To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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1. "Of all the idiots I have met in my life, and the Lord knows they have not been few or little, I think that I have been the biggest."
Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Other categories: Intellect, Judgement
2. "A Letter always seemed to me like Immortality, for is it not the Mind alone, without corporeal friend?"
Emily Dickinson, from her letter to James D. Clark
3. "The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
Lewis Thomas
Other categories: Manners and Ethics
4. "We need God, not in order to understand the why, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore, to give a meaning to the universe."
Miguel de Unamuno, "The Tragic Sense of Life"
Other categories: God and Religion
5. "You have not converted a man because you have silenced him."
John Morley
6. "Confession is always weakness. The grave soul keeps its own secrets, and takes its own punishment in silence."
Dorothy Dix
Other categories: Sin and Conscience
7. "Lots of white people think black people are stupid. They are stupid themselves for thinking so, but regulation will not make them smarter."
Stephen Carter, "Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby"
Other categories: Wisdom and Stupidity
8. "Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers."
Mignon McLaughin, "The Neurotic’s Notebook"
Other categories: Manners and Ethics
9. "If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters."
Nora Ephron
10. "Each person is a graveyard of his thoughts."
Robert Musil
11. "There are two things necessary to Salvation.... Money and gunpowder."
George Bernard Shaw, "Major Barbara"
12. "Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example."
Mark Twain
Other categories: Anger
13. "Dance like it hurts,
Love like you need money,
Work when people are watching."
Scott Adams
14. "The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million."
Arthur Koestler, "Darkness at Noon"
Other categories: Human
15. "The shadows of things are greater than themselves; and the more exaggerated the shadow, the more unlike the substance."
Herman Melville, "Mardi"
Other categories: Power and Weakness
16. "If the secret of being a bore is to tell all, the secret of pleasing is to say just enough to be—not understood, but divined."
Rémy De Gourmont, "Selected Writings"
17. "If God lived on earth, people would break his windows."
Jewish proverb
Other categories: God and Religion
18. "The cost of living is going up and the chance of living is going down."
Flip Wilson
Other categories: Life and Death
19. "The road to hell is paved with adverbs."
Stephen King
Other categories: Good and Evil
20. "Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing."
Dave Barry
21. "Society, my dear, is like salt water, good to swim in but hard to swallow."
Arthur Stringer
22. "Criticism is prejudice made plausible."
Henry Louis Mencken
23. "I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it."
Thomas Jefferson
Other categories: Happiness
24. "Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century."
Marshall McLuhan
Other categories: Art and Culture
25. "You cannot have both truth and what you call civilization."
Iris Murdoch, "A Severed Head"
Other categories: Truth and Falsity
26. "Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor."
Arnold Toynbee
Other categories: History and Nations
27. "Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."
Kurt Vonnegut
Other categories: Human
28. "I'm not sure I want popular opinion on my side -- I've noticed those with the most opinions often have the fewest facts."
Bethania McKenstry
Other categories: Intellect, Judgement
29. "The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."
George Bernard Shaw
30. "Behind the phony tinsel of Hollywood lies the real tinsel."
Oscar Levant
Other categories: Success and Fame
31. "To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three men, two of whom are absent."
Robert Copeland
32. "Bureacracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism."
Mary McCarthy, "On the Contrary"
Other categories: Authority, Government
33. "New York will be a great place when they finish it."
local saying
34. "Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly."
Jose Ortega y Gasset, "Notes on the Novel"
Other categories: Talent and Genius
35. "There are two kinds of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won't."
William Least Heat-Moon, "Blue Highways: A Journey into America"
36. "Misfortune is never invited. And it comes and sits at the table without permission and it eats, leaving nothing but bones."
Jacques Roumain
Other categories: Pain and Tears
37. "The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms - hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal."
James Thurber
Other categories: Manners and Ethics
38. "When you stare persistently into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you."
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, "Beyond Good and Evil"
Other categories: Good and Evil
39. "Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual."
Angela Carter
40. "Young children step on your feet, older children step on your heart."
proverb
Other categories: Family and Loneliness
41. "The golden rule is that there are no golden rules."
George Bernard Shaw
42. "Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."
Howard Aiken
43. "Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?"
James Thurber
44. "There are two great pleasures in gambling: that of winning and that of losing."
French proverb
45. "I respect only those who resist me; but I cannot tolerate them."
Charles de Gaulle
46. "Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns."
Willem De Kooning
Other categories: Art and Culture
47. "No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one."
Elbert Green Hubbard
Other categories: Work and Laziness
48. "Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows."
William Shakespeare, "The Tempest"
Other categories: Destiny and Fate
49. "I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true."
Truman Capote
Other categories: Truth and Falsity
50. "A man who finishes a book is always alone when he finishes it."
Nora Ephron, "Scribble Scrabble"
Other categories: Family and Loneliness
2007, collected and compiled by Kazimierz Matan
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