"Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation."

Kim Stanley Robinson "Red Mars"

History and Nations

Politics and Diplomacy

"The only way out of today's misery is for people to become worthy of each other's trust."

Albert Schweitzer

Trust

"Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams."

Charles Baudelaire "Artificial Paradise"

Intellect, Judgement

Reality and Imagination

"Women don't make history, they complicate it."

Click if you know the author

History and Nations

Woman and Man

"Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth."

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Truth and Falsity

"Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit."

Elbert Green Hubbard

Wisdom and Stupidity

"Some play at chess, some at cards, some at the Stock Exchange. I prefer to play at Cause and Effect."

Ralph Waldo Emerson "The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson"

Various

"Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think."

Hannah Arendt

Freedom and Servitude

"Time: That which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him."

Herbert Spencer

Time and Passing

"Patriotism ruins history."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

History and Nations

Patriotism

"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of."

Blaise Pascal "Pensées"

Intellect, Judgement

"The artist needs but a roof, a crust of bread, and his easel, and all the rest God gives him in abundance. He must live to paint and not paint to live."

Albert Pinkham Ryder

Art and Culture

"Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent clothing."

Nathaniel Hawthorne "The Marble Faun"

Art and Culture

Manners and Ethics

"If you're not making mistakes, then you're not doing anything. I'm positive that a doer makes mistakes."

John Wooden

Defeates and Mistakes

"Money doesn't like fools but fools love money."

Agnieszka Lisak

Richness and Money

Wisdom and Stupidity

"Anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one."

Benjamin Franklin

Anger

"The hottest hearts are obtained by cats of lonely women."

Lidia Jasinska

Family and Loneliness

Nature and Animals

"The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes. "

Sir Thomas Beecham

Art and Culture

History and Nations

"Liberty is always unfinished business."

Click if you know the author

Freedom and Servitude

"I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am."

Bernard Mannes Baruch

Youth and Age

"There are three sides to any story, my side, his side and the truth."

Click if you know the author

Truth and Falsity

"Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards."

George Orwell "Collected Essays"

Youth and Age

"Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair."

George Burns

Authority, Government

Wisdom and Stupidity

"Don't count your chickens until they've hatched."

Catalan Proverbs

Richness and Money

Various

"Men love women because women are the loveliest things on God's earth. Women love men because chocolate can't mow the lawn."

Guy Browning

Woman and Man

"Nothing has an uglier look to us than reason, when it is not on our side."

George Savile

Intellect, Judgement

"Manners are the shadows of virtues; the momentary display of those qualities which our fellow creatures love, and respect."

Sydney Smith "Sermons"

Manners and Ethics

"Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country."

Bertrand Russell

Patriotism

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit."

Aristotle

Manners and Ethics

Success and Fame

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart."

Helen Keller

Beauty and Ugliness

"Mankind cannot get on without a certain amount of absurdity."

Arthur Schopenhauer

Human

"There's only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I'll get married again."

Clint Eastwood

Happiness

Marriage

"Me got no education, me got inspiration. If I was educated I'd be a damn fool."

Bob Marley

Education

"We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full."

Marcel Proust

Health and Alcohol

Pain and Tears

"Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy."

Robert A. Heinlein "Time Enough for Love"

Education

Family and Loneliness

"A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of."

Jane Austen

Happiness

Richness and Money

"Cause and effect are two sides of one fact."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Various

"Truth never damages a cause that is just."

Mahatma Gandhi "Non-Violence in Peace and War"

Justice

Truth and Falsity

"Every intelligent child is an amateur anthropologist. The first thing such a child notices is that adults don't make sense."

John Leonard

Family and Loneliness

"For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of a Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros."

Ethel Barrymore

Success and Fame

"Poetry [...] is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal - which the reader recognizes as his own."

Salvatore Quasimodo

Art and Culture

"Photography is truth. The cinema is truth 24 times per second."

Godard-Jean-Luc

Science and Technology

Truth and Falsity

"Disappointments should be cremated, not embalmed."

Henry S. Haskings

Defeates and Mistakes

"A country can be judged by the quality of its proverbs."

German Proverbs

History and Nations

Wisdom and Stupidity

"I have often regretted my speech, never my silence."

Publilius Syrus "Sentences"

Oration and Silence

Sorrow and Nostalgia

"At 20 a man is a peacock, at 30 a lion, at 40 a camel, at 50 a serpent, at 60 a dog, at 70 an ape, and at 80 nothing."

Baltasar Gracian "The Art of Worldly Wisdom"

Youth and Age

"The shadows of things are greater than themselves; and the more exaggerated the shadow, the more unlike the substance."

Herman Melville "Mardi"

Power and Weakness

Various

"I don't believe in God, but I miss Him."

Julian Barnes "Nothing to Be Frightened Of"

God and Religion