I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.
Challenge is a dragon with a gift in its mouth?Tame the dragon and the gift is yours.
I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.
People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.
Bear in mind that you should conduct yourself in life as at a feast.
Worrying about them always struck me as about as useful as worrying about getting hit by lightning.
Truth has beauty, power and necessity.
The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.
If you think you can win, you can win. Faith is necessary to victory.
When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
When you make a mistake, don't look back at it long. Take the reason of the thing into your mind and then look forward. Mistakes are lessons of wisdom. The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power.
He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
I nearly fell again, but new hands grabbed me from in front and dragged me down a steel floor and then forced me to my knees and locked my hands to something behind me.
Whatever you fear most has no power - it is your fear that has the power.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'
The hands behind me gave me another shove.
To be willing to die for an idea is to set a rather high price on conjecture.
We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.
Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change color and fall from the trees.
On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily lying down.
The best of us must sometimes eat our words.
Listen. Do not have an opinion while you listen because frankly, your opinion doesn?t hold much water outside of Your Universe. Just listen. Listen until their brain has been twisted like a dripping towel and what they have to say is all over the floor.
Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.
The charity that hastens to proclaim its good deeds, ceases to be charity, and is only pride and ostentation.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.
Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.
There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.
Cheese - milk's leap toward immortality.
Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
I despise the pleasure of pleasing people that I despise.
I phoned my dad to tell him I had stopped smoking. He called me a quitter.
In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
The toughest question has always been, "How do you get your ideas?" How do you answer that? It's like asking runners how they run, or singers how they sing. They just do it!
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Oh, I don't blame Congress. If I had $600 billion at my disposal, I'd be irresponsible, too.
It?s like your batteries get low, and you need to charge them on someone else?s story.
Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster. Your life will never be the same again.
Depend not on another, but lean instead on thyself...True happiness is born of self-reliance.
My wish is to ride the tempest, tame the waves, kill the sharks. I will not resign myself...
The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.
After the last of 16 mounting screws has been removed from an access cover, it will be discovered that the wrong access cover has been removed.
A mother is not a person to lean on but a person to make leaning unnecessary.
Refuse to be ill. Never tell people you are ill; never own it to yourself. Illness is one of those things which a man should resist on principle.
I don't like composers who think. It gets in the way of their plagiarism.
His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even... knowledge, was foolproof.
Greatness is more than potential. It is the execution of that potential. Beyond the raw talent. You need the appropriate training. You need the discipline. You need the inspiration. You need the drive.
Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
What's the earth With all its art, verse, music, worth - Compared with love, found, gained, and kept?
After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.
To believe in God or in a guiding force because someone tells you to is the height of stupidity. We are given senses to receive our information within. With our own eyes we see, and with our own skin we feel. With our intelligence, it is intended that we understand. But each person must puzzle it out for himself or herself.
In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.
All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.
I despise the pleasure of pleasing people that I despise.
Winning is important to me, but what brings me real joy is the experience of being fully engaged in whatever I'm doing.
Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.
It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.
For the most part, fear is nothing but an illusion. When you share it with someone else, it tends to disappear.
My home is not a place, it is people.
Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.
Turn the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.
Take a two-mile walk every morning before breakfast.
Anyone who has gumption knows what it is, and anyone who hasn't can never know what it is. So there is no need of defining it.
Vanessa didn't like it, but I figured a cop wasn't going to stop for a kid waving his hat in the street, not that day. They just might stop if they saw Darryl bleeding there, though. I argued briefly with her and Darryl settled it by lurching to his feet and dragging himself down toward Market Street.
History is more or less bunk.
We cannot destroy kindred: Our chains stretch a little sometimes, but they never break.
I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get.
The engine died and then the doors swung open.
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.
We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.
History is more or less bunk.
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too.
Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.
Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.
Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work.
For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.
There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
I'd learned my lesson.
The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.
After the last of 16 mounting screws has been removed from an access cover, it will be discovered that the wrong access cover has been removed.
He was one of those men who think that the world can be saved by writing a pamphlet.
Most advances in science come when a person for one reason or another is forced to change fields.
Get away from the crowd when you can. Keep yourself to yourself, if only for a few hours daily.
I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.
We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.
My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.
It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.
The crux... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing.
The engine died and then the doors swung open.
Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey.
A man can do all things if he but wills them.
People will buy anything that is one to a customer.
Students achieving Oneness will move on to Twoness.
