Quotes

I am one for quotes. I love them. So, bask in the glory that is some of the quotes that I have collected.

• When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.
  -François de la Rochefoucauld
• I don’t like it, and I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it.
  - Erwin Schrödinger
• No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The “I” is chained to ancestry by many factors … This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory.
  -  Erwin Schrödinger
• If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.
  -  Erwin Schrödinger
• Being single is getting over the illusion that there is somebody out there to complete you and taking charge of your own life.
  -Omkar Phatak
• Doubt is the father of invention.
  -Galileo Galilei
• And yet, it still moves.
  - Galileo Galilei
• I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence.
  - Doug McLeod
• Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.
  - Thomas Jefferson
• I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
  - Galileo Galilei
• All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
  - Galileo Galilei
• I’ve loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
  - Galileo Galilei
• The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
  - Galileo Galilei
• Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
  - Albert Einstein
• Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds.
  - Albert Einstein
• Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe.
  - Albert Einstein
• Gravity cannot be held responsible for people falling in love.
  - Albert Einstein
• If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone.
  - Thomas Hardy
• The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
  - Christopher Morley
• Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
  - Robert Frost
• Make yourself necessary to somebody.
  - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• If ignorance is indeed bliss, it is a very low grade of the article.
  - Tehyi Hsieh
• A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
  - Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Let us leave pretty women to men without imagination.
  - Marcel Proust
• Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.
  - Will Durant
• It is a characteristic of all movements and crusades that the psychopathic element rises to the top.
  - Robert Lindner
• In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on.
  - Robert Frost
• Music is the shorthand of emotion.
  - Leo Tolstoy
• Hell is full of musical amateurs.
  - George Bernard Shaw
• If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
  - Voltaire
• The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.
  - Mark Twain
• The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
  - Oscar Wilde
• I can’t believe that out of a hundred thousand sperm, you were the quickest.
  - Steven Pearl
• Pessimist – one who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
  - Oscar Wilde
• The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.
  - Anonymous
• There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
  - Oscar Levant
• He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
  - Frederich Nietzsche
• There is more stupidity around than hydrogen and it has longer shelf life.
  - Frank Zappa
• To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.
  - Amos Bronson Alcott
• Childhood – a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
  - Igor Stavinsky
• Do not mistake a child for his symptom.
  - Erik Erikson
• When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, “I used everything you gave me.”
  - Erma Bombeck
• If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.
  - Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Love me, please, I love you; I can bear to be your friend. So ask of me anything … I am not a tentative person. Whatever I do, I give up my whole self to it.
  - Edna Saint Vincent Millay
• If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.
  - Michael Evans
• Without love, what are we worth? Eighty-nine cents! Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely.
  - Benjamin Franklin
• I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
  - T.S. Eliot
• It was my tongue that swore; my heart is unsworn.
  - Euripides
• Art isn’t something you marry, it’s something you rape.
  - Edgar Degas
• Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
  - Albert Camus
• I’m tired of all the nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want – an adorable pancreas?
  - Jean Kerr
• Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for instance.
  - John Ruskin
• What is actual is actual only for one time, and only for one place.
  - T.S. Eliot
• Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely.
  - Karen Kaiser Clark
• One must never lose time in vainly regretting the past or in complaining against the changes which cause us discomfort, for change is the essence of life.
  - Anatole France
• Beat your child once a day. If you don’t know why, he does.
  - Chinese Proverb
• Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.
  - Vincent van Gogh
• A picture lives by companionship. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling.
  - Mark Rothko
• All art is a revolt against man’s fate.
  - Andri Malraux
• With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance.
  - Norman Mailer
• All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
  - James Baldwin
• Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is and what he says and when the source dries up the work withers and crumbles.
  - Albert Camus
• An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
  - Paul Valery
• Through the picture, I see reality. Through the word, I understand it.
  - Sven Lidman
• Don’t get mad, get even.
  - Robert F. Kennedy
• Beware the fury of a patient man.
  - John Dryden
• I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow.
  - William Blake
• Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
  - William Congreve
• When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.
  - Samuel L. Clemens
• Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.
  - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
  - Oscar Wilde
• Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
  - Susan Sontag
• Action is eloquence.
  - William Shakespeare
• When you appeal to force, there’s one thing you must never do – lose.
  - Dwight D. Eisenhower
• In action, be primitive; in foresight, a strategist.
  - Rene Char
• The worst thing you can do is to try to cling to something that’s gone, or to recreate it.
  Johnette Napolitano
• Be frank and explicit. That is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and to confuse the minds of others.
  - Benjamin Disraeli
• Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.
  - Phyllis Diller
• Who can refute a sneer?
  - William Paley
• He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.
  - William Blake
• Death twitches my ear. “Live,” he says, “I am coming”.
  - Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
• I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death.
  - William Shakespeare
• I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.
  - Robert Frost
• Most persons have died before they expired – died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.
  - Oliver Wendell Holmes
• When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy, the only decent thing to do is to die at once.
  - Samuel Butler
• I will be dead in a few months. But it hasn’t given me the slightest anxiety or worry. I always knew I was going to die.
  - B.F. Skinner
• Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or ‘broken heart’ is excuse for cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.
  - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• Poisons pain you; Rivers are damp; Acid stains you; And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.
  - Dorothy Parker
• When a man dies, he does not just die of the disease he has: he dies of his whole life.
  - Charles Peguy
• Toward the person who has died we adopt a special attitude: something like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task.
  -Sigmund Freud
• You have to learn to do everything, even to die.
  - Gertrude Stein
• I’m not afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.
  - Woody Allen
• I hate funerals, and would not attend my Own if it could be avoided, but it is well for every man to stop once in a while to think of what sort of a collection of mourners he is training for his final event.
  - Robert T. Morris
• I cannot forgive my friends for dying: I do not find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.
  - Logan Pearsall Smith
• Around, around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.
  - Archibald MacLeish
• God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
  - Reinhold Niebuhr
• Acceptance is not submission; it is acknowledgement of the facts of a situation. Then deciding what you’re going to do about it.
  - Kathleen Casey Theisen
• The happy and efficient people in this world are those who accept trouble as a normal detail of human life and resolve to capitalize it when it comes along.
  - H. Bertram Lewis
• Into each life some rain must fall, some days must be dark and dreary.
  - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• There are some people that you cannot change, you must either swallow them whole or leave them alone.
  - Margot Asquith
• The world is not to be put in order, the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.
  - Henry Miller
• God asks no man whether he will accept life. This is not the choice. You must take it. The only question is how.
  - Henry Ward Beecher
• There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.
  - George Santayana
• The survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature, but the fittest are rarely the strong. The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for adaptation, the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable, to harmonize with existing or changing conditions.
  - Dave. E. Smalley
• Play out the game, act well your part, and if the gods have blundered, we will not.
  - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The fair request ought to be followed by the deed, in silence.
  - Dante Alighieri
• When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.
  - John F. Kennedy
• My life is one long dream of Papier-mâché girls and boys in hospital beds. Its a bad CD stuck on repeat in a player that won’t open or shut off. Like the steady ticking of a clock that’s battery has gone dead and the second hand just wiggles in the same spot.
  - Frau Führer Crow