Motivational and Entertaining Quotes

A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.
Groucho Marx

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.
Groucho Marx

A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.
Groucho Marx

A man's only as old as the woman he feels.
Groucho Marx

A woman is an occasional pleasure but a cigar is always a smoke.
Groucho Marx

Alimony is like buying hay for a dead horse.
Groucho Marx

All people are born alike - except Republicans and Democrats.
Groucho Marx

Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.
Groucho Marx

Before I speak, I have something important to say.
Groucho Marx

Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.
Groucho Marx

Either he's dead or my watch has stopped.
Groucho Marx

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.
Groucho Marx

Getting older is no problem. You just have to live long enough.
Groucho Marx

Go, and never darken my towels again.
Groucho Marx

Humor is reason gone mad.
Groucho Marx

I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions - the curtain was up.
Groucho Marx

I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.
Groucho Marx

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
Groucho Marx

I have a mind to join a club and beat you over the head with it.
Groucho Marx

I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.
Groucho Marx

I intend to live forever, or die trying.
Groucho Marx

I must confess, I was born at a very early age.
Groucho Marx

I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.
Groucho Marx

I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.
Groucho Marx

I read in the newspapers they are going to have 30 minutes of intellectual stuff on television every Monday from 7:30 to 8. to educate America. They couldn't educate America if they started at 6:30.
Groucho Marx

I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.
Groucho Marx

I remember the first time I had sex - I kept the receipt.
Groucho Marx

I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.
Groucho Marx

I wish to be cremated. One tenth of my ashes shall be given to my agent, as written in our contract.
Groucho Marx

I won't belong to any organization that would have me as a member.
Groucho Marx

I worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.
Groucho Marx

I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it.
Groucho Marx

I'm leaving because the weather is too good. I hate London when it's not raining.
Groucho Marx

I'm not feeling very well - I need a doctor immediately. Ring the nearest golf course.
Groucho Marx

I've got the brain of a four year old. I'll bet he was glad to be rid of it.
Groucho Marx

I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.
Groucho Marx

If I held you any closer I would be on the other side of you.
Groucho Marx

If you've heard this story before, don't stop me, because I'd like to hear it again.
Groucho Marx

In Hollywood, brides keep the bouquets and throw away the groom.
Groucho Marx

It isn't necessary to have relatives in Kansas City in order to be unhappy.
Groucho Marx

Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do that for him.
Groucho Marx

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?
Groucho Marx

Marry me and I'll never look at another horse!
Groucho Marx

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
Groucho Marx

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
Groucho Marx

My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something.
Groucho Marx

My mother loved children - she would have given anything if I had been one.
Groucho Marx

Next time I see you, remind me not to talk to you.
Groucho Marx

No man goes before his time - unless the boss leaves early.
Groucho Marx

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know.
Groucho Marx

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
Groucho Marx

Please accept my resignation. I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.
Groucho Marx

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows - marriage does.
Groucho Marx

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Groucho Marx

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.
Groucho Marx

Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted.
Groucho Marx

Room service? Send up a larger room.
Groucho Marx

She got her looks from her father. He's a plastic surgeon.
Groucho Marx

The first thing which I can record concerning myself is, that I was born. These are wonderful words. This life, to which neither time nor eternity can bring diminution - this everlasting living soul, began. My mind loses itself in these depths.
Groucho Marx

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
Groucho Marx

There's one way to find out if a man is honest - ask him. If he says, "Yes," you know he is a crook.
Groucho Marx

Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Groucho Marx

Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.
Groucho Marx

Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?
Groucho Marx

Whoever named it necking was a poor judge of anatomy.
Groucho Marx

Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can't make head nor tail out of it.
Groucho Marx

Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?
Groucho Marx

Why, I'd horse-whip you if I had a horse.
Groucho Marx

Wives are people who feel they don't dance enough.
Groucho Marx

Women should be obscene and not heard.
Groucho Marx

Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.
George Edward Woodberry

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?
George Edward Woodberry

Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse. Murphy's First Corollary If you tell the boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, the next morning you will have a flat tire.
George Edward Woodberry