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
O, it is excellent to have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings.
Set all things in their own peculiar place, and know that order is the greatest grace.
At the mention of the word mace, the guy looked scared and kind of melted back, though the crowd kept him moving forward.
Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.
You cannot be mad at somebody who makes you laugh - it's as simple as that.
You can't deny laughter. When it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.
You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
Many people weigh the guilt they will feel against the pleasure of the forbidden action they want to take.
Darryl wasn't in good shape -- he was white-faced and panting.
My friends are my estate.
It is fortunate to be of high birth, but it is no less so to be of such character that people do not care to know whether you are or are not.
The better part of valor is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life.
Sometimes the cure for restlessness is rest.
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.
Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster. Your life will never be the same again.
Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.
I hope that when I die, people say about me, 'Boy, that guy sure owed me a lot of money.'
I strained around against the crowd and saw Van looking with disgust at an older guy in a nice suit who was kind of smirking at her. She was digging in her purse and I knew what she was digging for.
I don't believe in intuition. When you get sudden flashes of perception, it is just the brain working faster than usual. But you've been getting ready to know it for a long time, and when it comes, you feel you've known it always.
If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.
There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
Therefore search and see if there is not some place where you may invest your humanity.
Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid.
To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.
People fail forward to success.
It is impossible to walk rapidly and be unhappy.
My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.
Listen. Do not have an opinion while you listen because frankly, your opinion doesn?t hold much water outside of Your Universe. Just listen. Listen until their brain has been twisted like a dripping towel and what they have to say is all over the floor.
Be courteous to all, but intimate with few; and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.
When they discover the center of the universe, a lot of people will be disappointed to discover they are not it.
If you refuse to be made straight when you are green, you will not be made straight when you are dry.
I ran the wrong kind of business, but I did it with integrity.
The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.
I'm going to stay in show business until I'm the last one left.
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."
A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
Listen. Do not have an opinion while you listen because frankly, your opinion doesn?t hold much water outside of Your Universe. Just listen. Listen until their brain has been twisted like a dripping towel and what they have to say is all over the floor.
Set all things in their own peculiar place, and know that order is the greatest grace.
There are two types of people--those who come into a room and say, 'Well, here I am!' and those who come in and say, 'Ah, there you are.'
The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure.
We rocked to a stop still on a downslope.
There are admirable potentialities in every human being. Believe in your strength and your youth. Learn to repeat endlessly to yourself, 'It all depends on me.'
Life engenders life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.
We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
Facts are the enemy of truth.
The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy.
Is there life before death?
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.
If it weren't for baseball, many kids wouldn't know what a millionaire looked like.
Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.
The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
I cried out and my own voice was muffled by the hood.
I was not a child prodigy, because a child prodigy is a child who knows as much when it is a child as it does when it grows up.
The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.
A man without ambition is dead. A man with ambition but no love is dead. A man with ambition and love for his blessings here on earth is ever so alive. Having been alive, it won't be so hard in the end to lie down and rest.
Even the fear of death is nothing compared to the fear of not having lived authentically and fully.
Before you do anything, think. If you do something to try and impress someone, to be loved, accepted or even to get someone's attention, stop and think. So many people are busy trying to create an image, they die in the process.
I say luck is when an opportunity comes along, and you're prepared for it.
My home is not a place, it is people.
The car slewed to a stop and only then did I notice that it wasn't a cop car, ambulance or fire-engine.
You must not think me necessarily foolish because I am facetious, nor will I consider you necessarily wise because you are grave.
We learn something every day, and lots of times it's that what we learned the day before was wrong.
We rocked to a stop still on a downslope.
The only difference between a rut and a grave... is in their dimensions.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it's important.
The more freedom we enjoy, the greater the responsibility we bear, toward others as well as ourselves.
Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.
In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from.
This world is given as the prize for the men in earnest; and that which is true of this world, is truer still of the world to come.
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.
A man without ambition is dead. A man with ambition but no love is dead. A man with ambition and love for his blessings here on earth is ever so alive. Having been alive, it won't be so hard in the end to lie down and rest.
There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.
Above all things, never be afraid. The enemy who forces you to retreat is himself afraid of you at that very moment.
Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.
Darryl wasn't in good shape -- he was white-faced and panting.
Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us.
Seize opportunity by the beard, for it is bald behind.
To achieve great things we must live as though we were never going to die.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex--but Congress can.
Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.
We rarely think people have good sense unless they agree with us.
