, it becomes like a woman who gives herself without preference. ~Anatole France


When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before. ~Clifton Fadiman


The difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891


The test of real literature is that it will bear repetition. We read over the same pages again and again, and always with fresh delight. ~Samual McChord Crothers


A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. ~Italo Calvino, The Literature Machine

Quotations about Logic

If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason. ~Samuel Butler


Truly, that reason upon which we plume ourselves, though it may answer for little things, yet for great decisions is hardly surer than a toss-up. ~Charles Sanders Peirce


No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. ~Niels Bohr


Logic is one thing and commonsense another. ~Elbert Hubbard, The Note Book, 1927


Reason: The arithmetic of the emotions. ~Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft Dictionary


Reason is the shepherd trying to corral life's vast flock of wild irrationalities. ~Paul Eldridge, Maxims for a Modern Man


Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942, translated from French by Lewis Galantière


A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. ~Rabindranath Tagore


Logic is logic. That's all I say. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, The One-Hoss Shay


He that cannot reason is a fool.
He that will not is a bigot.
He that dare not is a slave.
~Andrew Carnegie


Common sense, however it tries, cannot avoid being surprised from time to time. ~Bertrand Russell


He is a true fugitive who flies from reason. ~Marcus Aurelius


If the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle. ~Rita Mae Brown


Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so, and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence. ~Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper, 1929 (Thanks, Jeff)


A wise man is not governed by others, nor does he try to govern them; he prefers that reason alone prevail. ~La Bruyère, Characters, 1688


The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it. ~Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670


Logic is a large drawer, containing some useful instruments, and many more that are superfluous. A wise man will look into it for two purposes, to avail himself of those instruments that are really useful, and to admire the ingenuity with which those that are not so, are assorted and arranged. ~Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon

Quotations about Gossip

The easiest way to keep a secret is without help. ~Author Unknown


The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business. ~Wendell Phillips, attributed


A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run. ~Ouida


Whoever gossips to you will gossip about you. ~Spanish Proverb


Do not repeat anything you will not sign your name to. ~Author Unknown


Nothing travels faster than light, with the possible exception of bad news, which follows its own rules. ~Douglas Adams


Show me someone who never gossips, and I'll show you someone who isn't interested in people. ~Barbara Walters


Gossip needn't be false to be evil - there's a lot of truth that shouldn't be passed around. ~Frank A. Clark


It is one of my sources of happiness never to desire a knowledge of other people's business. ~Dolley Madison


To a friend, who asked him how to find out a girl's faults, he gave the sage advice to praise her to her girl friends. ~Edwin Lillie Miller, 1938, Explorations in Literature, about Benjamin Franklin (Thanks, Sam)


It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper. ~Errol Flynn


Trying to squash a rumor is like trying to unring a bell. ~Shana Alexander


There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us. ~F.H. Bradley, Aphorisms


Who brings a tale takes two away. ~Irish Proverb


A rumor without a leg to stand on will get around some other way. ~John Tudor


Gossip is just news running ahead of itself in a red satin dress. ~Liz Smith


I resolve to speak ill of no man whatever, not even in a matter of truth; but rather by some means excuse the faults I hear charged upon others, and upon proper occasions speak all the good I know of everybody. ~Benjamin Franklin


There is so much good in the worst of us,
And so much bad in the best of us,
That it hardly becomes any of us
To talk about the rest of us.
~Edward Wallis Hoch


Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: Their measurements are being taken and compared. ~Erica Jong


If an American was condemned to confine his activity to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence. ~Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835


The best way to keep one's word is not to give it. ~Napoleon I, Maxims


The biggest liar in the world is They Say. ~Douglas Malloch


Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead. ~Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, July 1735


There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true. ~Winston Churchill

Quotations about Passion

Chase down your passion like it's the last bus of the night. ~Terri Guillemets


Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter


Follow your passion, and success will follow you. ~Terri Guillemets


Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. ~Attributed to Howard Thurman


Renew your passions daily. ~Terri Guillemets


The most beautiful make-up of a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy. ~Yves Saint Laurent