"Old times" never come back and I suppose it's just as well. What comes back is a new morning every day in the year, and that's better.
George Edward Woodberry

All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.
Ted Turner

Every few seconds it changes - up an eighth, down an eighth -it's like playing a slot machine. I lose $20 million, I gain $20 million.
Ted Turner

I didn't get here for my acting... but I love show business.
Ted Turner

I know what I'm having 'em put on my tombstone: 'I have nothing more to say'.
Ted Turner

I see what keeps people young: work!
Ted Turner

I think Captain Cousteau might be the father of the environmental movement.
Ted Turner

I've never run into a guy who could win at the top level in anything today and didn't have the right attitude, didn't give it everything he had, at least while he was doing it; wasn't prepared and didn't have the whole program worked out.
Ted Turner

If I had any humility I would be perfect.
Ted Turner

If I only had a little humility, I'd be perfect.
Ted Turner

Just because your ratings are bigger doesn't mean you're better.
Ted Turner

Life is a game. Money is how we keep score.
Ted Turner

Life is like a B-movie. You don't want to leave in the middle of it but you don't want to see it again.
Ted Turner

My son is now an "entrepreneur." That's what you're called when you don't have a job.
Ted Turner

Over a three year period, I gave away half of what I had. To be honest, my hands shook as I signed it away. I knew I was taking myself out of the race to be the richest man in the world.
Ted Turner

Rupert Murdoch is the most dangerous man in the world.
Ted Turner

Sports is like a war without the killing.
Ted Turner

The media is too concentrated, too few people own too much. There's really five companies that control 90 percent of what we read, see and hear. It's not healthy.
Ted Turner

The mind is just another muscle.
Ted Turner

The United States has got some of the dumbest people in the world. I want you to know that we know that.
Ted Turner

There's nothing wrong with being fired.
Ted Turner

To be happy in this world, first you need a cell phone and then you need an airplane. Then you're truly wireless.
Ted Turner

War has been good to me from a financial standpoint but I don't want to make money that way. I don't want blood money.
Ted Turner

We have to do more than keep media giants from growing larger; they're already too big. We need a new set of rules that will break these huge companies to pieces.
Ted Turner

You can never quit. Winner never quit, and quitters never win.
Ted Turner

You should set goals beyond your reach so you always have something to live for.
Ted Turner

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
Carl Sagan

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.
Carl Sagan

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Carl Sagan

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
Carl Sagan

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
Carl Sagan

I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.
Carl Sagan

I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.
Carl Sagan

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?
Carl Sagan

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.
Carl Sagan

In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
Carl Sagan

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
Carl Sagan

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.
Carl Sagan

Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.
Carl Sagan

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.
Carl Sagan

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
Carl Sagan

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
Carl Sagan

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.
Carl Sagan

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.
Carl Sagan

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.
Carl Sagan

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
Carl Sagan

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
Carl Sagan

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.
Carl Sagan

When you make the finding yourself - even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light - you'll never forget it.
Carl Sagan

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.
Carl Sagan

Acceptance of one's life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary, it means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustices.
Paul Tournier

At the heart of personality is the need to feel a sense of being lovable without having to qualify for that acceptance.
Paul Tournier

Let us not seek to bring religion to others, but let us endeavor to live it ourselves.
Paul Tournier

Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.
Paul Tournier

Recounting of a life story, a mind thinking aloud leads one inevitably to the consideration of problems which are no longer psychological but spiritual.
Paul Tournier

Sooner or later, those who win are those who think they can.
Paul Tournier

The more refined and subtle our minds, the more vulnerable they are.
Paul Tournier

Hair is the first thing. And teeth the second. Hair and teeth. A man got those two things he's got it all.
James Brown

I did the thing with bonds, which was about 30 million dollars, and didn't get none of the money on them.
James Brown

I got a wife who likes expensive things, so she takes all the cash.
James Brown

I had to tell about my colonic, which expresses the fact why I'm so neat today as opposed to a few years ago. I never knew that the weight made that much difference.
James Brown