Worries go down better with soup than without.
Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn whatever state I am in, therin to be content
When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.
The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.
One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.
Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
Could you imagine how horrible things would be if we always told others how we felt? Life would be intolerably bearable.
Sometimes love will pick you up by the short hairs...and jerk the heck out of you.
That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong.
I kept talking. "Listen -- this is some kind of misunderstanding.
We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
There is surely a piece of divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun.
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Vigorous writing is concise.
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
Vanessa didn't like it, but I figured a cop wasn't going to stop for a kid waving his hat in the street, not that day. They just might stop if they saw Darryl bleeding there, though. I argued briefly with her and Darryl settled it by lurching to his feet and dragging himself down toward Market Street.
Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint on it you can.
There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
Never does the human soul appear so strong and noble as when it foregoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury.
Make a decision, even if it's wrong.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.
Never eat more than you can lift.
Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint on it you can.
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there.
A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.
Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from.
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
Each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms.
Never be a cynic, even a gentle one. Never help out a sneer, even at the devil.
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad to realize that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days.
We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jellybeans.
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily lying down.
Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel.
Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
History is more or less bunk.
Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.
I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.
True friends are those who really know you but love you anyway.
You couldn't even prove the White House staff sane beyond a reasonable doubt.
You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.
Where facts are few, experts are many.
Vegetarianism is harmless enough, though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self-righteousness.
Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint on it you can.
I am not sincere, even when I say I am not.
Neither did the cop car that went past, nor the firetruck, nor the next three cop-cars.
I feel very strongly that change is good because it stirs up the system.
Summer afternoon - Summer afternoon... the two most beautiful words in the English language.
How to Raise your I.Q. by Eating Gifted Children
If we fall, we don't need self-recrimination or blame or anger - we need a reawakening of our intention and a willingness to recommit, to be whole-hearted once again.
Memory feeds imagination.
When you encounter difficulties and contradictions, do not try to break them, but bend them with gentleness and time.
Sack over my head and cinched it tight around my windpipe.
How we treasure (and admire) the people who acknowledge us!
Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
When I was a kid my parents moved a lot, but I always found them.
Vegetarianism is harmless enough, though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self-righteousness.
Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.
I was not a child prodigy, because a child prodigy is a child who knows as much when it is a child as it does when it grows up.
I've gone into hundreds of fortune-teller's parlors, and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her.
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be.
Good soldiers never pass up a chance to eat or sleep. They never know how much they'll be called on to do before the next chance.
'Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.' Under the influence of this pestilent morality, I am forever letting tomorrow's work slop backwards into today's, and doing painfully and nervously today what I could do quickly and easily tomorrow.
If there is one thing worse than being an ugly duckling in a house of swans, it's having the swans pretend there's no difference.
Keep cool and you command everybody.
As I neared her, I bent to help her up, and was nearly knocked over her.
We were in the open concourse where the turnstiles were. It was hardly any better here -- the enclosed space sent the voices around us echoing back in a roar that made my head ring, and the smell and feeling of all those bodies made me feel a claustrophobia I'd never known I was prone to.
I never think of the future - it comes soon enough.
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
I'm moving, but don't worry! Someone once told me we're all on the same planet, so I'll be okay!
Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience.
Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.
In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be.
In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.
I don't like composers who think. It gets in the way of their plagiarism.
The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself.
A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.
He who labors diligently need never despair; for all things are accomplished by diligence and labor.
When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.
There is an applause superior to that of the multitudes: one's own.
If we fall, we don't need self-recrimination or blame or anger - we need a reawakening of our intention and a willingness to recommit, to be whole-hearted once again.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
I stumbled some, then a hand pushed my head down and I was inside the Hummer.
Nothing is so good for an ignorant man as silence; and if he was sensible of this he would not be ignorant.
Hope is tomorrow's veneer over today's disappointment.
If there's one thing I know it's God does love a good joke.
Be courteous to all, but intimate with few; and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.
The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too.
Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
Good company and good discourse are the very sinews of virtue.
I lived what most people call the good life. I was happy, but deep inside I always felt that, with the short amount of time we are given to live and love in this world, we spend too much time loving things instead of people.
If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
Each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms.
Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
Van was screaming something and Jolu was shouting and I looked at them for a second and that was when someone put a coarse.
A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course to victory.
Whatever you fear most has no power - it is your fear that has the power.
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
He who laughs, lasts!
There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else.
That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.
