"One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life."

Sartre-Jean-Paul

Human

Life and Death

"We do not remember days; we remember moments."

Cesare Pavese "The Burning Brand Diaries: 1935-1950"

Memory

"Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us."

Henri Matisse

Happiness

Work and Laziness

"Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins."

Henry Louis Mencken "A Mencken Chrestomathy"

Friendship and Hostility

"Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy."

F. Scott Fitzgerald "The Crack-Up, Notebook E"

Courage and Fear

Various

"To understand someone, find out how he spends his money."

Mason Cooley "City Aphorisms"

Human

Richness and Money

"Money won't buy happiness, but it will pay the salaries of a large research staff to study the problem."

Bill Vaughan

Happiness

Richness and Money

"That which is static and repetitive is boring. That which is dynamic and random is confusing. In between lies art."

John Locke

Art and Culture

"As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold."

Jonathan Swift

Love

"Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear."

Baruch Spinoza "Ethics"

Courage and Fear

Optimism and Hope

"A great portrait is always more a portrait of the painter than of the painted. "

Samuel Butler

Art and Culture

"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them."

George Bernard Shaw

Success and Fame

"Mankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum."

Herbert George Wells

History and Nations

Human

"A thing is only completely our own when it is a thing of joy to us."

Rabindranath Tagore

Joy and Sadness

"He who wants to do good knocks at the gate; he who loves finds the gate open."

Rabindranath Tagore

Good and Evil

Love

"Men do no great things, only small things with great love."

Mother Teresa of Calcutta

Human

Love

"Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over."

Ernest Hemingway "Death in the Afternoon"

Art and Culture

"Good wine is a necessity of life for me."

Thomas Jefferson

Health and Alcohol

"Tradition is a guide not a jailer."

William Somerset Maugham

Various

"The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism."

Sir William Osler

Knowledge, Ignorance

Various

"Sorrow is tranquillity remembered in emotion."

Dorothy Parker "Here Lies"

Sorrow and Nostalgia

"I have no conscience, Adolf Hitler is my conscience. "

Hermann Göring

Sin and Conscience

"Sometimes the Lord calms the storm. Sometimes He lets the storm rage and calms His child."

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Destiny and Fate

God and Religion

"Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."

Albert Camus

Friendship and Hostility

"Common sense is not really so common."

Antoine Amauld "The Art of Thinking: Port-Royal Logic"

Intellect, Judgement

"Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence."

Henrik Tikkanen

Intellect, Judgement

Normality and Madness

"A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it."

Henry Louis Mencken

Family and Loneliness

"The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces."

Maureen Murphy

Politics and Diplomacy

Woman and Man

"For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great."

Jose Ortega y Gasset "Meditations on Quixote"

Various

"There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line."

Oscar Levant

Normality and Madness

Talent and Genius

"Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem."

Brian W. Aldiss

Question and Problem

Talent and Genius

"The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and to beget."

Sir William Osler "Science and Immortality"

Egoism

Human

"Truth sits upon the lips of dying men."

Matthew Arnold "Sohrab and Rustum"

Life and Death

Truth and Falsity

"Home is where the heart is and hence a movable feast."

Angela Carter "Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings"

Family and Loneliness

Various

"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."

Howard Aiken

Various

"I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am."

Thomas Carlyle

Nature and Animals

Science and Technology

"Sorrow for a husband is like a pain in the elbow, sharp and short."

English Proverbs

Marriage

Sorrow and Nostalgia

"Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand of it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love."

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky "The Brothers Karamazov"

Love

Nature and Animals

"Family life is not a computer program that runs on its own; it needs continual input from everyone."

Neil Kurshan

Family and Loneliness

"The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another."

Horace "Epistles"

Time and Passing

Youth and Age

"We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."

Jonathan Swift "Thoughts On Various Subjects"

Friendship and Hostility

God and Religion

"Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things."

Robert A. Heinlein

Work and Laziness

"Basic research is like shooting an arrow into the air and, where it lands, painting a target."

Homer Adkins

Science and Technology

"Life is the only lesson, other lessons are only to make you learn this one lesson."

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Education

Life and Death

"Reality is that part of the imagination we all agree on."

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Reality and Imagination

"If you want to know what the Lord God thinks of money, just look at those to whom he gives it."

Dorothy Parker

Richness and Money

"Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case."

William James

God and Religion

Various

"All fiction may be autobiography, but all autobiography is of course fiction."

Shirley Abbott

Memory

Reality and Imagination