"On the Continent people have good food; in England people have good table manners."

George Mikes

History and Nations

Manners and Ethics

"Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost."

James Thurber

Wit and Humor

"Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the airplane, the pessimist invents the parachute."

George Bernard Shaw

Optimism and Hope

"Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live."

Socrates

Good and Evil

Life and Death

"The only time people dislike gossip is when you gossip about them."

Will Rogers

Manners and Ethics

Various

"When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination."

Ellen Key "The Woman of the Future"

Reality and Imagination

"Writing is turning one's worst moments into money."

J.P. Donleavy

Art and Culture

Richness and Money

"The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end."

Benjamin Disraeli "Henrieta Temple"

Knowledge, Ignorance

Love

"Why should we look to the past in order to prepare for the future? Because there is nowhere else to look."

James Burke

Time and Passing

"The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven."

Benjamin Disraeli "Tancred"

History and Nations

"Those who fled will fight another time."

Tertullian "De fuga in persecutione"

Courage and Fear

"A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats."

Nathaniel Hawthorne "English Notebooks"

Various

Woman and Man

"Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation."

Honoré De Balzac

Manners and Ethics

"Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself."

Plato

Human

Intellect, Judgement

"Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes to the bone."

Click if you know the author

Beauty and Ugliness

"I'm going to live forever. Or die trying."

Click if you know the author

Life and Death

"All art is an imitation of nature."

Seneca the Younger

Art and Culture

Nature and Animals

"Taking a child to the toy store is the nearest thing to a death wish parents can have."

Fred G. Gosman "How to Be a Happy Parent..."

Family and Loneliness

"Circumstances define us; they force us onto one road or another, and then they punish us for it."

Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

Human

Life and Death

"It's choice - not chance - that determines your destiny."

Jean Nidetch

Destiny and Fate

"Destiny is what we work toward. The future doesn't exist yet. Fate is for losers."

Douglas Coupland "Girlfriend in a Coma"

Destiny and Fate

Time and Passing

"When you open a door, don't forget to close it. Treat your mouth accordingly."

Jewish Proverbs

Oration and Silence

"Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading."

John Updike "Buchanan Dying"

Authority, Government

"America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America."

Jimmy Carter

History and Nations

Justice

"Our body has this defect that, the more it is provided care and comforts, the more needs and desires it finds."

Saint Teresa of Avila (Teresa de Jesús)

Dreams and Desires

Human

"As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable."

Albert Einstein

History and Nations

Peace and War

"The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel."

James Thurber "Lanterns and Lances"

Art and Culture

"Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time."

Thomas Carlyle

Oration and Silence

"I believe that sex is the most beautiful, natural, and wholesome thing that money can buy."

Steve Martin

Manners and Ethics

"After hearing two eyewitness accounts of the same accident, you begin to wonder about history."

Various Proverbs

Truth and Falsity

"The more I see of the representatives of the people, the more I admire my dogs."

Alphonse de Lamartine

Human

Nature and Animals

"There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say."

Cyril Connolly

Courage and Fear

Manners and Ethics

"Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow."

Honoré De Balzac

Joy and Sadness

Sorrow and Nostalgia

"Criminal: A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation."

Howard Scott

Law and Crime

Richness and Money

"American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe."

Harold Rosenberg "The Tradition of the New"

History and Nations

Time and Passing

"The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths."

Graham Greene "The Heart of the Matter"

Truth and Falsity

"One good thing about my computer: it never asks why."

Ashleigh Brilliant

Question and Problem

Science and Technology

"It requires twenty years for a man to rise from the vegetable state in which he is within his mother's womb, and from the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of reason begins to appear. It has required thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him."

Voltaire "Questions sur l'Encyclopédie"

Human

"Although Freud said happiness is composed of love and work, reality often forces us to choose love or work."

Letty Cottin Pogrebin "Family and Politics"

Happiness

Love

Work and Laziness

"The impersonal hand of government can never replace the helping hand of a neighbor."

Hubert Humphrey

Authority, Government

Friendship and Hostility

"The best way to correct a mistake is to make it right."

Henry David Thoreau

Defeates and Mistakes

"A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier."

Henry Louis Mencken "A Mencken Chrestomathy"

Knowledge, Ignorance

Various

"Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another."

Anatol France "The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard"

Work and Laziness

"Never trust the advice of a man in difficulties."

Aesop "The Fox and the Goat"

Trust

"Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has."

Anita Brookner "The Misalliance"

Defeates and Mistakes

Time and Passing

Youth and Age

"One doesn't have a sense of humor. It has you."

Larry Gelbart

Wit and Humor

"Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination."

Bertrand Russell

Knowledge, Ignorance

Reality and Imagination

Science and Technology

"Truth is no road to fortune."

Rousseau-Jean-Jacques

Richness and Money

Truth and Falsity