I am here for a purpose and that purpose is to grow into a mountain, not to shrink to a grain of sand. Henceforth will I apply ALL my efforts to become the highest mountain of all and I will strain my potential until it cries for mercy.
Whenever evil befalls us, we ought to ask ourselves, after the first suffering, how we can turn it into good. So shall we take occasion, from one bitter root, to raise perhaps many flowers.
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
There is no stigma attached to recognizing a bad decision in time to install a better one.
The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself.
A chess genius is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise.
If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.
In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from.
What's the earth With all its art, verse, music, worth - Compared with love, found, gained, and kept?
A chess genius is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise.
My friend is one... who take me for what I am.
The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.
A smiling face is half the meal.
All human situations have their inconveniences. We feel those of the present but neither see nor feel those of the future; and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse.
I am doomed to an eternity of compulsive work. No set goal achieved satisfies. Success only breeds a new goal. The golden apple devoured has seeds. It is endless.
I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.
The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
Hollywood is a place where they place you under contract instead of under observation.
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.
Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.
Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
I'd never really believed in terrorists before.
If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.
We can be sure that the greatest hope for maintaining equilibrium in the face of any situation rests within ourselves.
I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.
I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.
The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth that it prevents you from achieving.
Be thou the first true merit to befriend, his praise is lost who stays till all commend.
If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.
Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.
Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.
A hypocrite is a person who--but who isn't?
I like coincidences. They make me wonder about destiny, and whether free will is an illusion or just a matter of perspective. They let me speculate on the idea of some master plan that, from time to time, we're allowed to see out of the corner of our eye.
Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
Seize opportunity by the beard, for it is bald behind.
There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.
Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but 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 ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.
Winning is important to me, but what brings me real joy is the experience of being fully engaged in whatever I'm doing.
Most advances in science come when a person for one reason or another is forced to change fields.
Obscurity is a good thing. You can fail in obscurity. It removes the fear of failure.
He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.
A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course to victory.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
The perfect bureaucrat everywhere is the man who manages to make no decisions and escape all responsibility.
Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. 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 blindfolded fear.
There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else.
They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad to realize that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days.
You couldn't even prove the White House staff sane beyond a reasonable doubt.
The strongest possible piece of advice I would give any young woman is: Don't screw around, and don't smoke.
He who is not very strong in memory should not meddle with lying.
The trick is to make sure you don't die waiting for prosperity to come.
Lack of money is no obstacle. Lack of an idea is an obstacle.
After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.
Anger at lies lasts forever. Anger at truth can't last.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch.
I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
Funny business, a woman's career: the things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman. It's one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman.
You never find yourself until you face the truth.
Good company and good discourse are the very sinews of virtue.
Any transition serious enough to alter your definition of self will require not just small adjustments in your way of living and thinking but a full-on metamorphosis.
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
Like anyone else, there are days I feel beautiful and days I don't, and when I don't, I do something about it.
There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.
One of the best rules in conversation is, never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish had been left unsaid.
There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness.
I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God's business.
The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.
So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
Be sincere; be brief; be seated.
My friend is one... who take me for what I am.
We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.
Keep cool and you command everybody.
I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."
Is love supposed to last throughout all time, or is it like trains changing at random stops. If I loved her, how could I leave her? If I felt that way then, how come I don't feel anything now?
Life engenders life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.
I feel very strongly that change is good because it stirs up the system.
No.
I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.
The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success. Talent is only a starting point in this business. You've got to keep on working that talent. Someday I'll reach for it and it won't be there.
It is better to wear out than to rust out.
What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight - it's the size of the fight in the dog.
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Everybody likes to go their own way--to choose their own time and manner of devotion.
More movement, and the sense of bodies being shackled in alongside of me.
On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily lying down.
The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.
The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.
I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming... suddenly you find - at the age of 50, say - that a whole new life has opened before you.
You could get on a boat there, get away. That fit with the terrorism hypothesis.
If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.
Maybe they were terrorists!
A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.
It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.
Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.
Be more prompt to go to a friend in adversity than in prosperity.
Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
Oh, I don't blame Congress. If I had $600 billion at my disposal, I'd be irresponsible, too.
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
There ain't no free lunches in this country. And don't go spending your whole life commiserating that you got raw deals. You've got to say, 'I think that if I keep working at this and want it bad enough I can have it.'
It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear.
Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.
It is not enough to aim; you must hit.
Peace is when time doesn't matter as it passes by.
