Spirituality is basically our relationship with reality.
Chandra Patel
Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next
1. "The moment of victory is much too short to live for that and nothing else."
Martina Navratilova
Categories: Success and Fame
2. "The most exciting happiness is the happiness generated by forces beyond your control."
Ogden Nash, "I’m a Stranger Here Myself"
Categories: Happiness
3. "Someone who always has to lie discovers that every one of his lies is true."
Elias Canetti, "The Secret Heart Of The Clock"
Categories: Truth and Falsity
4. "It is the personality of the mistress that the home expresses. Men are forever guests in our homes, no matter how much happiness they may find there."
Elsie de Wolfe, "The House in Good Taste"
Categories: Family and Loneliness -:- Woman and Man
5. "Today’s literature: prescriptions written by patients."
Karl Kraus, "Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths"
Categories: Art and Culture -:- Health and Alcohol
6. "You have not converted a man because you have silenced him."
John Morley
Categories: Various
7. "When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language."
John Donne, "Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions"
Categories: Life and Death
8. "A man is original when he speaks the truth that has always been known to all good men. What appears in newspapers is often new but seldom true."
Patrick Kavanagh, "Collected Prose"
Categories: Truth and Falsity
9. "The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none."
Thomas Carlyle, "Heroes and Hero-Worship"
Categories: Defeates and Mistakes
10. "In England there are sixty different religions, and only one sauce."
Francesco Caracciolo
Categories: God and Religion -:- History and Nations
11. "God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Conduct of Life"
Categories: God and Religion
12. "God made integers, all else is the work of man."
Leopold Kronecker
Categories: Science and Technology
13. "The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style."
Vladimir Nabokov
Categories: Art and Culture
14. "Men never do evil so fully and cheerfully as when we do it out of conscience."
Blaise Pascal, "Pensées"
Categories: Sin and Conscience -:- Good and Evil
15. "Everything in the world may be endured except continued prosperity."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Categories: Richness and Money -:- Success and Fame
16. "A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards."
Karl Kraus, "Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths"
Categories: History and Nations
17. "Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love."
Ellen Key, "The Morality of Woman"
18. "Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth."
Denis Diderot, "Selected Writings"
Categories: Talent and Genius
19. "Make friends with the angels, who though invisible are always with you.... Often invoke them, constantly praise them, and make good use of their help and assistance in all your temporal and spiritual affairs."
St. Francis de Sales, "Introduction to the Devout Life"
Categories: God and Religion
20. "Confession is always weakness. The grave soul keeps its own secrets, and takes its own punishment in silence."
Dorothy Dix
Categories: Sin and Conscience -:- Various
21. "The trouble with being punctual is that nobody's there to appreciate it."
Franklin P. Jones
Categories: Manners and Ethics -:- Time and Passing
22. "The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century."
E. L. Doctorow
Categories: Art and Culture
23. "An Irishman’s heart is nothing but his imagination."
George Bernard Shaw, "John Bull’s Other Island"
Categories: History and Nations -:- Reality and Imagination
24. "Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not real."
George Bernard Shaw, "John Bull’s Other Island"
Categories: Dreams and Desires -:- Reality and Imagination
25. "The House of Commons starts its proceedings with a prayer. The chaplain looks at the assembled members with their varied intelligence and then prays for the country."
Alfred Thompson, Baron Denning
Categories: Intellect, Judgement -:- Politics and Diplomacy
26. "It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative."
John Burroughs
Categories: Intellect, Judgement
27. "The trouble with foreign languages is, you have to think before your speak."
Swedish proverb
Categories: Intellect, Judgement -:- Oration and Silence -:- Question and Problem
28. "The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder."
Alfred Hitchcock
Categories: Art and Culture
29. "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"
Categories: Various -:- Wisdom and Stupidity
30. "This mortal air is one wide pestilence, that kills us all at last."
Herman Melville, "Mardi"
Categories: Life and Death -:- Nature and Animals
31. "There has been a comparatively greater proportion of good queens, than of good kings."
Sarah M. Grimke, "Letters on the Equality of the Sexes"
Categories: Authority, Government -:- History and Nations -:- Woman and Man
32. "Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers."
Mignon McLaughin, "The Neurotic’s Notebook"
Categories: Manners and Ethics -:- Various
33. "A Country is not a mere territory; the particular territory is only its foundation. The Country is the idea which rises upon that foundation; it is the sentiment of love, the sense of fellowship which binds together all the sons of that territory."
Giuseppe Mazzini
Categories: Patriotism
34. "The war was a mirror; it reflected man’s every virtue and every vice, and if you looked closely, like an artist at his drawings, it showed up both with unusual clarity."
George Grosz, "A Small Yes and a Big No"
Categories: Human -:- Peace and War
35. "A spoon does not know the taste of soup, nor a learned fool the taste of wisdom."
Welsh proverb
Categories: Wisdom and Stupidity
36. "Middle age is when you’ve met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else."
Ogden Nash
Categories: Memory -:- Youth and Age
37. "Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!"
Iris Murdoch, "The Book and the Brotherhood"
Categories: Science and Technology
38. "Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree."
Blaise Pascal, "Pensées"
Categories: God and Religion
39. "Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad."
Denis Diderot, "Selected Writings"
Categories: Manners and Ethics -:- Good and Evil
40. "If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters."
Nora Ephron
Categories: Various
41. "Each person is a graveyard of his thoughts."
Robert Musil
Categories: Various
42. "Life is the desert, life the solitude,
Death joins us to the great majority."
Edward Young, "The Revenge"
Categories: Family and Loneliness -:- Life and Death
43. "Fashion is something that goes in one year and out the other."
(?)
Categories: Manners and Ethics
44. "There is only one passion, the passion for happiness."
Denis Diderot
Categories: Dreams and Desires -:- Happiness
45. "A book is like a child: it is easier to bring it into the world than to control it when it is launched there."
George Bernard Shaw
Categories: Art and Culture -:- Family and Loneliness
46. "Give a man health and a course to steer; and he’ll never stop to trouble about whether he’s happy or not."
George Bernard Shaw, "Captain Brassbound's Conversion"
Categories: Happiness
47. "There are two things necessary to Salvation.... Money and gunpowder."
George Bernard Shaw, "Major Barbara"
Categories: Various
48. "A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters."
Angela Carter, "Expletives Deleted"
Categories: Art and Culture
49. "Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal."
Françoise Sagan
Categories: Art and Culture
50. "Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman’s entire but decisive advantage. Through man’s passions, nature has given man into woman’s hands, and the woman who does not know how to make him her subject, her slave, her toy, and how to betray him with a smile in the end is not wise."
Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch, "Venus in Furs"
Categories: Dreams and Desires -:- Woman and Man
2007, collected and compiled by Kazimierz Matan
Layout based on template by Darren Hester, DesignsByDarren.com