My heart beat so hard when I was near him, I feared he could hear my secret longing for him. ~Destiny Vaestus


The same passions in man and woman nonetheless differ in tempo; hence man and woman do not cease misunderstanding one another. ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil


Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark. ~Amiel, Journal, 17 December 1856


But this had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter


Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless. ~Honoré de Balzac


In music the passions enjoy themselves. ~Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886


It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to. ~George Santayana


I hated him with a passion so deep, sometimes it felt like love. ~Terri Guillemets


You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion. ~Garrison Keillor


Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work. ~Aldous Huxley

Quotations about Failure

Try again. Fail again. Fail better. ~Samuel Beckett


Failure doesn't mean you are a failure... it just means you haven't succeeded yet. ~Robert Schuller


One fails forward toward success. ~Charles F. Kettering


One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake. ~Anton Pavlovich Chekhov


A man may fall many times, but he won't be a failure until he says that someone pushed him. ~Elmer G. Letterman


Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald


Just once it might be instructive to pretend you're accepting an award for failure, just to see who you would thank. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


In a world flagrant with the failures of civilization, what is there particularly immortal about our own? ~G.K. Chesterton


They say President Wilson has blundered. Perhaps he has, but I notice he usually blunders forward. ~Thomas Edison


There are defeats more triumphant than victories. ~Michel de Montaigne


Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God. ~Charles Horton Cooley


Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, "I have failed three times," and what happens when he says, "I am a failure." ~S.I. Hayakawa


A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience. ~Elbert Hubbard


No man is a failure who is enjoying life. ~William Feather


Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently. ~Henry Ford


Because a fellow has failed once or twice or a dozen times, you don't want to set him down as a failure till he's dead or loses his courage. ~George Horace Lorimer


You can't have any successes unless you can accept failure. ~George Cukor


There is no failure. Only feedback. ~Robert Allen


Failure changes for the better, success for the worse. ~Lucius Annaeus Seneca


There is much to be said for failure. It is more interesting than success. ~Max Beerbohm, Mainly on the Air, 1946


You always pass failure on your way to success. ~Mickey Rooney


Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure. ~Kenneth Boudling


Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits. ~Robert Louis Stevenson


It is a mistake to suppose that people succeed through success; they often succeed through failures. ~Author Unknown


The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed. ~Lloyd Jones

Quotations about Attitude

If you don't think every day is a good day, just try missing one. ~Cavett Robert


It's so hard when I have to, and so easy when I want to. ~Annie Gottlier


Oh, my friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts. It's what you do with what you have left. ~Hubert Humphrey


Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference. ~Winston Churchill


Every day may not be good, but there's something good in every day. ~Author Unknown


There are exactly as many special occasions in life as we choose to celebrate. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and silly people. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. ~George Santayana


Happiness is an attitude. We either make ourselves miserable, or happy and strong. The amount of work is the same. ~Francesca Reigler


If you don't like something change it; if you can't change it, change the way you think about it. ~Mary Engelbreit


So often time it happens, we all live our life in chains, and we never even know we have the key. ~The Eagles, "Already Gone"


He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts. ~Samuel Johnson


I've decided that the stuff falling through the cracks is confetti and I'm having a party! ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com


The only people who find what they are looking for in life are the fault finders. ~Foster's Law


Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures. ~H. Jackson Brown, Jr., Life's Little Instruction Book


Every thought is a seed. If you plant crab apples, don't count on harvesting Golden Delicious. ~Bill Meyer


We find things where we look for them, which is why I never look for a golf ball out of bounds. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. ~Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan, 1893


Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed. ~Attributed to both Jonathan Swift and Benjamin Franklin


To be upset over what you don't have is to waste what you do have. ~Ken S. Keyes, Jr., Handbook to Higher Consciousness


Defeat is not bitter unless you swallow it. ~Joe Clark


The only disability in life is a bad attitude. ~Scott Hamilton


If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm. ~Vince Lombardi


My riches consist not in the extent of my possessions, but in the fewness of my wants. ~J. Brotherton


There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it reluctantly. ~Publius Terentius Afer