The first vehicle that screamed past -- an ambulance -- didn't even slow down.
The freedom of all is essential to my freedom.
No.
Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.
Paradise is exactly like where you are right now... only much, much better.
For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
We bear the world and we make it... There was never a great man who had not a great mother - it is hardly an exaggeration.
A man without ambition is dead. A man with ambition but no love is dead. A man with ambition and love for his blessings here on earth is ever so alive. Having been alive, it won't be so hard in the end to lie down and rest.
The roses, the lovely notes, the dining and dancing are all welcome and splendid. But when the Godiva is gone, the gift of real love is having someone who'll go the distance with you. Someone who, when the wedding day limo breaks down, is willing to share a seat on the bus.
Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
I like an escalator because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. There would never be an escalator temporaly out of order sign, only an escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.
Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.
Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn't block traffic.
I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be.
I ran the wrong kind of business, but I did it with integrity.
Never read a book through merely because you have begun it.
Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anyone else.
Now is the time for all good men to come to.
I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get.
Late to bed and late to wake will keep you long on money and short on mistakes.
There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
Sorrow was like the wind. It came in gusts.
When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently. For in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say, whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.
A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."
Hope is tomorrow's veneer over today's disappointment.
Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster. Your life will never be the same again.
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.
Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.
There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.
Learning to live in the present moment is part of the path of joy.
When you have got an elephant by the hind leg, and he is trying to run away, it's best to let him run.
Equal opportunity means everyone will have a fair chance at being incompetent.
We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.
What's another word for Thesaurus?
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex--but Congress can.
Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.
Having a holiday weekend without a family member felt like putting on a sweater that had an extra arm.
Man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'
I got up the third step and reached for the fourth, but it wasn't there.
When someone does something good, applaud! You will make two people happy.
None are so busy as the fool and knave.
There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice.
A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
A man can do all things if he but wills them.
Think of life as a terminal illness, because, if you do, you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.
I say luck is when an opportunity comes along, and you're prepared for it.
There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.
Your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.
I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. The transfer is not paying off. Sure, muscles are unreliable, but they represent several million years of accumulated finesse.
The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a building filled with archaic furniture. Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
Life is consciousness.
It is not enough to do good; one must do it the right way.
There is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.
If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles, one would hardly see anybody.
My mother loved children -- she would have given anything if I had been one.
Do something every day that you don't want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
Love truth, and pardon error.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
When you have got an elephant by the hind leg, and he is trying to run away, it's best to let him run.
Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.
Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.
Bacchus hath drowned more men than Neptune.
We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
The car skidded to a stop just in front of me, and I jumped back and lost my balance and ended up on the road.
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
What more felicity can fall to creature, than to enjoy delight with liberty.
The crux... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing.
Life is consciousness.
Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.
After the last of 16 mounting screws has been removed from an access cover, it will be discovered that the wrong access cover has been removed.
Refuse to be ill. Never tell people you are ill; never own it to yourself. Illness is one of those things which a man should resist on principle.
True friends are those who really know you but love you anyway.
Worrying about them always struck me as about as useful as worrying about getting hit by lightning.
Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.
The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.
Never let the demands of tomorrow interfere with the pleasures and excitement of today.
You cannot be mad at somebody who makes you laugh - it's as simple as that.
What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight - it's the size of the fight in the dog.
All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.
Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousand of miles and all the years you have lived.
You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jellybeans.
Sometimes love will pick you up by the short hairs...and jerk the heck out of you.
Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves.
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there.
Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.
If you refuse to be made straight when you are green, you will not be made straight when you are dry.
It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.
Sitting in the back of that Hummer, my head in a hood, my hands lashed behind my back, lurching back and forth while the bruises swelled up on my head, terrorism suddenly felt a lot riskier.
Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far.
Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
Be careful that victories do not carry the seed of future defeats.
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you.
By prizing heartfulness above faultlessness, we may reap more from our effort because we're more likely to be changed by it.
We succeed only as we identify in life, or in war, or in anything else, a single overriding objective, and make all other considerations bend to that one objective.
I heard Jolu respond, then felt the thump he was dealt, too.
I don't like composers who think. It gets in the way of their plagiarism.
The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.
The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
I felt the doors open near me, and then saw a confusion of booted feet moving close by.
Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
Get away from the crowd when you can. Keep yourself to yourself, if only for a few hours daily.
You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.
