"A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it."

Albert Einstein

Question and Problem

Wisdom and Stupidity

"Money lent to a friend must be recovered from an enemy."

Various Proverbs

Friendship and Hostility

Richness and Money

"Those who flee temptation generally leave a forwarding address."

Lane Olinghouse

Sin and Conscience

"The safest way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket."

Kin Hubbard

Richness and Money

"Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows."

William Shakespeare "The Tempest"

Destiny and Fate

Various

"Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me."

Ambrose Bierce "The Devil's Dictionary"

Egoism

"Shame arises from the fear of men, conscience from the fear of God."

Samuel Johnson

Courage and Fear

God and Religion

Sin and Conscience

"Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity."

Robert G. Ingersoll

Optimism and Hope

Truth and Falsity

"Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else."

Ogden Nash

Memory

Youth and Age

"Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life.... The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis."

Marlon Brando

Art and Culture

Health and Alcohol

"History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the the movements of the world gave a chance for it."

Walter Bagehot "Physics and Politics"

History and Nations

"The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star."

Brillat-Savarin-Anthelme "Physiologie du Gout"

Happiness

Science and Technology

"If married couples did not live together good marriages would be more common."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Marriage

"Anyone can catch your eye, but it takes someone truly special to catch your heart."

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Love

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth."

Henry David Thoreau

Truth and Falsity

"Cynicism is humour in ill health."

Herbert George Wells

Wit and Humor

"Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us."

Jane Austen "Pride and Prejudice"

Manners and Ethics

"Being natural is one of the most irritating poses I know in people."

Alexander Theroux "An Adultery"

Manners and Ethics

"I find out what the world needs. Then, I go ahead and invent it."

Thomas Alva Edison

Science and Technology

Talent and Genius

"Food is an important part of a balanced diet."

Fran Lebowitz

Health and Alcohol

"Man is not man, but a wolf to those he does not know."

Titus Maccius Plautus "The Comedy of Asses"

Egoism

Manners and Ethics

"Love is the whole history of a woman's life, it is but an episode in a man's."

Stael-Holstein-Anne-Louise-Germaine-de

Love

Woman and Man

"Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says... I'll try again tommorrow."

Mary Anne Radmacher

Courage and Fear

"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

Thomas Mann

Art and Culture

"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry."

Henry Louis Mencken "Notebooks"

Manners and Ethics

"I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends."

Abraham Lincoln

Friendship and Hostility

"Time cools, time clarifies, no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours."

Thomas Mann "The Magic Mountain"

Time and Passing

"Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution."

Gustave Flaubert letter to Louise Colet

Happiness

"Don't gripe about your church; if it was perfect, you couldn't be a member."

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God and Religion

"Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual."

Angela Carter

Various

"Knowledge is the most democratic source of power."

Alvin Toffler "The Democratic Difference"

Knowledge, Ignorance

Power and Weakness

"Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's."

Billy Wilder

Defeates and Mistakes

Intellect, Judgement

"It's a recession when your neighbour loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours."

Harry S. Truman

Various

"To desire friendship is a great fault. Friendship should be a gratuitous joy like those afforded by art or life. We must refuse it so that we may be worthy to receive it; it is of the order of grace."

Simone Weil "Love"

Friendship and Hostility

"The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations."

David Friedman

Peace and War

Politics and Diplomacy

Power and Weakness

"Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need."

Gaston Bachelard

Dreams and Desires

Human

"The British tourist is always happy abroad as long as the natives are waiters."

Robert Morley

History and Nations

"The less of one's life one must exchange for money, the more freedom one may enjoy."

Gerry Spence

Freedom and Servitude

Richness and Money

"Nature, time and patience are the three great physicians."

Chinese Proverbs

Health and Alcohol

Nature and Animals

Time and Passing

"The world is composed of givers and takers. The takers may eat better, but the givers sleep better."

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Good and Evil

Justice

"If you want your dreams to come true, don't sleep."

Jewish Proverbs

Dreams and Desires

Work and Laziness

"What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike."

Alfred North Whitehead

Manners and Ethics

"There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it."

William James "Varieties of Religious Experience"

Truth and Falsity

"Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds."

Socrates

Success and Fame

"It is not at all simple to understand the simple."

Eric Hoffer

Intellect, Judgement

"You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can't possibly live long enough to make them all yourself."

Sam Levenson

Defeates and Mistakes

Education

"The only time a woman really succeeds in changing a man is when he is a baby."

Natalie Wood

Woman and Man

"When a man is willing and eager, the gods join in."

Aeschylus

Dreams and Desires

Success and Fame