I don't like that man. I must get to know him better. ~Abraham Lincoln


Just because you're miserable doesn't mean you can't enjoy your life. ~Annette Goodheart


In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer. ~Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays


Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so, let us all be thankful. ~Buddha


There are no menial jobs, only menial attitudes. ~William J. Bennett, The Book of Virtues


I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow. ~Abraham Lincoln


Being in a good frame of mind helps keep one in the picture of health. ~Author Unknown


Got no checkbooks, got no banks,
Still I'd like to express my thanks -
I got the sun in the morning and the moon at night.
~Irving Berlin, "I Got the Sun in the Morning," 1946


To everyone is given the key to heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell. ~Ancient Proverb


Make your optimism come true. ~Author Unknown


True contentment depends not upon what we have; a tub was large enough for Diogenes, but a world was too little for Alexander. ~Charles Caleb Colton


To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it. ~Confucius


I don't think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains. ~Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl


The best things in life are unexpected - because there were no expectations. ~Eli Khamarov, Surviving on Planet Reebok


Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises.
~William Shakespeare


Affectation is a greater enemy to the face than smallpox. ~English Proverb


Say you are well, or all is well with you,
And God shall hear your words and make them true.
~Ella Wheeler Wilcox


A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body - the wishbone. ~Robert Frost


If we shall take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes. ~William James


Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye. ~Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818


When you feel dog tired at night, it may be because you've growled all day long. ~Author Unknown


What is possible? What you will. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Good fortune shies away from gloom. Keep your spirits up. Good things will come to you and you will come to good things. ~Glorie Abelhas
Let me enjoy the earth no less
Because the all-enacting Might
Which fashioned forth its loveliness
Had other aims than my delight.
~Thomas Hardy, Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses, 1909


Whenever you fall, pick something up. ~Oswald Avery


Success is due less to ability than to zeal. ~Charles Buxton


My father's nature turned out no waste product; he had none of that useless stuff in him that lies in heaps near factories. He took his own happiness with him. ~Margot Asquith


Anywhere is paradise; it's up to you. ~Author Unknown


We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them. ~Elbert Hubbard


If my resolution to be a great man was half so strong as it is to despise the shame of being a little one... ~William Cowper


I think, what has this day brought me, and what have I given it? ~Henry Moore


This weary ol' workhorse is a unicorn, my friend. ~Terri Guillemets


I wish I was a glow worm,
A glow worm's never glum.
'Cos how can you be grumpy
When the sun shines out your bum!
~Author Unknown


We plant seeds that will flower as results in our lives, so best to remove the weeds of anger, avarice, envy and doubt... ~Dorothy Day


Sometimes life's Hell. But hey! Whatever gets the marshmallows toasty. ~J. Andrew Helt


I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else. ~Winston Churchill


[W]hat counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight - it's the size of the fight in the dog. ~Dwight Eisenhower, address to Republican National Committee, 31 January 1958, also sometimes attributed to Mark Twain (unverified)


Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. ~Betty Smith


Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune. ~Walt Whitman


No life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it. ~Ellen Glasgow


I have learned to use the word impossible with the greatest caution. ~Wernher von Braun


Where the loser saw barriers, the winner saw hurdles. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Your heart is a sun -
Joy its stars,
Faith a moon, shining in your darkness...
~Terri Guillemets


The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald


There's a saying among prospectors: "Go out looking for one thing, and that's all you'll ever find." ~Robert Flaherty


I've got dreams in hidden places and extra smiles for when I'm blue. ~Author Unknown


The human spirit is stronger than anything that can happen to it. ~C.C. Scott


I am a little deaf, a little blind, a little impotent, and on top of this are two or three abominable infirmities, but nothing destroys my hope. ~Voltaire


The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy. ~Eudora Welty


Being a sex symbol has to do with an attitude, not looks. Most men think it's looks, most women know otherwise. ~Kathleen Turner


Too many people miss the silver lining because they're expecting gold. ~Maurice Setter


We cannot direct the wind but we can adjust the sails. ~Author Unknown


The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong. ~Thomas Carlyle


Misery is a communicable disease. ~Martha Graham


The world is full of cactus, but we don't have to sit on it. ~Will Foley


Optimist: someone who isn't sure whether life is a tragedy or a comedy but is tickled silly just to be in the play. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


