quotes blog

George It was the greatest feeling I ever had. Followed abruptly by the worst feeling I ever had. - Blow

On CBS Radio the news of his Ed Murrow’s death, reportedly from lung cancer, was followed by a cigarette commercial. - Alexander Kendrick

When you helped somebody, right away you were responsible for that person. And things always followed for which you were never prepared. - Martha Brooks, True Confessions of a Heartless Girl

Nurture an appetite for being puzzled, for being confused, indeed for being openly stupid, and that - despite what you may think - is very difficult…We all know the cliche’ that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. It is also true that a lot of knowledge can be a dangerous thing as well…use your ignorance as well as your knowledge for creative means. - Lee C. Bollinger

We need quiet time to examine our lives openly and honestly. . . spending quiet time alone gives your mind an opportunity to renew itself and create order. - Susan Taylor

Admonish thy friends in secret, praise them openly. - Publilius Syrus

What I am is good enough if I could only be it openly. - Carl R. Rogers

Whatever is to make us better and happy, God has placed either openly before us or close to us. - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity. - Seneca

Self-denial is not a virtue it is only the effect of prudence on rascality. - George Bernard Shaw

Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life. - Germaine Greer

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. - Melody Beattie

It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen that is the common right of humanity. - Seneca

Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits. - Mark Twain

We must not be hampered by yesterday’s myths in concentrating on today’s needs. - Harold S. Geneen

There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in the country. The trouble is they cost a quarter. What this country really needs is a good five-cent nickel. - Franklin P. Adams

From birth to age eighteen, a girl needs good parents.
From eighteen to thirty-five, she needs good looks.
From thirty-five to fifty-five, she needs a good personality.
From fifty-five on, she needs good cash. - Sophie Tucker

A cold needs the cook as much as the doctor. - Scottish Proverb

It’s just human. We all have the jungle inside of us. We all have wants and needs and desires, strange as they may seem. If you stop to think about it, we’re all pretty creative, cooking up all these fantasies. it’s like a kind of poetry. - Andrew Schneider

We are born at the rise of the curtain and we die with its fall, and every night in the presence of our patrons we write our new creation, and every night it is blotted out forever and of what use is it to say to audience or to critic, ‘Ah, but you should have seen me last Tuesday’ - Michel MacLiammir

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. - Sir Winston Churchill, Speech in March 1946

When the tea is brought at five o’clock And all the neat curtains are drawn with care, The little black cat with bright green eyes Is suddenly purring there. - Harold Monro

As the moon retaineth her nature, though darkness spread itself before her face as a curtain, so the Soul remaineth perfect even in the bosom of the fool. - Akhenaton

Surely your gladness need not be the less for the thought that you will one day see a brighter dawn than this - when lovelier sights will meet your eyes than any waving trees or rippling waters - when angel-hands shall undraw your curtains, and sweeter tones than ever loving Mother breathed shall wake you to a new and glorious day - and when all the sadness, and the sin, that darkened life on this little earth, shall be forgotten like the dreams of a night that is past! - Lewis Carroll

From behind the Iron Curtain, there are signs that tyranny is in trouble and reminders that its structure is as brittle as its surface is hard. - Dwight D Eisenhower

Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change. - Robert F. Kennedy, 1966 speech

A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart, his next to escape the censures of the world. - English Proverb

It is folly for an eminent person to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected by it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age, have passed through this fiery persecution. There is no defense against reproach but obscurity; it is a kind of concomitant to greatness, as satires and invectives were an essential part of a Roman triumph. - Joseph Addison

Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice take each man’s censure but reserve thy judgement. - William Shakespeare

Beware Of entrance to a quarrel but being in, Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee. Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment. Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, But not express’d in fancy rich, not gaudy For the apparel oft proclaims the man. - William Shakespeare

I won’t have you electioneering on my doorstep. Every time you get in trouble in Parliament you run over here with your shirttail hanging out. (To Prime Minister Harold Wilson) - Lyndon B. Johnson

Alcohol is a very necessary article… It makes life bearable to millions of people who could not endure their existence if they were quite sober. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning. - George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara (1907) act 2

Let a short Act of Parliament be passed, placing all street musicians outside the protection of the law, so that any citizen may assail them with stones, sticks, knives, pistols, or bombs without incurring any penalties. - George Bernard Shaw

I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic. - Sir Winston Churchill

Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined together, let no man put asunder. (To Canadian Parliament) - John Fitzgerald Kennedy

In Britain, the segregated world of public schools crops up in all kinds of institutions A boy can pass from Eton to the Guards to the Middle Temple to Parliament and still retain the same male world of leather armchairs, teak tables and nicknames. They need never deal closely with other kinds of people, and some never do. - Anthony Sampson

If you would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable. - Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. - Jose Ortega y Gasset

Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything one learned in school. - Albert Einstein