I lived what most people call the good life. I was happy, but deep inside I always felt that, with the short amount of time we are given to live and love in this world, we spend too much time loving things instead of people.
Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.
The most important thing she'd learned over the years was that there was no way to be a perfect mother and a million ways to be a good one.
Never feel self-pity, the most destructive emotion there is. How awful to be caught up in the terrible squirrel cage of self.
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
The strongest possible piece of advice I would give any young woman is: Don't screw around, and don't smoke.
What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
Our lives teach us who we are.
The man who has nothing to boast of but his illustrious ancestry is like the potato - the best part under ground.
There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?
The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself.
I've gone into hundreds of fortune-teller's parlors, and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her.
Flattery is like cologne water, to be smelt of, not swallowed.
How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?
I define comfort as self-acceptance. When we finally learn that self-care begins and ends with ourselves, we no longer demand sustenance and happiness from others.
Depend not on another, but lean instead on thyself...True happiness is born of self-reliance.
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
Obscurity is a good thing. You can fail in obscurity. It removes the fear of failure.
Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.
Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.
I opened my mouth, then shut it, then, very slowly, I held my hands up in front of me.
If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe.
I nearly fell again, but new hands grabbed me from in front and dragged me down a steel floor and then forced me to my knees and locked my hands to something behind me.
There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.
We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.
You could get on a boat there, get away. That fit with the terrorism hypothesis.
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.
It is not enough to aim; you must hit.
He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jellybeans.
Art is science made clear.
Worries go down better with soup than without.
Man is only miserable so far as he thinks himself so.
I am not young enough to know everything.
It was a military-looking Jeep, like an armored Hummer, only it didn't have any military insignia on it.
We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.
Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
Over the years your bodies become walking autobiographies, telling friends and strangers alike of the minor and major stresses of your lives.
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
The secret of greatness is simple: do better work than any other man in your field - and keep on doing it.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
The happiest is the person who suffers the least pain; the most miserable who enjoys the least pleasure.
Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far.
Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey.
What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive?
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Speak when you are angry--and you will make the best speech you'll ever regret.
All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.
Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.
We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.
It is wonderful how quickly you get used to things, even the most astonishing.
A minute's success pays the failure of years.
Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.
No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.
The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.
Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
We should every night call ourselves to an account; What infirmity have I mastered today? What passions opposed? What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired? Our vices will abort of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.
Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently. For in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say, whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.
I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people who are convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference after another.
Art is science made clear.
Someone went upside my head again.
A doctor saves lives -- It's up to people to create lives that are worth saving.
Money doesn't always bring happiness. People with ten million dollars are no happier than people with nine million dollars.
Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.
Confidence is the sexiest thing a woman can have. It's much sexier than any body part.
One of the best rules in conversation is, never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish had been left unsaid.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
You should not live one way in private, another in public.
Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.
When you close your doors, and make darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone, for you are not alone; nay, God is within, and your genius is within. And what need have they of light to see what you are doing?
We don't get offered crises, they arrive.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Everybody likes to go their own way--to choose their own time and manner of devotion.
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.
We rocked to a stop still on a downslope.
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
I feel very strongly that change is good because it stirs up the system.
Nothing inspires forgiveness quite like revenge.
What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
If you would thoroughly know anything, teach it to others.
We are always in search of the redeeming formula, the crystallizing thought.
O, it is excellent to have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.
All human situations have their inconveniences. We feel those of the present but neither see nor feel those of the future; and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse.
In America, they want you to accomplish these great feats, to pull off these David Copperfield-type stunts. You want me to be great, but you don't ever want me to say I'm great?
I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me they are wonderful things for other people to go on.
Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.
I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
You know what's interesting about Washington? It's the kind of place where second-guessing has become second nature.
Laughter is supposed to be the best medicine, however, it should never be at the expense of someone?s feelings or ignoring truth.
I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.
Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing.
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.
Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.
You know what's interesting about Washington? It's the kind of place where second-guessing has become second nature.
A moment later, I caught my breath, but I didn't say anything.
Be more prompt to go to a friend in adversity than in prosperity.
Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
Always seek out the seed of triumph in every adversity.
A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.
Memory feeds imagination.
All human situations have their inconveniences. We feel those of the present but neither see nor feel those of the future; and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse.
...happiness gives us the energy which is the basis of health.
It's a dangerous business going out your front door.
Nobody is ever met at the airport when beginning a new adventure. It's just not done.
My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.
It's not the hours you put in your work that counts, it's the work you put in the hours.
