Wisdom


Now and always I have love quotations of famous (and many not-so-famous) men and women. I stand with Sir Winston Churchill, a great manufacturer of quotes himself, when he said:

“It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.”

I’ve copied some of my favorite quotes and a great man which I have endeavored to live by. The first ten are my personal favorites and those that follow are grouped alphabetically by speaker or author.

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.
— Dr. Seuss

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
— Philip K. Dick

Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?
— G.K. Chesterton

Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true.
— Robert Brault

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
— Elie Wiesel

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
— Oscar Wilde

Just as modern motorways have no room for ox-carts or wandering pedestrians, so modern society has little place for lives and ways that are too eccentric.
— A.C. Grayling

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.
— Albert Einstein

Always try to be a little kinder than is necessary.
— J M Barrie

You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.
— Winston S. Churchill

Abraham Lincoln

  • It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.

Akira Kurosawa

  • In a mad world, only the mad are sane.

Alan Moore

  • Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky.

Albert Camus

  • Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

Albert Einstein

  • The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with joy are goodness, beauty, and truth.
  • There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Aldous Huxley

  • Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

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Anonymous Marine in Afghanistan

  • Talking to a Taliban warrior about improving his quality of life is like trying to teach an ape how to hold a pen; eventually he just gets frustrated and sticks you in the eye with it.

Apple Computer Inc.

  • Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square hole. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Aristotle

  • No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.
  • To perceive is to suffer.

Benjamin Disraeli

  • There are three types of lies — lies, damn lies, and statistics.
  • When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.

C.P. Snow

  • When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.

C.S. Lewis

  • Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.
  • If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

Charlotte Gray

  • Human beings who leave behind them no great achievements, but only a series of small kindnesses, have not had wasted lives

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  • We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.

Elie Wiesel

  • The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.

Flannery O’Connor

  • The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

  • The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

Friedrich Nietzsche

  • There is always some madness in love, but there’s also always some reason in madness.

G. K. Chesterton

  • In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn.
  • Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
  • The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.
  • The word “good” has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
  • There nearly always is a method in madness.
  • Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
  • We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man’s terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God.
  • A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
  • According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.
  • Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
  • Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.
  • Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.
  • Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.
  • Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
  • Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
  • Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
  • For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.
  • I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.
  • Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference which is an elegant name for ignorance.
  • In prosperity, our friends know us. In adversity, we know our friends
  • In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don’t know it.
  • It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.
  • It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.
  • Just going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in your garage makes you a car.
  • Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
  • Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.
  • Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
  • Only poor men get hanged.
  • Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.
  • The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
  • The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
  • The classes that wash most are those that work least.
  • The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.
  • The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
  • The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
  • The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.
  • The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder.
  • There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.
  • There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.
  • Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot.
  • To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
  • When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.

George Orwell

  • In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Harold Pinter

  • There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.

Herbert Hoover

  • Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.

Hunter S. Thompson

  • A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.
  • At the top of the mountain we are all snow leopards.
  • Every now and then you run up on one of those days when everythings in vain . . . . a stone bummer from start to finish; if you know what’s good for you, on days like these you sortof hunker down in a safe corner and watch. Maybe think a bit.
  • I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.
  • I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me
  • Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.
  • Like most others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles – a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other – that kept me going.
  • Some may never live, but the crazy never die.
  • The highways are crowded with people who drive as if their sole purpose in getting behind the wheel is to avenge every wrong done  them by man, beast or fate.  The only thing that keeps them in line is their fear of death, jail and lawsuits.
  • You better take care of me Lord, if you don’t you’re gonna have me on your hands.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

  • What wisdom can you find greater than kindness.

Kahlil Gibran

  • Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution.

Kurt Vonnegut

  • One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

Maimonides

  • Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.

Marilyn Monroe

  • I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.

Mark Twain

  • A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
  • If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
  • Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
  • Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.
  • Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Oscar Wilde

  • A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
  • A good friend will always stab you in the front.
  • A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
  • All women become like their mothers.  That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.
  • Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
  • Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
  • Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
  • I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.
  • No good deed goes unpunished.
  • We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Patrick Jones

  • The nail that sticks out farthest gets hammered the hardest.

Plato

  • Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

Robert Frost

  • In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.

Robert Orben

  • Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.

Tom Bissell

  • A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.

William Penn

  • I expect to pass through life but once. If therefore there be any kindness I can show…let me do it now.

William S. Burroughs

  • A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on.

Winston Churchill

  • I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
  • Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.
  • Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.
  • There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result.
  • We have not journeyed all this way because we are made of sugar candy.
  • When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.
  • A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.
  • A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
  • A small lie needs a bodyguard of bigger lies to protect it.
  • He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
  • History is written by the victors.
  • I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
  • If you are going through hell, keep going.
  • Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
  • Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
  • Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
  • The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
  • The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.
  • The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.
  • We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us.

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