If you have the will to win, you have achieved half your success; if you don't, you have achieved half your failure. ~David Ambrose


If the skies fall, one may hope to catch larks. ~Francis Rabelais


For my part I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance. ~Adlai Stevenson


A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes. ~Hugh Downs


Very often a change of self is needed more than a change of scene. ~Arthur Christopher Benson


Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns; I am thankful that thorns have roses. ~Alphonse Karr


If you call a thing bad you do little, if you call a thing good you do much. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


The Kingdom of Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind. ~John Burroughs


The real "it is well" is something I say from the ground, having fallen. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


Since the house is on fire let us warm ourselves. ~Italian Proverb


Reach for the stars, even if you have to stand on a cactus. ~Susan Longacre


I not only bow to the inevitable; I am fortified by it. ~Thornton Wilder


I never really look for anything. What God throws my way comes. I wake up in the morning and whichever way God turns my feet, I go. ~Pearl Bailey


Men who never get carried away should be. ~Malcolm Forbes


Become a possibilitarian. No matter how dark things seem to be or actually are, raise your sights and see possibilities - always see them, for they're always there. ~Norman Vincent Peale


Surrounded by people who love life, you love it too; surrounded by people who don't, you don't. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Physical strength is measured by what we can carry; spiritual by what we can bear. ~Author Unknown


There are souls in this world which have the gift of finding joy everywhere and of leaving it behind them when they go. ~Frederick Faber


We all live under the same sky, but we don't all have the same horizon. ~Konrad Adenauer


We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs. ~Kenneth Clark


The impossible can always be broken down into possibilities. ~Author Unknown


He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn't be done, and he did it.
~Edgar A. Guest, It Couldn't Be Done


Why not learn to enjoy the little things - there are so many of them. ~Author Unknown


Say "Yes" to the seedlings and a giant forest cleaves the sky. Say "Yes" to the universe and the planets become your neighbors. Say "Yes" to dreams of love and freedom. It is the password to utopia. ~Brooks Atkinson, Once Around the Sun, 1951


Positive anything is better than negative thinking. ~Elbert Hubbard


For every day that there is sunshine, there will be days of rain,
it's how we dance within them both that shows our love and pain.
~Joey Tolbert


Either way, things are a lot better - either a lot better than they were or a lot better than they're going to be. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


I am sure that nothing has such a decisive influence upon a man's course as his personal appearance, and not so much his appearance as his belief in its attractiveness or unattractiveness. ~Leo Tolstoy


Be enthusiastic. Remember the placebo effect - 30% of medicine is showbiz. ~Ronald Spark


An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. ~G.K. Chesterton, "On Running After One's Hat," All Things Considered, 1908


It is no use to grumble and complain;
It's just as cheap and easy to rejoice;
When God sorts out the weather and sends rain -
Why, rain's my choice.
~James Whitcomb Riley


Impossible is a word only to be found in the dictionary of fools. ~Napoleon


Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out. ~Art Linkletter


I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. ~Galileo Galilei


Heaven is under our feet, as well as over our heads. ~Henry David Thoreau


A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world; everyone you meet is your mirror. ~Ken Keyes, Jr.


Is life so wretched? Isn't it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddled? You are the one who must grow up. ~Dag Hammarskjold


The man who has no inner life is a slave to his surroundings. ~Henri Frédéric Amiel


Toughness is in the soul and spirit, not in muscles. ~Alex Karras


It isn't our position but our disposition which makes us happy. ~Author Unknown


Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you. ~Maori Proverb


Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky. ~Rabindranath Tagore


Some days there won't be a song in your heart. Sing anyway. ~Emory Austin


Mind is everything. Muscle - pieces of rubber. All that I am, I am because of my mind. ~Paavo Nurmi


Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations. ~Edward de Bono, Observer, 12 June 1977


Anywhere you go liking everyone, everyone will be likeable. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Worship," The Conduct of Life, 1860


