"Experience is a good school. But the fees are high."

Heinrich Heine

Defeates and Mistakes

Education

"There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us."

Francis Herbert Bradley

Various

"Education: How come we have smart bombs and dumb kids?"

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Education

Wisdom and Stupidity

"Sin is whatever obscures the soul."

André Gide

Sin and Conscience

"Of course a platonic relationship is possible - but only between husband and wife."

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Love

Marriage

"Orgies are an early form of what will someday become sex by committee."

Mason Cooley

Manners and Ethics

Various

"Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy."

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Art and Culture

Work and Laziness

"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

"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."

Albert Einstein

Power and Weakness

"An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself."

Albert Camus "Notebooks"

Intellect, Judgement

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

Winston Churchill

Manners and Ethics

"Talent is nothing but a prolonged period of attention and a shortened period of mental assimilation."

Konstantin Stanislavsky

Talent and Genius

"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Good and Evil

Oration and Silence

"All great truths begin as blasphemies."

George Bernard Shaw

Truth and Falsity

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

Logan Pearsall Smith "Afterthoughts"

Happiness

"In times of prosperity friends will be plenty, in times of adversity not one in twenty."

English Proverbs

Friendship and Hostility

Richness and Money

"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

"Don't be afraid to learn. Knowledge is weightless, a treasure you can always carry easily."

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Education

Knowledge, Ignorance

"Without health, life is not life; it is only a state of languor and suffering."

Francois Rabelais

Health and Alcohol

Life and Death

Pain and Tears

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

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Nature and Animals

"Don't grieve that your roses have thorns. Rejoice instead that your thorns have roses."

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Joy and Sadness

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

Irving Berlin

Life and Death

"True love never grows old."

Catalan Proverbs

Love

Youth and Age

"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 ignorant man always adores what he cannot understand."

Cesare Lombroso

Intellect, Judgement

Knowledge, Ignorance

"Man is a luxury loving animal."

Eric Hoffer

Human

"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

"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

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

H. G. Bohn

Normality and Madness

Science and Technology

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

Henry Kissinger

Peace and War

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

Agnieszka Lisak

Happiness

Life and Death

"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

"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

"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

"Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting."

Edmund Burke

Various

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

Joseph Joubert

Marriage

"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

"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

"Never lend money. It causes amnesia."

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Memory

Richness and Money

"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 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

"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

"No rules for success will work if you don't."

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Success and Fame

Work and Laziness

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

Evan Esar "Esar's Comic Dictionary"

Science and Technology