Quotes        

Some of my favorite quotes:

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
        - Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944)

A goal without a plan is just a wish.
        - Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944)

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
        - Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-)

I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.
        - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.
        - Italo Calvino (1923-1985), Invisible Cities

Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions; but those who kindly reprove thy faults.
        - Socrates (469 BC - 399 BC)

Talk not of wasted affection, affection never was wasted,
If it enrich not the heart of another, its waters returning
Back to their springs, like the rain shall fill them full of refreshment;
That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain.

        - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882)

The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.
        - Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
        - Isaac Newton (1642 - 1727)

Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.
        - Theodore Roosevelt (1858 - 1919)

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
        - Steven Weinberg, NY Times, April 20, 1999

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
        - Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

Habits - the only reason they persist is that they are offering some satisfaction. You allow them to persist by not seeking any other, better form of satisfying the same needs. Every habit, good or bad, is acquired and learned in the same way - by finding that it is a means of satisfaction.
        - Juliene Berk (c. 1918 - )

Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
        - Auguste Rodin (1840 - 1917)

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
        - Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
          - Norman Cousins (1915 - 1990)

You better live your best and act your best and think your best today, for today is the sure preparation for tomorrow and all the other tomorrows that follow.
        - Harriet Martineau (1802 - 1876)

Be humble for you are made of earth. Be noble for you are made of stars.
        - Serbian Proverb

You are the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does. If you seek yourself, you rob the lens of its transparency. You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency, your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end, and remain purely as a means.
        - Dag Hammarskjold (1905 - 1961)

Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.
        - David Lloyd George (1863 - 1945)

The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth that it prevents you from achieving.
        - Russell Green

Graduate school is the snooze button on the alarm clock of life.
        - Anonymous OkCupid user, 2007

The truth is that there is nothing noble in being superior to somebody else. The only real nobility is in being superior to your former self.
        - Whitney Young (1921 - 1971)

Courage is a special kind of knowledge; the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared.
        - David Ben-Gurion (1886 - 1973)

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.
        - H.H. Munro (Saki) (1870 - 1916)

When you have nothing to say, say nothing.
        - Charles Caleb Colton (1780 - 1832)

Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography.
        - Paul Rodriguez (1955 - )

It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can do only a little. Do what you can.
        - Sydney Smith (1771)

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
          - Jack London (1876 - 1916)

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you react to what happens to you.
          - Robert H. Schuller (1926 - )

The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
          - Howard Zinn, November 6, 2004

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
          - Stephen Hawking (1942 - )

Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.
          - Sir Ralph Richardson (1902 - 1983)

In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.
          - Johann von Neumann (1903 - 1957)

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
          - Poul Anderson (1926 - )

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
          - Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

Trouble is part of your life, and if you don't share it, you don't give the person who loves you a chance to love you enough.
          - Dinah Shore (1917 - 1994)

What makes loneliness an anguish is not that I have no one to share my burden, but this: I have only my own burden to bear.
          - Dag Hammarskjold (1905 - 1961)

Riches may enable us to confer favours, but to confer them with propriety and grace requires a something that riches cannot give.
        - Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832)

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
        - Josh Billings (1818 - 1885)

[Re: Writing] When people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what's wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
          - Neil Gaiman (1960 - )

A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.
          - Hunter S. Thompson (1939 - 2005)

Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.
          - Robert Heinlein (1907 - 1988), Time Enough For Love

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.
          - Paul Dirac (1902 - 1984)

This isn't right, this isn't even wrong.
          - Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), upon reading a young physicist's paper

As we all know, reality has a liberal bias.
          - Stephen Colbert, White House Correspondents' Dinner, 4/29/06

At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years.
          - Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - ), 1983

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
          - Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860)

I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.
          - Franklin P. Adams (1881 - 1960)

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
          - Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

When you point your finger at someone, three fingers are pointing back at you.
          - Anonymous

All that really belongs to us is time; even he who has nothing else has that.
          - Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658)

You may delay, but time will not.
          - Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790)

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of.
          - Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790)

Well done is better than well said.
          - Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790)

Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.
          - Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790)

Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing.
          - Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790)

Energy and persistence conquer all things.
          - Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790)

Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.
          - Elie Wiesel (1928 - )

The best way out is always through.
          - Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)

Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.
          - Dale Carnegie (1888 - 1955)

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.
          - Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
          - John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 - 2006)

It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously.
          - Peter Ustinov (1921 - 2004)

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
          - Rachel Carson (1907 - 1964)

               

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Last updated March 6, 2008.