People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them. ~Epictetus


Swallow a toad in the morning and you will encounter nothing more disgusting the rest of the day. ~Nicholas Chamfort


A cloudy day is no match for a sunny disposition. ~William Arthur Ward


I have found that if you love life, life will love you back. ~Arthur Rubinstein


There are two types of people - those who come into a room and say, "Well, here I am!" and those who come in and say, "Ah, there you are." ~Frederick L. Collins


Consider how much more you often suffer from your anger and grief, than from those very things for which you are angry and grieved. ~Marcus Antonius


You shouldn't say it is not good. You should say, you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe. ~James Whistler


"It's snowing still," said Eeyore gloomily. "So it is." "And freezing." "Is it?" "Yes," said Eeyore. "However," he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately." ~A.A. Milne


Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise. ~Alice Walker


Those who wish to sing, always find a song. ~Swedish Proverb


You must start with a positive attitude or you will surely end without one. ~Carrie Latet


So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity. ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden


Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come. ~Chinese Proverb


Nothing is interesting if you're not interested. ~Helen MacInness


We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. ~Joseph Campbell


Excellence is not a skill. It is an attitude. ~Ralph Marston

Quotations about Death

Gaily I lived as ease and nature taught,
And spent my little life without a thought,
And am amazed that Death, that tyrant grim,
Should think of me, who never thought of him.
~René Francois Regnier


The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. ~Mark Twain


We cannot banish dangers, but we can banish fears. We must not demean life by standing in awe of death. ~David Sarnoff


Men fear Death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other. ~Francis Bacon, Essays


If you spend all your time worrying about dying, living isn't going to be much fun. ~From the television show Roseanne


Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live. ~Henry Van Dyke


He who doesn't fear death dies only once. ~Giovanni Falcone


People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad. ~Marcel Proust


Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me.
The Carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality
~Emily Dickinson


A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man. ~Percival Arland Ussher


The idea is to die young as late as possible. ~Ashley Montagu


'Tis very certain the desire of life prolongs it. ~Lord Byron


No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow. ~Euripides


Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody. ~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1945


While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die. ~Leonardo Da Vinci


Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it. ~Alice Walker


I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived. ~Willa Cather


Death is a distant rumor to the young. ~Andrew A. Rooney


A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own. ~Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain


There are so many little dyings that it doesn't matter which of them is death. ~Kenneth Patchen


If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death. ~Charles Sanders Peirce


Death, the sable smoke where vanishes the flame. ~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage


God himself took a day to rest in, and a good man's grave is his Sabbath. ~John Donne


The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity. ~Seneca


Years, following years, steal something every day;
At last they steal us from ourselves away.
~Horace


Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life. ~Albert Einstein


Death may be the greatest of all human blessings. ~Socrates


In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight....
Not people die but worlds die in them.
~Yevgeny Yevtushenko, "People"


Death never takes the wise man by surprise; He is always ready to go. ~Jean de La Fontaine


Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time. ~Attributed to George Carlin


Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death. ~Erik H. Erikson


Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. ~Susan Ertz, Anger in the Sky


Death is a delightful hiding place for weary men. ~Herodotus


We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance. ~Marcel Proust


Thou art not dead! Thou art the whole
Of life that quickens in the sod.
~Charles Hanson Towne


Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation. ~Tennessee Williams, "The Rose Tattoo"


We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love. ~Madame de Stael
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live. ~Norman Cousins


The death of someone we know always reminds us that we are still alive - perhaps for some purpose which we ought to re-examine. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Death is a debt we all must pay. ~Euripides


They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person. ~Arthur Schopenhauer


He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery


People living deeply have no fear of death. ~Anaiïs Nin, Diary, 1967


To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there. ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Expeditions of an Untimely Man


Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in. ~George Bernard Shaw


I knew a man who once said, "death smiles at us all; all a man can do is smile back." ~From the movie Gladiator


Our birth is nothing but our death begun. ~Edward Young, Night Thoughts


I want a priest, a rabbi, and a Protestant clergyman. I want to hedge my bets. ~Wilson Mizner


