With all the fine writing we offer here at Black Midnight, I thought it was about time we also offer some work from the masters. The "Quotables" room is just the beginning. Here you will find selected quotes from some of the best known people of the world. Right now the quotes aren't in any particular order, so please read through them. You may find inspiration. If there is a quote you like but don't see it here, please, feel free to email it to me by using the email button on the main page. Thanks for stopping by.




"One showing is worth a thousand sayings." Zen Proverb

"No man's knowledge can go beyond his experience." John Locke

"Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style." Jonathan Swift

"To err is human, to forgive is divine." Alexander Pope

"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." Alexander Pope

"The paths of glory lead but to the grave." Thomas Grey

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." John Donne

"Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind." John Donne

"One half the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other." Jane Austen

"‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty' - that is all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know." John Keats

"Youth is a blunder, manhood a struggle; old age a regret." Benjamin Disraeli

"You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side." William E. Gladstone

"Because God's gifts puts man's best dreams to shame." Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"You can't hold a man down without staying down with him." Booker T. Washington

"Never the time and the place
And the loved one all together!" Robert Browning

"Familiar acts are beautiful through love." Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Life is a game that mus be played." Edwin Arlington Robinson

"The game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as playing a poor hand." H.T. Leslie

"Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons." Thomas Hardy

"We know nothing of tomorrow, our business is to be good and happy today." Sydney Smith

"Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got." Janis Joplin

"Heaven never helps the men who will not act." Sophocles

"Never mistake motion for action." Ernest Hemingway

"The most effective way to cope with change is to help create it." L.W. Lynett

"Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend." Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The Mind has a Thousand Eyes, And the Heart but One." Francis Bourdillon

"When you do the common things of life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world."
George Washington Carver

"There's no fool like an old fool - he's had more experience." Confucius

"Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for awhile and leave footprints on our hearts. And we are never, ever the same." Unknown

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen, nor touched...but are felt in the heart." Helen Keller

"Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused." Anonymous

"To know someone here or there with whom you can feel there is understanding in spite of distances or thoughts expressed ~ That can make life a garden." Goethe

"A friend is a gift you give yourself." Robert Louis Stevenson

"If you have it [love], you don't need to have anything else, and if you don't have it, it doesn't matter much what else you have." Sir James M. Barrie

"Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart." Confucious

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." Martin Luther King Jr.

"We must use time creatively and forever realize that time is always hope to do great things." Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them." Martin Luther King, Jr.

"In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." Martin Luther King Jr.

"If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live." Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love." Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Man was born into barbarism when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another's flesh." Martin Luther King, Jr.

"I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me." Hunter S. Thompson

"At last I know what love is really like." Virgil

"Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you." Aldous Huxley

"Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example." Mark Twain

"I come like Water, and like Wind I go." Edward Fitzgerald

"Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced." Leo Tolstoy

"Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature." Tom Robbins

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp -- or what's a heaven for?" Robert Browning

"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons." T.S. Eliot

"Make voyages! Attempt them...there's nothing else." Tennessee Williams

"A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day." Emily Dickenson

"Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes." Oscar Wilde

"Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for example." John Ruskin (The Stones of Venice, I)

"I always prefer to believe the best of everybody - it saves so much trouble." Rudyard Kipling

"The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now." James Baldwin

"I'm a simple man. All I want is enough sleep for two normal men, enough whiskey for three, and enough women for four." Joel Rosenberg (The Warrior Lives)

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

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell." Aldous Huxley

"And I am right, And you are right, And all is right as right can be." Sir W.S. Gilbert

"Be not a slave of words." Thomas Carlyle

"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out." Alfred Hitchcock

"Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason." Oscar Wilde

"Evil is whatever distracts." Franz Kafka

"Men do not invent Myths. They only invent fables, and tell lies. True Myths create themselves, and find their expression in the men who serve their purpose." Denis Johnston (The Brazen Horn)

"Enjoy yourself. These are the good old days you're going to miss in the years ahead." Unknown

"The most wasted day is that in which we have not laughed." Chamfort

"What's meant to be will always find a way." Trisha Yearwood

"When one door closes, another opens. But we often look so regretfully upon the closed door that we don't see the one that has opened for us." Alexander Graham Bell

"When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on." Thomas Jefferson

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age. Robert Frost

All of the animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it. Anonymous

"Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint you can at it." Danny Kaye

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." John Lennon

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

"Live every day as if it were your last and then some day you'll be right." Anonymous

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

"There are always two choices, two paths to take. One is easy. And its only reward is that it's easy." Unknown

"Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it." Tallulah Bankhead

"What we see depends mainly on what we look for." John Lubbock

"It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards." Soren Kierkegaard

"Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save." Will Rogers

"You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you don't trust enough." Frank Crane

"When you spend your life worrying about how other people feel, you lose track of how you feel." Unknown

"Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else." Ogden Nash

"Memory is not so brilliant as hope, but it is more beautiful, and a thousand times as true." Prentice

"Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men." Kin Hubbard

"Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep." Fran Lebowitz

"The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it." Carl Jung

"I can resist everything except temptation." Oscar Wilde

"Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you." Elbert Hubard

"A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words." Unknown

"But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life; and thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine." Thomas Jefferson

"A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I get by with a little help from my friends." John Lennon

"The better part of one's life consists of his friendships." Abraham Lincoln

"Words are easy, like the wind; Faithful friends are hard to find." William Shakespeare

"We know what we are, but not what we may be." William Shakespeare

"The voice of parents is the voice of gods, for to their children they are heaven's lieutenants." William Shakespeare

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." William Shakespeare

"This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man." Shakespeare

"I had rather have a fool make me merry, than experience make me sad." William Shakespeare