"We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it."

George Eliot "The Mill on the Floss"

Youth and Age

"Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence."

Robert Fripp

Art and Culture

Oration and Silence

"The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families."

George Eliot "Silas Marner"

Health and Alcohol

"Incompetence plus incompetence equals incompetence."

Laurence J. Peter "The Peter Principle"

Knowledge, Ignorance

"Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else."

Gloria Steinem

Art and Culture

Work and Laziness

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."

William Pitt the Younger

Freedom and Servitude

"When you look at me, when you think of me, I am in paradise."

William Makepeace Thackeray

Happiness

Love

"Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors."

Eugene O`Neill "Lazarus Laughed"

Family and Loneliness

Life and Death

"Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors."

François de La Rochefoucauld

Optimism and Hope

Various

"If government were a product, selling it would be illegal."

P.J. O`Rourke

Authority, Government

"The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found."

Calvin Trillin

Family and Loneliness

"I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world."

Oscar Wilde

Human

Manners and Ethics

"The supply of words in the world market is plentiful but the demand is falling. Let deeds follow words now."

Lech Walesa

Oration and Silence

Various

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional."

M. Kathleen Casey

Pain and Tears

"Lawyer - One who protects us against robbers by taking away the temptation."

Henry Louis Mencken

Law and Crime

"Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."

Mao Zedong

Peace and War

Politics and Diplomacy

"Sometimes the path you're on is not as important as the direction you're heading."

Kevin Smith

Intellect, Judgement

Various

"Every man over forty is responsible for his face."

Abraham Lincoln

Youth and Age

"Appeal: v.t. In law, to put the dice into the box for another throw."

Ambrose Bierce "The Devil's Dictionary"

Law and Crime

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."

Albert Einstein

Various

"Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell."

Walter Bagehot

Richness and Money

"Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person."

Zora Neale Hurston "Dust Tracks on a Road"

Human

Various

"The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking [...] the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

Albert Einstein

Human

Question and Problem

"Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place."

Billy Crystal

Manners and Ethics

"My greatest weapon is mute prayer."

Mahatma Gandhi

God and Religion

Oration and Silence

Power and Weakness

"It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organisation upon the natural organisation of the body."

Thomas Henry Huxley "Collected Essays"

Education

"Live today for tomorrow it will all be history."

Various Proverbs

Time and Passing

"An idea ran back and forward in his head like a blind man, knocking over the solid furniture."

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

Intellect, Judgement

Wisdom and Stupidity

"Politicians are the best alternative to warlords that we have yet conceived."

Stephen Covington

Peace and War

Politics and Diplomacy

"Women like silent men. They think they're listening."

Marcel Achard

Oration and Silence

Woman and Man

"The greatest barrier to consciousness is the belief that one is already conscious."

P. D. Ouspensky

Intellect, Judgement

"Gossip is when you hear something you like about someone you don't."

Earl Wilson

Manners and Ethics

"The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their forgetfulness."

Marguerite Yourcenar "Memoirs of Hadrian"

Memory

"Fashion is something that goes in one year and out the other."

Click if you know the author

Manners and Ethics

"For, I ask, what is man in Nature? A cypher compared with the Infinite, an All compared with Nothing, a mean between nothing and all."

Blaise Pascal "Pensées"

Human

Nature and Animals

"The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who--in their grudge against traditional religion as the "opium of the masses"--cannot hear the music of the spheres."

Albert Einstein

God and Religion

"The first half of our lives are ruined by our parents and the second half by our children."

Clarence Darrow

Family and Loneliness

Life and Death

"In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine."

George Bernard Shaw "Man and Superman"

Life and Death

"Passion is the genesis of genius."

Anthony Robbins

Talent and Genius

"A poet can survive everything but a misprint."

Oscar Wilde

Art and Culture

"Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people."

Charlie Chaplin "The Great Dictator"

Authority, Government

Freedom and Servitude

"I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information."

Quentin Crisp "The Naked Civil Servant"

Art and Culture

"Eat and drink with your relatives; do business with strangers."

Greek Proverbs

Family and Loneliness

"Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness."

Georges Simenon

Art and Culture

Happiness

"Never apologize for showing feeling...When you do so, you apologize for truth."

Benjamin Disraeli

Truth and Falsity

"You'll catch a liar before you'll catch a cripple."

Catalan Proverbs

Truth and Falsity

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

Arthur Schopenhauer

Truth and Falsity

"Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful."

Ann Landers

Nature and Animals