"There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees."

Michel de Montaigne

Various

"He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears."

Michel de Montaigne

Courage and Fear

Pain and Tears

"Home is the girl's prison and the woman's workhouse."

George Bernard Shaw "Man and Superman"

Family and Loneliness

Woman and Man

"Man is the only creature that consumes without producing."

George Orwell

Human

"Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder."

Thornton Wilder "Merchant of Yonkers"

Marriage

"It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken."

Aristotle

Life and Death

"Nature has some perfections to show that she is the image of God, and some defects, to show that she is only His image."

Blaise Pascal "Pensées"

God and Religion

Nature and Animals

"What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos."

Kerry Thornley

Reality and Imagination

"It is not the walls that make the city, but the people who live within them. The walls of London may be battered, but the spirit of the Londoner stands resolute and undismayed."

George VI (Radio broadcast, September 23, 1940)

Human

Various

"The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problem."

Mahatma Gandhi

Question and Problem

Work and Laziness

"Knowledge is knowing something. Wisdom is knowing what to do with that knowledge."

Click if you know the author

Knowledge, Ignorance

Wisdom and Stupidity

"Happiness is a good martini, a good meal, a good cigar and a good woman... or a bad woman, depending on how much happiness you can stand."

George Burns

Happiness

Woman and Man

"Never argue with a stupid person. First they'll drag you down to their level, then they will beat you with experience."

Click if you know the author

Wisdom and Stupidity

"Don't take life too seriously, you'll never get out of it alive."

Elbert Green Hubbard

Life and Death

"When you meet a stranger, give them a smile. It may be the only sunshine they see all day."

Click if you know the author

Joy and Sadness

"It is a very rare thing for a man of talent to succeed by his talent."

Joseph Roux "Meditations of a Parish Priest"

Success and Fame

Talent and Genius

"The biggest argument against democracy is a five minute discussion with the average voter."

Winston Churchill

Authority, Government

Politics and Diplomacy

"Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children."

William Makepeace Thackeray

Family and Loneliness

God and Religion

"The courage of a soldier is found to be the cheapest and most common quality of human nature."

Edward Gibbon "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"

Courage and Fear

Human

"Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth."

Rabindranath Tagore

Time and Passing

"Genius is one of the many forms of insanity."

Cesare Lombroso

Normality and Madness

Talent and Genius

"Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want."

Dan Stanford

Education

Various

"I used to think that running an organization was equivalent to conducting a symphony orchestra. But I don't think that's quite it; it's more like jazz. There is more improvisation."

Warren Bennis

Various

"Beat me with the truth, don't torture me with lies."

Click if you know the author

Truth and Falsity

"Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend."

Martin Luther King

Friendship and Hostility

Love

"Success is the space one occupies in the newspaper. Success is one day's insolence."

Elias Canetti "The Secret Heart Of The Clock"

Success and Fame

"What this country needs is more free speech worth listening to."

Hansell B. Duckett

Oration and Silence

"Conscience is the sentinel of virtue."

Johann Kaspar Lavater

Sin and Conscience

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts."

Mark Twain

Various

"Justice is the bread of the nation, it is always hungry for it."

Chateaubriand-Francois-Rene-de

History and Nations

Justice

"A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference and a longer view and finds them incongruous. It dampens enthusiasm; it mocks hope; it pardons shortcomings; it consoles failure. It recommends moderation."

Thornton Wilder "The Eighth Day"

Wit and Humor

"When the wine goes in, strange things come out."

Friedrich von Schiller "Wallenstein"

Health and Alcohol

"One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day."

Sartre-Jean-Paul

Various

Work and Laziness

"In prosperity, our friends know us; in adversity, we know our friends."

John Churton Collins

Friendship and Hostility

"The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free. "

Henry David Thoreau "Slavery in Massachusetts"

Freedom and Servitude

Human

Law and Crime

"When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart."

Helen Rowland "Reflections of a Bachelor Girl"

Manners and Ethics

Marriage

"Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers."

Lewis Mumford "The Brown Decades"

Friendship and Hostility

Youth and Age

"To me old age is always fifteen years older than I am."

Bernard Mannes Baruch

Youth and Age

"We prefer being free men than imprisoned heros."

Mojtaba Mirtahmasb

Freedom and Servitude

Life and Death

"Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers."

Voltaire

Intellect, Judgement

Question and Problem

"A smile on your face can be felt on anothers heart."

Rhonda Marlow

Joy and Sadness

"A literary woman's best critic is her husband."

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps "Chapters from a Life"

Art and Culture

Marriage

"Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed."

Ralph Waldo Emerson "Essays, First Series"

Friendship and Hostility

"Land, n. A part of the earth's surface, considered as property."

Ambrose Bierce "The Devil's Dictionary"

Various

"Anything you lose automatically doubles in value."

Mignon McLaughin

Various

"Building a conscience is what discipline is all about."

James L. Hymes, Jr. "Childhood"

Education

Sin and Conscience

"Life is the risk we cannot refuse."

Mason Cooley "City Aphorisms"

Life and Death

"We sometimes find truth, but more often it finds us."

Mason Cooley "City Aphorisms"

Truth and Falsity