or....I couldn't have said it better myself.
...I must be desperate using these old chestnuts. I used to collect quotations when I took life more seriously than I do now.
To nobody can you communicate in words and teachings, what happened to you in your hour of enlightenment. (Hermann Hesse : Siddartha)
A man's balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs. (James Baldwin : No name in the street.)
It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day. (James Baldwin : No name in the street.)
We forget that Socrates was famed for wisdom not because he was omniscient but because he realised at the age of 70 that he still knew nothing. (Robert Lynd)
You're only as young as the woman you feel. (Grouch Marx)
...if there is a sin against life, it is not perhaps so much to despair of life, as to hope for another life and to lose sight of the implacable grandeur of this one. (Albert Camus : Summer in Algiers.)
Things are beautiful if you love them. (Jean Anouilh)
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time. (Albert Camus)
A blind man will not thank you for a looking-glass. (Thomas Fuller)
A man is known by the company his mind keeps. (T B Aldrich)
"All is passing". When one realises this, he sits loose to this world of sorrow : This is the way of purity. (Gautama Buddha)
Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself. (Erich Fromm)
He who neglects to drink at the spring of experience is likely to die of thirst in the desert of experience. (Ling Po)
People can die of mere imagination. (Chaucer)
He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. (Ecclesiastes 1.18)
Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears. (Albert Camus)
Birth, and copulation, and death. That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks. (T S Eliot)
To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour. (William Blake)
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. (William Blake)
Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. (G K Chesterton)
The life is so short, the craft so long to learn. (Hippocrates)
A man, sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair. (Samuel Johnson)
The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited ; he must not make himself a nuisance to others. (John Stuart Mill)
The only person who behaved sensibly was my tailor ; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, whilst all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me. (George Bernard Shaw)
The price of tapping water into every house is that no one values water anymore. (John Fowles : The Aristos)
Noise Killeth Thought. (Friedrich Nietzsche : Thus Spake Zarathustra)
A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night and in between he does what he wants to. (Bob Dylan)
I did try to find a heresy of my own ; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy. (G K Chesterton : Orthodoxy)
Absence is to love as wind is to fire : It extinguishes the small, it inflames the great. (Comte de Bussy Rabutin)
The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood. (Jean Cocteau)
Extraordinary how potent cheap music is. (Noel Coward)
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's yourself. (Aldous Huxley)
Be happy while y'er leevin', For y'er a lang time deid. (Scottish Motto)
In the fight between you and the world, back the world. (Franz Kafka)
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing ; while others judge us by what we already have done. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
The terrible thing about the truth is that you find it. (de Gourmant)
The way to be a bore is to say everything. (Voltaire)
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Here are some rhymes I came across that amuse me :
There was a young man of Cadiz
who inferred that life is what it is ;
For he early had learnt,
if it were what it weren't,
it could not be that what it is.
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The centipede was happy quite,
until the toad in fun
Said "Pray tell which leg goes after which ?"
And worked her mind to such a pitch
She lay distracted in the ditch
Considering how to run.