"Love truth, but pardon error."

Voltaire

Defeates and Mistakes

Truth and Falsity

"Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example."

François de La Rochefoucauld

Manners and Ethics

Youth and Age

"Experience is what you get while looking for something else."

Federico Fellini

Education

"Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do."

R. G. Collingwood "Speculum Mentis"

Freedom and Servitude

Work and Laziness

"Men despise religion; they hate it and fear it is true."

Blaise Pascal "Pensées"

God and Religion

"If there were no bad people there would be no good lawyers."

Charles Dickens "The Old Curiosity Shop"

Good and Evil

Law and Crime

"There are only two ways of telling the complete truth - anonymously and posthumously."

Thomas Sowell

Truth and Falsity

"Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem."

Lindsay Anderson

Art and Culture

Question and Problem

"The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long."

Bertrand Russell

Life and Death

"Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech."

Martin Farquhar Tupper "Proverbial Philosophy"

Oration and Silence

"Forgiveness is like the fragrance a flower gives after it's been stepped on."

Click if you know the author

Forgiveness

"Here's to your coffins: May they be made of hundred-year-old oaks, which we shall plant tomorrow."

(a toast)

Health and Alcohol

Life and Death

Wit and Humor

"If you have an apple and I have an apple, and we exchange apples, we both still only have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange ideas, we each now have two ideas."

George Bernard Shaw

Intellect, Judgement

Various

"Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God."

Jean Anouilh "Becket"

Beauty and Ugliness

God and Religion

"There are no strangers in this world, just friends we've never met."

Click if you know the author

Friendship and Hostility

"I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts."

John Steinbeck

Nature and Animals

"Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling."

Margaret Lee Runbeck

Happiness

"Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it."

Alfred North Whitehead

Various

Wisdom and Stupidity

"We desire nothing so much as what we ought not to have."

Publilius Syrus

Dreams and Desires

"Nature admits of no permanence in the relation between man and woman.... It is only man's egoism that wants to keep woman like some buried treasure. All endeavors to introduce permanence in love, the most changeable thing in this changeable human existence, have gone shipwreck in spite of religious ceremonies, vows, and legalities."

Sacher-Masoch-Leopold-Von "Venus in Furs"

Love

Manners and Ethics

Woman and Man

"If you can't appreciate it, you don't deserve it."

Click if you know the author

Various

"Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it."

Laurence J. Peter

Memory

Various

"Women can fake orgasms, men can fake the whole relationships."

Click if you know the author

Woman and Man

"Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art."

Charles Baudelaire

Art and Culture

Good and Evil

"When is a crisis reached? When questions arise that can't be answered."

Ryszard Kapusciński "A Warsaw Diary"

Question and Problem

"All that is not eternal is eternally out of date. "

Clive Staples Lewis

Time and Passing

"If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger."

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Various

"Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness."

Immanuel Kant

Manners and Ethics

"Every era has a currency that buys souls. In some the currency is pride, in others it is hope, in still others it is a holy cause."

Eric Hoffer

Various

"The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they believe they are as clever as he."

Karl Kraus

Wisdom and Stupidity

"This life is a hospital in which each patient is obsessed with the desire to change beds."

Charles Baudelaire

Life and Death

"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."

Lewis Thomas

Manners and Ethics

Various

"It is well that war is so terrible — lest we should grow too fond of it."

Robert E. Lee

Peace and War

"There is no first world and third world. There is only one world, for all of us to live and delight in."

Gerald Durrell

Various

"To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance."

Oscar Wilde

Egoism

Love

"Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment."

Carl Sandburg

Art and Culture

"Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities."

Aldous Huxley

Happiness

"Society, my dear, is like salt water, good to swim in but hard to swallow."

Arthur Stringer

Various

"If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars."

Rabindranath Tagore

Pain and Tears

"It requires more courage to suffer than to die."

Napoleon Bonaparte

Courage and Fear

Life and Death

Pain and Tears

"Military justice is to justice what military music is to music."

Georges Clemenceau

Justice

"America is a country that doesn't know where it is going but is determined to set a speed record getting there."

Laurence J. Peter

History and Nations

"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."

Edith Wharton

Good and Evil

Knowledge, Ignorance

"If Socrates lived and died like a philosopher, Jesus lived and died like a God."

Rousseau-Jean-Jacques

Life and Death

"The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament."

Rousseau-Jean-Jacques

History and Nations

"The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love."

Henry Miller

Love

"Wedding: the point at which a man stops toasting a woman and begins roasting her."

Helen Rowland "A Guide to Men"

Marriage

Woman and Man

"A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman."

Wallace Stevens

Art and Culture

Woman and Man