"From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other."

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "A Study in Scarlet"

Knowledge, Ignorance

Science and Technology

"When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it - this is knowledge."

Confucius "The Confucian Analects"

Knowledge, Ignorance

"To express the emotions of life is to live. To express the life of emotions is to make art."

Jane Heap

Art and Culture

Life and Death

"Those who cast the Votes, they decide nothing. Those who count the votes, they decide everything."

Joseph Stalin

Authority, Government

Politics and Diplomacy

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

Ambrose Bierce "The Devil's Dictionary"

Law and Crime

"The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique."

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Art and Culture

"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

"They who are of the opinion that money will do everything, may very well be suspected to do everything for money."

George Savile

Richness and Money

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

Marcel Achard

Oration and Silence

Woman and Man

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

P.J. O`Rourke

Authority, Government

"Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong."

Terry Pratchett

Reality and Imagination

"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

"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

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Human

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional."

M. Kathleen Casey

Pain and Tears

"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

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

Charlie Chaplin "The Great Dictator"

Authority, Government

Freedom and Servitude

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

Henry Louis Mencken

Law and Crime

"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

"Passion is the genesis of genius."

Anthony Robbins

Talent and Genius

"There's no one thing that's true. It's all true."

Ernest Hemingway

Truth and Falsity

"Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person."

James Thurber

Love

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

Robert Fripp

Art and Culture

Oration and Silence

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

Earl Wilson

Manners and Ethics

"A poet can survive everything but a misprint."

Oscar Wilde

Art and Culture

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

Albert Einstein

Various

"Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease is prevalent only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient."

Ambrose Bierce "The Devil's Dictionary"

Love

"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

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

Click if you know the author

Manners and Ethics

"Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation."

Robert Fitzgerald

Art and Culture

"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

"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

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

P. D. Ouspensky

Intellect, Judgement

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

Abraham Lincoln

Youth and Age

"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

"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

"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

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

Zora Neale Hurston "Dust Tracks on a Road"

Human

Various

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

Various Proverbs

Time and Passing

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

William Makepeace Thackeray

Happiness

Love

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

Kevin Smith

Intellect, Judgement

Various

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

Stephen Covington

Peace and War

Politics and Diplomacy

"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

"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

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

Billy Crystal

Manners and Ethics

"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

"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