In fact, there’s nothing that keeps its youth,
-So far as I know, but a tree and truth.
(This is a moral that runs at large;
Take it.–You’re welcome.–No extra charge.)
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894)
When I have a little money, I buy books; and when I have a little left, I buy food and clothes. –Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (1466?-1536)
I don’t go looking for trouble. Trouble usually finds me. –J. K. [Joanna Kathleen] Rowling (1965- )
I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. –Bill Cosby (1937- )
Those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music. –George Carlin (1937-2008)
There are two reasons for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it. –Bertrand [Arthur William] Russell (1872-1970)
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. –Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all. –Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it. –W.C. Fields (1879-1946)
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. –George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
There is a theory that states that if anyone ever discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory that states that this has already happened. –Douglas Adams (1952-2001)
I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that don’t work. –Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do. –Henry Ford (1863-1947)
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. –Terry Pratchett (1948- )
A day without sunshine is like, you know, night. –Steve Martin (1945- )
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore? –Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)
The question isn’t who is going to let me, it’s who’s going to stop me. –Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability. –Both by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The best time to stop taking a poll is when the results match your preconceived conclusions.
No one holding four aces ever calls for a new deal.
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book. –Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me. –C.S. [Clive Staples] Lewis 1898-1963
I am not young enough to know everything. –Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. –Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though. –J. D. Salinger (1919-2010) [From The Catcher in the Rye]
I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens. –Woody Allen (1935- )
All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts, / His acts being seven ages. –William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. –Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the universe. –Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound as they go by. –Douglas Adams (1952-2001)
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. –Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Traces of nobility, gentleness and courage persist in all people, do what we will to stamp out the trend. So, too, do those characteristics which are ugly. –Walt Kelly (1913-1973)
I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand. –Charles Schulz (1922-2000)
If everybody does it, there must be something wrong with it.
No good deed ever goes unpunished. –Claire Booth Luce (1903-1987)
No problem is so big or so complicated that it can’t be run away from. –Charles Schulz (1922-2000)
What matters it that man should have a little more knowledge of the Universe? If he has it he gets a little higher. Is he not always infinitely removed from the end and is not the duration of our life equally removed from eternity, even if it lasts ten years longer? –Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. –Douglas Adams (1952-2001)
Always do what you are afraid to do. –Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. –Maya Angelou (1928- )
It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. –Anne Frank (1929-1945)
True that a plant may not think; neither will the profoundest of men ever put forth a flower. –Donald Culross Peattie (1898-1964)
I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I’m saying. –Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. –Douglas Adams (1952-2001)
If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything. –Malcom X (1925-1965)
You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
If you are going through hell, keep going.
Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen. –All from Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
If Shakespeare were alive today, do you think he’d blog or Twitter?
Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people. –Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962)
If A equals success, then the formula is A = X + Y + Z, where X is work, Y is play, and Z is keep your mouth shut.
If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? –both by Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
To the victor belong the spoils in nature also, but for a time only. When there are no more spoils to be consumed, the victor dies.
How can man be persuaded to cherish any other ideal unless he can learn to take some interest and some delight in the beauty and variety of the world for its own sake, unless he can see a “value” in a flower blooming or an animal at play, unless he can see some “use” in things not useful?
If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food either.
You never know how much you are losing when you demonstrate the untrustworthiness of your word. –All from Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970)
There are three types of lies–lies, damn lies, and statistics. –Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere. –Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
When you hear the toilet flush and the words, “uh-oh,” it’s already too late.
If you put hairspray on dust bunnies and run over them with rollerblades, they can ignite.
Marbles in gas tanks make lots of noise when driving.
Brake fluid mixed with Clorox makes smoke, and lots of it. –All from Regina McMullan (?)
Write out of love, write out of instinct, write out of reason… But always for money. –Louis Untermeyer (1885-1977)
Of all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, “It might have been.” –John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)
Success is not final, failure is not final. It’s the courage to continue that counts. –Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)
Whether you think you can or think you can’t–you’re right. –Henry Ford (1863-1947)
I write from the worm’s eye point of view. –Ernie Pyle (1900-1945)
You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend. –Paul Sweeney (?)
He writes so well he makes me feel like putting my quill back in my goose. –Fred Allen (1894-1956)
Make it a rule never to give to a child a book you would never read yourself. –George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. –Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
That which we call sin in others is experiment for us. –Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Someday I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away. –Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
You can’t expect to hit the jackpot if you don’t put a few nickels in the machine. –Flip Wilson (1933-1998)
An exception may test a rule, but it doesn’t prove it.
Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it. –Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
The original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate. –Francois Rene de Chateaubriand (1768-1848)
If you don’t read for pleasure, you’ll lose your edge as a writer. –Nora Roberts (1950- )
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t. –Mark Twain (1835-1910)
If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. –Toni Morrison (1931- )
What this world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left. –Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see. –Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
You can’t tell how deep a puddle is until you step into it.
A chicken doesn’t stop scratching just because the worms are scarce.
In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on. –Robert Frost (1874-1963)
I don’t pretend to understand the Universe–it’s a great deal bigger than I am. –Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
There may not be a solution to every problem, but there are always problems for every solution. (Unknown)
The chief cause of problems is solutions. –Eric Sevareid (1912-1992)
Nothing worth a damn is ever done as a matter of principle. If it is worth doing, it is done because it is worth doing. If it is not, it is done as a matter of principle. –James T. Evans ( ? )
Never say “oops” in the operating room.
I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this. –Cormac McCarthy (1933- )
The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. –Robert Cromier ( ? )
Everything not forbidden is compulsory. –T. H. White (1915-1986)
If there’s no reason why something shouldn’t exist, then it must exist. –Murray Gell-Mann (1929- )
The pen is the tongue of the mind. –Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. –Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996)
The product of an arithmetical computation is the answer to an equation; it is not the solution to a problem.
Numbers are symbols for things, the number and the thing are not the same.
Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes all the pressure off the second. –Robert Frost (1874-1963)
There are three ways to get something done: do it yourself, hire someone, or forbid your kids from doing it. –Monta Crane
If you have something to do, and you put it off long enough, chances are someone else will do it for you. –Clyde F. Adams
The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is, shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence. –Freeman Dyson (1923- )
Self-trust is the first secret of success, the belief that if you are here, the authorities of the universe put you here, and for cause, or with some task strictly appointed you in your constitution, and so long as you work at that, you are well and successful. –Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
The North Carolina Equine Paradox:
VYARZERZOMANIMORORSEZASSESZANZERAREORSES?
There seems to be a kind of order in the universe, in the movement of the stars and the turning of the earth and the changing of the seasons, and even in the cycle of human life. But human life itself is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own rights and feelings, mistaking the motive of others, and his own. –Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)
How can we understand the outsider if we do not know the stranger who is in our skin? –Walt Kelly (1913-1973)
The lion and the lamb shall lie down together, but the lamb won’t get much sleep. –Woody Allen (1935- )
Never lie down with a woman who’s got more troubles than you. –Attributed to Satchel Paige, but there are questions.
We gaze up at the same stars, the sky covers us all, the same universe compasses us. What does it matter what practical systems we adopt in our search for the truth? Not by one avenue only can we arrive at so tremendous a secret. –Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (ca. AD 340-402)
I’ve heard there are Interstate highways in Hawaii. Shall we drive over and find out?
Never judge the cover of a book by what’s inside.
Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. –J. B. S. (John Burdon Sanderson) Haldane (1892-1964).
(Forty-seven years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy.) Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. –John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
Let us wander where we will, the universe is built round about us, and we are central still. –Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862).
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. –Philip K. Dick (1928-1982)
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. –Derek Bok ( ? )
There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self. –Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
The progress of science varies inversely with the number of journals published.
For every Ph.D., there is an equal and opposite Ph.D.
Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. –Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food either. –Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970)
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in science because science is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good science. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. –Modified slightly from John W. Gardner.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. –Herman Melville (1819-1891). [From Moby Dick, Ch. 49]
History repeats itself. That’s one of the things wrong with history. –Clarence Darrow (1857-1938).
What men learn from history is that men do not learn from history. [Unknown]
Work eight hours, sleep eight hours. But not the same eight hours. [A sign I saw on a faculty member’s door when I was in college.]
Nobody can put a character on paper without–at any rate in part and at times–sitting as a model for it himself. —Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)
Never look a gift horse in the rectum. [Yes, I know.]
In unanimity, there may well be either cowardice or uncritical thinking. —Donald Rumsfeld.
It takes everyone to make a happy day. —Marcy Kay Rumsfeld (age seven)
How many molecules of water in that last [glass, bottle, can, jar] of swill you drank do you think went through the kidneys of Cleopatra? Or Elizabeth Taylor?
The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them to the impossible. —Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008)
I started out with nothing and I still have most of it. [Seen on a roadside sign.]