Be thou the first true merit to befriend, his praise is lost who stays till all commend.
Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'
The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad to realize that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days.
It is easier to exclude harmful passions than to rule them, and to deny them admittance than to control them after they have been admitted.
My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.
You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness, can be trained to do most things.
You need only claim the event of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality.
Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be.
Photographers do this for a living, every single day -- they point their lenses toward every single corner of our world and somehow make the mundane mesmerizing through their artistic eye. It's all a matter of being aware of your surroundings and realizing that there are some really amazing and interesting things to look at, even if it may just be something so simple as a wall being covered up by paint.
Good taste is the enemy of comedy.
Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.
A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
A chess genius is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise.
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
I guess we'd be living in a boring, perfect world if everybody wished everybody else well.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
I shouted, and earned a hard thump on my head for my trouble.
Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.
Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
We rocked to a stop still on a downslope.
A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Cheerfulness, it would appear, is a matter which depends fully as much on the state of things within, as on the state of things without and around us.
How to Raise your I.Q. by Eating Gifted Children
The better part of valor is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life.
No one goes there nowadays, it's too crowded.
For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.
Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.
It is my hope that I can assist you in getting here too.
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Vigorous writing is concise.
What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Try to put your happiness before anyone else's, because you may never have done so in your entire life, if you really think about it, if you are really honest with yourself.
Depend not on another, but lean instead on thyself...True happiness is born of self-reliance.
We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.
I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
I don't like composers who think. It gets in the way of their plagiarism.
Thomas Jefferson once said, 'We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.' And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.
Learn the art of patience. Apply discipline to your thoughts when they become anxious over the outcome of a goal. Impatience breeds anxiety, fear, discouragement and failure. Patience creates confidence, decisiveness, and a rational outlook, which eventually leads to success.
Most advances in science come when a person for one reason or another is forced to change fields.
More bodies were roughly shoved in beside me.
Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.
The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a building filled with archaic furniture. Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings.
Before you do anything, think. If you do something to try and impress someone, to be loved, accepted or even to get someone's attention, stop and think. So many people are busy trying to create an image, they die in the process.
He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.
Never part without loving words to think of during your absence. It may be that you will not meet again in life.
A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, "You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing."
Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.
I phoned my dad to tell him I had stopped smoking. He called me a quitter.
I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
You freeze where you are, time stops, and your heart thunders in your ears.
Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.
It's all right to have butterflies in your stomach. Just get them to fly in formation.
Sometimes the cure for restlessness is rest.
The trick is to make sure you don't die waiting for prosperity to come.
I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
A hobby a day keeps the doldrums away.
Walking is man's best medicine.
A good man would prefer to be defeated than to defeat injustice by evil means.
Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
It is better to wear out than to rust out.
Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Bacchus hath drowned more men than Neptune.
Go often to the house of thy friend; for weeds soon choke up the unused path.
We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.
My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.
Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster. Your life will never be the same again.
The average person thinks he isn't.
It's the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.
Never rely on the glory of the morning nor the smiles of your mother-in-law.
If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?
God creates men, but they choose each other.
Assuming either the Left Wing or the Right Wing gained control of the country, it would probably fly around in circles.
I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.
Now is the time for all good men to come to.
Deeds, not words shall speak me.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.
I'd learned my lesson.
Do not envy a sinner; you don't know what disaster awaits him.
As a scientist, I am not sure anymore that life can be reduced to a class struggle, to dialectical materialism, or any set of formulas. Life is spontaneous and it is unpredictable, it is magical. I think that we have struggled so hard with the tangible that we have forgotten the intangible.
You never know how a horse will pull until you hook him up to a heavy load.
Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.
I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
Preserving health by too severe a rule is a worrisome malady.
A tactical retreat is not a bad response to a surprise assault, you know. First you survive. Then you choose your own ground. Then you counterattack.
You don't stop laughing because you grow old. You grow old because you stop laughing.
Facts are the enemy of truth.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Feet, why do I need them if I have wings to fly?
The crowd gives the leader new strength.
I mean, I knew that in the abstract there were terrorists somewhere in the world, but they didn't really represent any risk to me.
You have to have funny faces and words, you can't just have words. It is a powerful thing, and I think that's why it's hard for people to imagine that women can do that, be that powerful.
Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
I stumbled some, then a hand pushed my head down and I was inside the Hummer.
Time is that quality of nature which keeps events from happening all at once. Lately it doesn't seem to be working.