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered. - W. H. Auden

Most new books are forgotten within a year, especially by those who borrow them. - Evan Esar

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts–the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. - John Ruskin

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds. - Marian Evans

Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds. - Buddha

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination. - Ovid

The truly skillful politician is one who, when he comes to a fork in the road, goes both ways. - Marco A. Almazan

Order, unity and continuity are human inventions just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias. - Bertrand Russell

Truly, to tell lies is not honorable;
but when the truth entails tremendous ruin,
To speak dishonorably is pardonable. - Sophocles, Creusa

They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for. - Tom Bodett

Europe is spreading its wings. In freedom. In prosperity. And in peace. It is a truly proud moment for the European Union. It is a triumph for liberty and democracy. To our new members I say: ?Warmly welcome to our family?. Our new Europe is born. - Anders Fogh Rasmussen, (Prime Minister of Denmark) Family photo after the European Council meeting in Copenhagen, 13 December 20

It?s a wonder I haven?t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. - Anne Frank, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, July 15, 1944

In your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go and sheltered so may thrive and grow. - Louise Driscoll

What feeling is so nice as a child’s hand in yours So small, so soft and warm, like a kitten huddling in the shelter of your clasp. - Marjorie Holmes

A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it. - H. L. Mencken

This is something that I cherish. Once in a friend’s home I came across this blessing, and took it down in shorthand … it says something I like to live with Oh Thou, who dwellest in so many homes, possess Thyself of this. Bless the life that is sheltered here. Grant that trust and peace and comfort abide within, and that love and life and usefulness may go out from this home forever. - Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. - Barbara Tuchman

He with whom neither slander that gradually soaks into the mind, nor statements that startle like a wound in the flesh, are successful may be called intelligent indeed. - Confucius, The Confucian Analects

All general statements are false. - Unknown, The Ultimate Law

Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The most profound statements are often said in silence. - Lynn Johnston, For Better or For Worse, 01-15-04

It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years. - John Von Neumann (ca. 1949)

I stand by all the misstatements that I’ve made. - Dan Quayle

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. - Henry David Thoreau

Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because dawn has come. - Rabindranath Tagore

Surely your gladness need not be the less for the thought that you will one day see a brighter dawn than this - when lovelier sights will meet your eyes than any waving trees or rippling waters - when angel-hands shall undraw your curtains, and sweeter tones than ever loving Mother breathed shall wake you to a new and glorious day - and when all the sadness, and the sin, that darkened life on this little earth, shall be forgotten like the dreams of a night that is past! - Lewis Carroll

The Darkness has begun. There will be no dawn. - J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King, Chapter 1

It is the darkest hour before dawn. - Unknown

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself. To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving. - Kahlil Gibran

In all things preserve integrity; and the consciousness of thine own uprightness will alleviate the toil of business, soften the hardness of ill-success and disappointments, and give thee an humble confidence before God, when the ingratitude of man, or the iniquity of the times may rob thee of other rewards. - Barbara Paley

A great preservative against angry and mutinous thoughts, and all impatience and quarreling, is to have some great business and interest in your mind, which, like a sponge shall suck up your attention and keep you from brooding over what displeases you. - Joseph Rickaby

‘Humph’ grunted Mr. Romford, seeing his worst fears about to be realized. He had dreamt that he had timbled over a poodle in the drawing-room, and squirted a bottle of porter right into a lady’s face. ‘Who’s goin’ besides ourselves’ asked Romford, wishing to know the worst at once. ‘Better be killed than frightened to death,’ thought he. - Robert Smith Surtees

Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into immortality. - Martin Luther King Jr.

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered. - Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Presumption means nothing more than as stated by Lord Mansfield, the weighing of probabilities, and deciding, by the powers of common sense, on which side the truth is. - Sir William Draper

It must require an inordinate share of vanity and presumption, too, after enjoying so much that is good and beautiful on earth, to ask the Lord for immortality in addition to all. - Heinrich Heine

That’s the fourth extra base hit for the Padres — two doubles and a triple. - Jerry Coleman

Mike Caldwell, the Padres’ right-handed southpaw, will pitch tonight. - Jerry Coleman

All the Padres need is a flyball in the air. - Jerry Coleman

As members of the Body of Christ, each of us have been endowed with a special measure of grace to use in His service. Paul develops this theme in Romans where he states ‘For as we have many members in one Body, and all members have not the same office So we, being many, are one Body in Christ, and ever one members one of another. Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, whether…ministry, let us wait on our ministering or he that teacheth, on teaching Or he that exhorteth, on exhortation he that giveth, let him do it with simplicity he that ruleth, with diligence he that showeth mercy, with cheerfulness. - Paul Sadler

If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search… I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor. - Nikola Tesla, New York Times, October 19, 1931

Care and diligence bring luck. - Thomas Fuller

The expectations of life depend upon diligence the mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools. - Confucius

