You asked.
"For all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: 'It might have been.'"
-John Greenleaf Whittier
"Black holes are when God divided by zero."
-Stephen Wright
"In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.”
-Dorothy Sayers
"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; slight minds discuss people."
-Eleanor Roosevelt
"Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future."
-Oscar Wilde
"There is no torture greater than that of a man who is unable to express what is in his soul."
-Michel de Montaigne
"The unexamined life is not worth living."
-Socrates
"People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not."
-Neil Postman
"We have sunk to a depth in which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men."
-George Orwell
"With what noise, and tumult, and zeal of solemn justice, is this sin punished! The streets are not more full of beholders, than clamors. Every one strives to express his detestation of the fact, by some token of revenge: one casts mire, another water, another rotten eggs, upon the miserable offender. Neither, indeed, is she worthy of less: but, in the mean time, no man looks home to himself. It is no uncharity to say, that too many insult in this just punishment, who have deserved more... Public sins have more shame; private may have more guilt. If the world cannot charge me of those, it is enough, that I can charge my soul of worse. Let others rejoice, in these public executions; let me pity the sins of others, and be humbled under the sense of my own."
-Joseph Hall
"Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed"
-Emily Dickinson
"And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me"
-Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
-Bertrand Russell
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles..."
-Jack Kerouac
"One does not see anything until one sees its beauty."
-Oscar Wilde
"There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses."
-George Bernard Shaw
"The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them."
-Stephen King
"Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction."
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions."
-Mahfouz Naguib
"From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then- in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life- was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view."
-Edgar Allan Poe
“The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, 'I was wrong.'”
-Sydney J. Harris
"A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor."
-Victor Hugo
“The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing, and becomes nothing may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn and feel and change and grow and love and live.”
- Leo F. Buscaglia
“There is no joy but calm.”
-Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."
-Bertrand Russell
"I believe in things so huge we forget what they're about and why. I believe in things so small that it's taken us all these years to realize we've seen nothing."
-Arkaye Kierulf
"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
-Albert Einstein
"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought."
-Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
"The policy of being too cautious is the greatest risk of all."
-Jawaharlal Nehru
Albert Einstein:
People like you and I, though mortal of course like everyone else, do not grow old no matter how long we live...[We] never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born. letter to Otto Juliusburger
Daniel Dennett:
There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.
John Adams:
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
Pablo Picasso:
All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Georg C. Lichtenberg:
To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.
Kenneth Patton:
The day I see a leaf is a marvel of a day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Truth, and goodness, and beauty are but different faces of the same all.
Alfred Korzybski:
There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.
Albert Camus:
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Cicero:
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Oscar Wilde:
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
Edwin H. Friedman:
The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them. Even the choices words lose their power when they are used to overpower. Attitudes are the real figures of speech.
Franklin D. Roosevelt:
When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.
Leo Tolstoy:
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
John J. Plomp:
You know children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers.
Leo Rosten:
You can understand and relate to most people better if you look at them -- no matter how old or impressive they may be -- as if they are children. For most of us never really grow up or mature all that much -- we simply grow taller. O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.
Elbert Hubbard:
The man who is anybody and who does anything is surely going to be criticized, vilified, and misunderstood. This is part of the penalty for greatness.
Winston Churchill:
From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
Martin Luther King, jr.:
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Shirley Chisholm:
When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.
Charlotte Bronte:
Conventionality is not morality.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Is it so bad to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.
True dissent doesn't feel like going to school wearing black; it feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.
—Eliezer Yudkowsky
People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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