Go through your phone book, call people and ask them to drive you to the airport. The ones who will drive you are your true friends. The rest aren't bad people; they're just acquaintances.
A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.
Each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms.
The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.
Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists.
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.
Nothing changes your opinion of a friend so surely as success - yours or his.
Nothing is so good for an ignorant man as silence; and if he was sensible of this he would not be ignorant.
Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.
I was not a child prodigy, because a child prodigy is a child who knows as much when it is a child as it does when it grows up.
I used to believe that marriage would diminish me, reduce my options. That you had to be someone less to live with someone else when, of course, you have to be someone more.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.
Sorrow was like the wind. It came in gusts.
If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles, one would hardly see anybody.
A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
Before I met my husband, I'd never fallen in love, though I'd stepped in it a few times.
I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?
A mother is not a person to lean on but a person to make leaning unnecessary.
Good taste is the enemy of comedy.
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
I've been on a diet for two weeks and all I've lost is two weeks.
I'd never really believed in terrorists before.
We don't get offered crises, they arrive.
Love truth, and pardon error.
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death.
Never rely on the glory of the morning nor the smiles of your mother-in-law.
How we remember, what we remember and why we remember form the most personal map of our individuality.
How we treasure (and admire) the people who acknowledge us!
If it weren't for baseball, many kids wouldn't know what a millionaire looked like.
In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
I was in total darkness now and I strained my ears to hear what was going on with my friends.
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.
Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose.
Assuming either the Left Wing or the Right Wing gained control of the country, it would probably fly around in circles.
Never read a book through merely because you have begun it.
My wish is to ride the tempest, tame the waves, kill the sharks. I will not resign myself...
You must not think me necessarily foolish because I am facetious, nor will I consider you necessarily wise because you are grave.
It is only possible to live happily ever after on a day-to-day basis.
I looked up and saw a bunch of military-looking guys in coveralls, holding big, bulky rifles and wearing hooded gas masks with tinted face-plates.
History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.
I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God's business.
You cannot run away from a weakness; you must sometimes fight it out or perish. And if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?
This world is given as the prize for the men in earnest; and that which is true of this world, is truer still of the world to come.
I think it is good that books still exist, but they do make me sleepy.
Never let the demands of tomorrow interfere with the pleasures and excitement of today.
Be honorable yourself if you wish to associate with honorable people.
Oh, I don't blame Congress. If I had $600 billion at my disposal, I'd be irresponsible, too.
It's very hard to take yourself too seriously when you look at the world from outer space.
A hobby a day keeps the doldrums away.
Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness.
For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
One of the best rules in conversation is, never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish had been left unsaid.
Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Never feel self-pity, the most destructive emotion there is. How awful to be caught up in the terrible squirrel cage of self.
Flattery is like cologne water, to be smelt of, not swallowed.
He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.
An idea is salvation by imagination.
At my lemonade stand I used to give the first glass away free and charge five dollars for the second glass. The refill contained the antidote.
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
Maybe they were terrorists!
Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
It?s like your batteries get low, and you need to charge them on someone else?s story.
Summer afternoon - Summer afternoon... the two most beautiful words in the English language.
I was not a child prodigy, because a child prodigy is a child who knows as much when it is a child as it does when it grows up.
Terrorists killed a lot fewer people than bathroom falls and accidental electrocutions.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.
He had learned over the years that poor people did not feel so poor when allowed to give occasionally.
A man is too apt to forget that in this world he cannot have everything. A choice is all that is left him.
If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is "thank you," that would suffice.
You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
It is not enough to aim; you must hit.
I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."
The charity that hastens to proclaim its good deeds, ceases to be charity, and is only pride and ostentation.
The perfect bureaucrat everywhere is the man who manages to make no decisions and escape all responsibility.
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.
It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.
You could get on a boat there, get away. That fit with the terrorism hypothesis.
I'd never really believed in terrorists before.
When you want to believe in something, you also have to believe in everything that's necessary for believing in it.
Up ahead, I saw someone, a middle-aged lady in a hippie dress, falter and fall.
His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even... knowledge, was foolproof.
Vanessa didn't like it, but I figured a cop wasn't going to stop for a kid waving his hat in the street, not that day. They just might stop if they saw Darryl bleeding there, though. I argued briefly with her and Darryl settled it by lurching to his feet and dragging himself down toward Market Street.
You create your opportunities by asking for them.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.