No one knows whether death is really the greatest blessing a man can have, but they fear it is the greatest curse, as if they knew well. ~Plato


For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? ~Kahlil Gibran, from "The Prophet" (Thanks, Roxalanne)


Life and death are balanced on the edge of a razor. ~Homer, Iliad


Death is the surest calculation that can be made. ~Ludwig Büchner, Force and Matter


Suicide is man's way of telling God, "You can't fire me - I quit." ~Bill Maher, on Politically Incorrect, 1995


Suicide is... the sincerest form of criticism life gets. ~Wilfred Sheed, The Good Word, 1978


After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure. ~J.K. Rowling


You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. ~The Epic of Gilgamesh


My soul is full of whispered song;
My blindness is my sight;
The shadows that I feared so long
Are all alive with light.
~Alice Cary, Dying Hymn


God is growing bitter, He envies man his mortality. ~Jacques Rigaut, Pensées


Embalm, v.: To cheat vegetation by locking up the gases upon which it feeds. By embalming their dead and thereby deranging the natural balance between animal and vegetable life, the Egyptians made their once fertile and populous country barren and incapable of supporting more than a meagre crew. The modern metallic burial casket is a step in the same direction, and many a dead man who ought now to be ornamenting his neighbor's lawn as a tree, or enriching his table as a bunch of radishes, is doomed to a long inutility. We shall get him after awhile if we are spared, but in the meantime the violet and the rose are languishing for a nibble at his glutaeus maximus. ~Ambrose Bierce


He first deceas'd; She for a little tri'd
To live without him: lik'd it not, and di'd.
~Henry Worton


The goal of all life is death. ~Sigmund Freud


Death is a release from the impressions of sense, and from impulses that make us their puppets, from the vagaries of the mind, and the hard service of the flesh. ~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations


For death,
Now I know, is that first breath
Which our souls draw when we enter
Life, which is of all life center.
~Edwin Arnold


When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever.... I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it. ~H.L. Mencken


Oh, for the time when I shall sleep
Without identity.
~Emily Bronte


The graveyards are full of indispensable men. ~Charles de Gaulle


And they die an equal death - the idler and the man of mighty deeds. ~Homer, Iliad


Name me no names for my disease,
With uninforming breath;
I tell you I am none of these,
But homesick unto death.
~Witter Bynner, "The Patient to the Doctors"


Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident - It is as common as life. ~Henry David Thoreau, 11 March 1842, letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson


Someday I'll be a weather-beaten skull resting on a grass pillow,
Serenaded by a stray bird or two.
Kings and commoners end up the same,
No more enduring than last night's dream.
~Ryokan


To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it. ~C.G. Jung


Death a friend that alone can bring the peace his treasures cannot purchase, and remove the pain his physicians cannot cure. ~Mortimer Collins


Death is patiently making my mask as I sleep. Each morning I awake to discover in the corners of my eyes the small tears of his wax. ~Philip Dow


For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity. ~William Penn


Paradise -
I see flowers
from the cottage where I lie.
~Yaitsu's death poem, 1807


Old persons are sometimes as unwilling to die as tired-out children are to say good night and go to bed. ~Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu


As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death. ~Leonardo da Vinci


On a large enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero. ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club


God made death so we'd know when to stop. ~Steven Stiles


Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. ~Albert Einstein


There is only one ultimate and effectual preventive for the maladies to which flesh is heir, and that is death. ~Harvey Cushing


A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist. ~Stewart Alsop


I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death. ~Thomas Browne, An Essay on Death


The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you'll grow out of it. ~Doris Day


Death is a low chemical trick played on everybody except sequoia trees. ~J.J. Furnas


Oh, may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again.
~George Eliot, The Choir Invisible


Die, v.: To stop sinning suddenly. ~Elbert Hubbard


I intend to live forever. So far, so good. ~Steven Wright


I wouldn't mind dying - it's the business of having to stay dead that scares the shit out of me. ~R. Geis


You can be a king or a street sweeper,
but everybody dances with the Grim Reaper.
~Robert Alton Harris


Death is life's way of telling you you're fired. ~Author Unknown


Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life. ~John Muir