"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."

Albert Einstein

Power and Weakness

"We are only what we are; not what we would be; nor every thing we hope for. We are but a step in a scale, that reaches further above us than below. "

Herman Melville "Mardi"

Human

"Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned."

James Baldwin "The Price of the Ticket"

Human

Various

"An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself."

Albert Camus "Notebooks"

Intellect, Judgement

"True love never grows old."

Catalan Proverbs

Love

Youth and Age

"Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash."

Winston Churchill

Manners and Ethics

"All great truths begin as blasphemies."

George Bernard Shaw

Truth and Falsity

"Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men."

Thomas Henry Huxley "Science and Culture"

Wisdom and Stupidity

"Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste."

Logan Pearsall Smith "Afterthoughts"

Happiness

"The zoo is a place for animals to study the behaviour of human beings."

Click if you know the author

Nature and Animals

"What does a fish know about the water in which it swims all its life?"

Albert Einstein

Knowledge, Ignorance

Nature and Animals

"Any man who thinks he deserves heaven is not a Christian. But for any man who knows he deserves hell there is hope."

Lloyd-Jones-Martyn "The Cross"

God and Religion

"As a general rule the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information."

Benjamin Disraeli

Knowledge, Ignorance

Success and Fame

"Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round."

David Lodge

Art and Culture

Life and Death

"The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work. "

Robert Lee Frost

Sorrow and Nostalgia

Work and Laziness

"Man is a luxury loving animal."

Eric Hoffer

Human

"Life is 10 percent what you make it, and 90 percent how you take it."

Irving Berlin

Life and Death

"Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting."

Edmund Burke

Various

"The man who does more than he is paid for will soon be paid for more than he does."

Napoleon Hill

Richness and Money

Work and Laziness

"We learn something every day, and lots of times it's that what we learned the day before was wrong."

Bill Vaughan

Education

"Marriage is a bad proposition, half end in divorce, and the other half end in death."

Click if you know the author

Marriage

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

Clive Staples Lewis

God and Religion

"Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow."

Mark Twain

Work and Laziness

"Justice is truth in action."

Benjamin Disraeli (or Joseph Joubert)

Justice

Truth and Falsity

"Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption."

André Bazin "What is Cinema?"

Art and Culture

Time and Passing

Various

"A man should be mourned at his birth, not at his death."

Charles Louis de Montesquieu

Life and Death

"There are only two cases in which war is just: first, in order to resist the aggression of an enemy, and second, in order to help an ally who has been attacked."

Charles Louis de Montesquieu

Peace and War

"Toilet paper too thin, newspapers too fat."

Winston Churchill (on America)

History and Nations

Various

"Striving for better life we waste the one we already have."

Agnieszka Lisak

Happiness

Life and Death

"When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend."

Menander "A Mencken Chrestomathy"

Marriage

Woman and Man

"Do not choose for your wife any woman you would not choose as your friend if she were a man."

Joseph Joubert

Marriage

"Never lend money. It causes amnesia."

Click if you know the author

Memory

Richness and Money

"When words leave off, music begins."

Heinrich Heine

Art and Culture

"Age is not an accomplishment, and youth is not a sin."

Robert A. Heinlein

Youth and Age

"People who live outside a society are the ones who can see how it works."

Christopher Rice "A Density of Souls"

Manners and Ethics

Various

"The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose."

Henry Kissinger

Peace and War

"Every man has his own destiny: The only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him."

Henry Miller

Destiny and Fate

"If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist."

Quentin Crisp "The Naked Civil Servant"

Reality and Imagination

Wit and Humor

"The aeroplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth."

Saint-Exupery-Antoine-de "Wind, Sand, and Stars"

Nature and Animals

Science and Technology

"Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing up is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing."

Phyllis Diller

Family and Loneliness

"Home is any four walls that enclose the right person."

Helen Rowland "Reflections of a Bachelor Girl"

Family and Loneliness

"Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true."

H. G. Bohn

Normality and Madness

Science and Technology

"[Statistics] The science that can prove everything except the usefulness of statistics."

Evan Esar "Esar's Comic Dictionary"

Science and Technology

"Never believe in mirrors or newspapers."

John Osborne "The Hotel in Amsterdam"

Trust

Truth and Falsity

"The strength of a man's virtue must not be measured by his efforts, but by his ordinary life."

Blaise Pascal "Pensées"

Human

Power and Weakness

"To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely."

Edmund Burke

Patriotism

"Too many people spend money they haven't earned to buy things they don't want to impress people they don't like."

Will Rogers

Envy

Richness and Money

"A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth!"

Stendhal "The Charterhouse of Parma"

Love

Youth and Age