"All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them."

Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)

Sorrow and Nostalgia

"Let justice be done, though the world perish."

Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor (his motto)

Justice

"If God lived on earth, people would break his windows."

Jewish Proverbs

God and Religion

Manners and Ethics

"Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water."

W. C. Fields

Health and Alcohol

"If you don't have a dream how you gonna have a dream come true?"

Oscar Hammerstein from song "Happy Talk"

Dreams and Desires

"Follow the fellow who follows a dream."

E.Y. Harburg "Finian's Rainbow"

Dreams and Desires

"The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things."

Rainer Maria Rilke

Defeates and Mistakes

Life and Death

"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Dreams and Desires

Knowledge, Ignorance

"Big pay and little responsibility are circumstances seldom found together."

Napoleon Hill

Richness and Money

Work and Laziness

"The arts are the salt of the earth; as salt relates to food, the arts relate to technology."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe "Wilhelm Meister's Travels"

Art and Culture

Science and Technology

"It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people."

Logan Pearsall Smith

Richness and Money

"Refrain from asking what going to happen tomorrow, and everyday that fortune grants you, count as gain."

Horace

Happiness

Time and Passing

"Study men, not historians."

Harry S. Truman

Education

"I'm optimistic about the future, but not about the future of this civilization. I'm optimistic about the civilization which will replace this one."

James Baldwin

Human

Various

"Meteorology has ever been an apple of contention, as if the violent commotions of the atmosphere induced a sympathetic effect on the minds of those who have attempted to study them."

Joseph Henry

Science and Technology

Various

"In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is."

Henry Louis Mencken "A Mencken Chrestomathy"

Love

Woman and Man

"I am never in such good company as when I am alone; I am never so busy as when I have nothing to do."

Scipio Africanus

Family and Loneliness

Work and Laziness

"Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don't even arise."

Jean Baudrillard "Cool Memories"

Knowledge, Ignorance

Question and Problem

Science and Technology

"A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow."

Click if you know the author

Time and Passing

"There is enough in the world for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed."

Frank Buchman "Remaking the World"

Egoism

Justice

Richness and Money

"In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world."

Federico García Lorca

Life and Death

"Few things are as painful as the truth realized too late."

Click if you know the author

Sorrow and Nostalgia

Truth and Falsity

"I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants."

A. Whitney Brown

Nature and Animals

Various

"Honor is like an island, rugged and without shores; once we have left it, we can never return."

Nicolas Boileau

Manners and Ethics

Various

"Man is not the creature of circumstance. Circumstances are the creatures of men."

Benjamin Disraeli

Human

Various

"There is no sanctuary of virtue like home."

Edward Everett

Family and Loneliness

"If you can actually count your money you are not really a rich man."

J. Paul Getty

Richness and Money

"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be."

Lao-tse

Destiny and Fate

Human

Success and Fame

"Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."

Abraham Lincoln

Happiness

"There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages."

Mark Twain "Following the Equator"

History and Nations

Human

"Remorse is a violent dyspepsia of the mind."

Ogden Nash "I'm a Stranger Here Myself"

Sin and Conscience

"Never try to make anyone like yourself. You know, and God knows, that one of you is enough."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Human

"A paranoid-schizophrenic is a guy who just found out what's going on."

William S. Burroughs

Health and Alcohol

Normality and Madness

"Winning isn't everything, but it beats anything in second place."

William Cullen Bryant

Success and Fame

"Hope is generally a wrong guide, though it is good company along the way."

George Savile

Optimism and Hope

"We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature."

Edmund Burke

Law and Crime

Nature and Animals

"I never think of the future - it comes soon enough."

Albert Einstein

Time and Passing

"France may claim the happiest marriages in the world, but the happiest divorces in the world are "made in America.""

Helen Rowland "A Guide to Men"

History and Nations

Manners and Ethics

Marriage

"The hardest task of a girl's life, nowadays, is to prove to a man that his intentions are serious."

Helen Rowland "A Guide to Men"

Manners and Ethics

Woman and Man

"Everything ends this way in France. Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindlings, affairs of state - everything is a pretext for a good dinner."

Jean Anouilh "Cécile"

Health and Alcohol

History and Nations

"France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams."

Thomas Carlyle "History of the French Revolution"

Authority, Government

History and Nations

Wit and Humor

"The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth."

Gaston Bachelard

Truth and Falsity

"If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence."

Charles Bukowski

Friendship and Hostility

"We keep seeking our angel, demons come unsought."

Agnieszka Lisak

Good and Evil

Power and Weakness

Sorrow and Nostalgia

"Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Authority, Government

"Fortune sides with he who dares."

Virgil

Courage and Fear

Success and Fame

"America is a mistake, a giant mistake."

Sigmund Freud

Defeates and Mistakes

History and Nations

"All the powers of imagination combine in hypochondria."

Mason Cooley "City Aphorisms"

Reality and Imagination