"We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems."

John W. Gardner

Question and Problem

Various

"Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible."

Stanisław Lem

God and Religion

"Opinions are a private matter. The public has an interest only in judgments."

Walter Benjamin

Manners and Ethics

Various

"To be able to say how much you love is to love but little."

Francesco Petrarca

Love

"Some things that cost $5 to buy several years ago now costs $10 just to repair."

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Various

"If you haven't got charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble."

Bob Hope

Good and Evil

"Never drive faster than your guardian angel can fly."

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Various

"Of two evils, choose neither."

Charles Spurgeon

Good and Evil

"In America, you can always find a party. In Soviet Russia, The Party can always find you!"

Yakov Smirnoff

Politics and Diplomacy

"Poetry is the work of the bard and of the people who inspire him."

José Martí "Poesia"

Art and Culture

"If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel."

Will Kommen

Various

Youth and Age

"I never speak ill of dead people or live judges."

Edwin W. Edwards

Law and Crime

Life and Death

"A good laugh is sunshine in the house."

William Makepeace Thackeray

Joy and Sadness

"The surest way to ruin a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some."

George Bernard Shaw "Heartbreak House"

Richness and Money

"The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it."

William James

Life and Death

"They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself."

Andy Warhol "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol"

Time and Passing

Work and Laziness

"Government: a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

George Washington

Authority, Government

Power and Weakness

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."

Anais Nin "The Diary of Anais Nin"

Courage and Fear

Life and Death

"I believe in the sun even if it isn't shining. I believe in love even when I am alone. I believe in God even when He is silent."

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God and Religion

Optimism and Hope

"Television is more interesting than people. If it were not, we would have people standing in the corners of our rooms."

Alan Corenk

Various

"I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward."

John Mortimer

Health and Alcohol

Life and Death

"Variety is the spice of love."

Helen Rowland "Reflections of a Bachelor Girl"

Love

"Disease is a vital expression of the human organism."

Georg Groddeck "The Book of the It"

Health and Alcohol

"Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs."

Aldous Huxley "Themes and Variations"

Human

"There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage."

Alexander Theroux "An Adultery"

Family and Loneliness

Marriage

"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts."

Henry Brooks Adams "The Education of Henry Adams"

Education

Knowledge, Ignorance

"Love is a binding force, by which another is joined to me and cherished by myself."

St. Thomas Aquinas "Summa Theologiae"

Love

"An ideal wife is any woman who has an ideal husband."

Booth Tarkington "Looking Forward and Others"

Marriage

Woman and Man

"Few things are more satisfying than seeing your own children have teenagers of their own."

Doug Larson

Family and Loneliness

Youth and Age

"Cooking is just like religion. Rules don't no more make a cook than sermons make a saint."

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Various

"If we knew what we were doing it wouldn't be research."

Albert Einstein

Knowledge, Ignorance

Science and Technology

"Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is a progress. Working together is a success."

Henry Ford

Friendship and Hostility

Success and Fame

Work and Laziness

"After all, life is really simple; we ourselves create the circumstances that complicate it."

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Life and Death

Question and Problem

"It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not."

André Gide

Human

Love

"Education is the best provision for the journey to old age."

Aristotle

Education

Youth and Age

"To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody."

Quentin Crisp "The Naked Civil Servant"

Forgiveness

"Never rely on the glory of the morning nor the smiles of your mother-in-law."

Japanese Proverbs

Trust

Various

"A candidate is someone who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other."

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Politics and Diplomacy

Richness and Money

"By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest."

Confucius

Wisdom and Stupidity

"A happy person is one whose arithmetic is at its best when they is counting their blessings."

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Happiness

Joy and Sadness

"The latter part of a wise man's life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former."

Jonathan Swift

Wisdom and Stupidity

"America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair."

Arnold Toynbee

History and Nations

Politics and Diplomacy

"Superstition and accident manifest the will of God."

Carl Gustav Jung

God and Religion

"Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress."

William Hazlitt "The Most Brilliant Thoughts of All Time"

Beauty and Ugliness

Manners and Ethics

"If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it."

Horace Mann

Various

"Our senses are the landing ports of our spiritual enemies."

George Whitefield

Manners and Ethics

Sin and Conscience

"The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes."

William Somerset Maugham

Art and Culture

"Punctuality is the soul of business."

Thomas C. Haliburton "Sam Slick's Wise Saws"

Time and Passing