He who labors diligently need never despair; for all things are accomplished by diligence and labor. - Menander

Honest differences are often a healthy sign of progress. - Mahatma Gandhi

Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own…. Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love the greater the jealousy. - Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Srange Land

My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can. - Frank Zappa

Old age is not a disease- it is strength and survivorship, triumph over all kinds of vicissitudes and disappointments, trials and illnesses. - Samuel Johnson

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish it’s source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. - Anais Nin

To mature means to take responsibility for your life, to be on your own. Psychoanalysis fosters the infantile state by considering that the past is responsible for the illness. - Fritz Perls

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility. - William Shakespeare

In the mountain, stillness surges up to explore its own height In the lake, movement stands still to contemplate its own depth. - Rabindranath Tagore

Clarence Oh there they go. There they go, every time I start talkin ’bout boxing, a white man got to pull Rocky Marciano out their ass. That’s their one, that’s their one. Rocky Marciano. Rocky Marciano. Let me tell you something once and for all. Rocky Marciano was good, but compared to Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano ain’t shit. - Coming to America

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to. . . . The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures. - Vincent Van Gogh

Lawyers and painters can soon change white to black. - Danish proverb

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun. - Pablo Picasso

I say that good painters imitated nature but that bad ones vomited it. - Miguel de Cervantes

True gentleness is founded on a sense of what we owe to him who made us and to the common nature which we all share. It arises from reflection on our own failings and wants, and from just views of the condition and duty of man. It is native feeling heightened and improved by principle. - Hugh Blair

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more. - Nikola Tesla

The best fortune that can fall to a man is that which corrects his defects and makes up for his failings. - Johann von Goethe

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake. - Victor Hugo

All men have an equal right to the free development of their faculties they have an equal right to the impartial protection of the state but it is not true, it is against all the laws of reason and equity, it is against the eternal nature of things, that the indolent man and the laborious man, the spendthrift and the economist, the imprudent and the wise, should obtain and enjoy an equal amount of goods. - Victor Cousin

In studying the history of the human mind one is impressed again and again by the fact that the growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and that each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement. One could almost say that nothing is more hateful to man than to give up even a particle of his unconsciousness. Ask those who have tried to introduce a new idea! - Carl Jung

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day. - Sir Winston Churchill

RICHER THAN GOLDYou may have tangible wealth untoldCaskets of jewels and coffers of gold.Richer than I you can never be –I had a mother who read to me. - Strickland Gillilan

Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with. - Leighton

Like jewels in a crown, the precious stones glittered in the queen’s round metal hat. - Jack Handey Deep Thoughts

Liberals are very broadminded they are always willing to give careful consideration to both sides of the same side. - Anonymous

Liberals are very broadminded: they are always willing to give careful consideration to both sides of the same side. - Anonymous

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel. - Robert Frost

They that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength they shall mount up with wings as eagles they shall run, and not be weary they shall walk and not faint. - Isaiah 4031 Bible

You can put wings on a pig, but you don’t make it an eagle. - William Jefferson Clinton

As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill. - Hellen Keller

No need to teach an eagle to fly. - Greek Proverb

Eagles fly alone, but sheep flock together. - Polish Proverb

I’d like to see a nature film where an eagle swoops down and pulls a fish out of a lake, and then maybe he’s flying along, low to the ground, and the fish pulls a worm out of the ground. Now that’s a documentary - Jack Handey Deep Thoughts

Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue. - John Kenneth Galbraith

Thoughtfulness for others, generosity, modesty, and self-respect are the qualities which make a real gentleman or lady. - Thomas Huxley

Modesty is a shining light; it prepares the mind to receive knowledge, and the heart for truth. - Madam Guizot

Modesty is the only sure bait when you angle for praise. - Lord Chesterfield

He who speaks without modesty will find it difficult to make his words good. - Confucius, The Confucian Analects

As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense. - Jonathan Swift

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there. - Sydney Harris

Apparent failure may hold in its rough shell the germs of a success that will blossom in time, and bear fruit throughout eternity. - Frances Watkins Harper

I have the worlds largest seashell collection. You may have seen it, I keep it spread out on beaches all over the world. - Steven Wright

Books…are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with ‘em, then we grow out of ‘em and leave ‘em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development. - Dorothy L. Sayers

Beauty is a form of genius–is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon. - Oscar Wilde

He who boasts of his ancestry praises the merits of another. - Hercules Furens - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbors. - Dean Inge

He who boasts of his ancestry is praising the deeds of another. - Seneca

The man who has nothing to boast of but his illustrious ancestry is like the potato - the best part under ground. - Thomas Overbury

A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors. - William Ralph Inge

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them. - John Ruskin

Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. - Mark Twain

Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare. - Harriet Martineau

A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer. - Dean Acheson