The only joy in the world is to begin.
~Pavese~
Dreams have as much influence as actions.
~Mallarme~
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
~Santayana~
How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares,
were there any danger of their coming true.
~L. P. Smith~
No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved.
~Mignon McLaughlin~
The best is the enemy of the good.
~Voltaire~
Success has always been a great liar.
~Nietzsche~
Force is not a remedy.
~Bright~
What is now proved was once only imagined.
~Blake~
Error itself may be happy chance.
~Whitehead~
The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.
~Gracian~
Man is what he believes.
~Chekhov~
Be careful how you interpret the world: it is like that.
~Heller~
It is the triumph of reason to get on well
with those who possess none.
~Voltaire~
Thinking is more interesting than knowing,
but less interesting than looking.
~Goethe~
We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.
~Thoreau~
Once a rigid idea of duty has got inside a narrow mind,
it can never again get out.
~Joubert~
In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world,
not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
~Osler~
When he was expected to use his mind, he felt like a right-handed person
who has to do something with his left.
~Lichtenberg~
It is useless to close the gates against ideas; they overleap them.
~Metternich~
The dispensing of injustice is always in the right hands.
~Lec~
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.
~Saki~
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
~Henry Adams~
A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it,
you can't expect an apostle to look out.
~Lichtenberg~
Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.
~Peguy~
Systems die: instincts remain.
~O. W. Holmes, Jr.~
The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.
~L. P. Smith~
Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that they do not make more clear.
~Joubert~
It is harder to hide feelings we have than to feign those we lack.
~La Rochefoucauld~
A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap,
never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.
~Proust~
Imagination is nature's equal, sensuality her slave.
~Goethe~
Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self.
~Hoffer~
To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.
~Hazlitt~
His passions make man live, his wisdom merely makes him last.
~Chamfort~
It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.
~Emerson~
One's real life is often the life that one does not lead.
~Wilde~
If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy;
but we want to be happier than other people,
which is almost always difficult,
since we think them happier than they are.
~Montesquieu~
The ardor chills us which we do not share.
~Patmore~
Among all human constructions the only ones
that avoid the dissolving hands of time are castles in the air.
~De Roberto~
To describe happiness is to diminish it.
~Stendahl~
The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.
~Marx~
We are never so happy or so unhappy as we think.
~La Rochefoucauld~
The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
~Carlyle~
Anger is never without an argument, but seldom with a good one.
~Halifax~
Laughter is regional: a smile extends over the whole face.
~Chazal~
Life is too short to be small.
~Disraeli~
Fine minds are seldom fine souls.
~Richter~
People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have, for example, freedom of thought;
instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation.
~Kierkegaard~
Simply the thing I am shall make me live.
~Shakespeare~
Life is not a spectacle or feast; it is a predicament.
~Santayana~
To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct is for it.
~Samuel Butler II~
You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
~Eleanor Roosevelt~
You can close your eyes to reality, but not to memories.
~Lec~
Our very life depends on everythings recurring till we answer from within.
The thousandth time may prove the charm.
~Robert Frost~
We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.
~Goethe~
Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
~Doris Lessing~
A friend is a gift you give yourself.
~Robert Louis Stevenson~
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
~Helen Keller~
In the province of the mind what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true.
~John Lilly~
Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.
~Anna Freud~
Sanity is a cozy lie.
~Susan Sontag~
I never cease being dumbfounded by the unbelievable things people believe.
~Leo Rosten~
I am a deeply superficial person.
~Andy Warhol~
Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.
~Ernestine Ulmer~
I know but one freedom, and that is the freedom of the mind.
~Antoine de Saint Exupery~
Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps.
~Emo Phillips~
Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
~William Safire~
If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.
~Kingsley Amis~
A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday, but never remembers her age.
~Robert Frost~
I think of a hero as someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.
~Bob Dylan~
One cannot always be laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.
~Jane Austen~
A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.
~Doug Larsen~
You have wrecked my poor heart
and your own is like flint,
but I'll have the last word...
and I'll have it in print.
~Rebecca McCann~