I just thank God for all of the blessings.
James Brown

I named my new son James Joseph Brown II. I think he's going to be a lot better than I was.
James Brown

I started Michael years ago. I saw him in Gary, Indiana, and we'd have him on the talent shows. He kind of emulated me, and did the best he could.
James Brown

I taught them everything they know, but not everything I know.
James Brown

I think the best thing about being James Brown is looking at my little son. Hopefully I can make my son a role model to a lot of people.
James Brown

I think what I came through is great, but my son can take it to another level, not having to fight racism. His mother's a Norwegian and I'm mixed up four or five times, so he can face the world.
James Brown

I used to think like Moses. That knocked me down for a couple years and put me in prison. Then I start thinking like Job. Job waited and became the wealthiest and richest man ever 'cause he believed in God.
James Brown

I want to say to you, Help yourself, so you can help someone else.
James Brown

I was stillborn. The midwives laid me aside, thought I was really gone. I laid there about an hour, and they picked me back up and tried again, 'cause my body was still warm. The Good Lord brought me back.
James Brown

I'd like to cut down on the work a little bit.
James Brown

I'm kidding about having only a few dollars. I might have a few dollars more.
James Brown

I'm not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can't play my stuff. It's too complicated.
James Brown

I've been held responsible for taxes I know nothing about.
James Brown

I've been knocked down a lot of times.
James Brown

Like Christ said, love thee one another. I learned to do that, and I learned to respect and be appreciative and thankful for what I had.
James Brown

Michael Jackson has a very good heart. He was crying when he was giving me the award, 'cause his mind went back over the early days.
James Brown

My expectations of other people, I double them on myself.
James Brown

My son don't have to say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud. He don't have to be called those crazy names.
James Brown

Sometimes I feel like I'm a preacher as well, 'cause I can really get into an audience.
James Brown

Sometimes you struggle so hard to feed your family one way, you forget to feed them the other way, with spiritual nourishment. Everybody needs that.
James Brown

Thank God for the journey.
James Brown

The hardest thing about being James Brown is I have to live. I don't have no down time.
James Brown

The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing.
James Brown

When God took it, he accepted it; when he brought it back, he accepted it. That's what's happening with me.
James Brown

When I'm on stage, I'm trying to do one thing: bring people joy. Just like church does. People don't go to church to find trouble, they go there to lose it.
James Brown

You can take care of yourself, and God helps those who help themselves.
James Brown

You can't teach others if you are living the same way.
James Brown

You only live once.
James Brown

A man will go to war, fight and die for his country. But he won't get a bikini wax.
Rita Rudner

Before I met my husband, I'd never fallen in love. I'd stepped in it a few times.
Rita Rudner

I don't plan to grow old gracefully. I plan to have face-lifts until my ears meet.
Rita Rudner

I got kicked out of ballet class because I pulled a groin muscle. It wasn't mine.
Rita Rudner

I know I want to have children while my parents are still young enough to take care of them.
Rita Rudner

I love being married. It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.
Rita Rudner

I love to shop after a bad relationship. I don't know. I buy a new outfit and it makes me feel better. It just does. Sometimes I see a really great outfit, I'll break up with someone on purpose.
Rita Rudner

I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage. They've experienced pain and bought jewelry.
Rita Rudner

I want to have children, but my friends scare me. One of my friends told me she was in labor for 36 hours. I don't even want to do anything that feels good for 36 hours.
Rita Rudner

I was a vegetarian until I started leaning toward the sunlight.
Rita Rudner

I was going to have cosmetic surgery until I noticed that the doctor's office was full of portraits by Picasso.
Rita Rudner

I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.
Rita Rudner

In Hollywood a marriage is a success if it outlasts milk.
Rita Rudner

It wasn't that no one asked me to the prom, it was that no one would tell me where it was.
Rita Rudner

It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.
Rita Rudner

Marriages don't last. When I meet a guy, the first question I ask myself is: is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?
Rita Rudner

Men reach their sexual peak at eighteen. Women reach theirs at thirty-five. Do you get the feeling that God is playing a practical joke?
Rita Rudner

Men who consistently leave the toilet seat up secretly want women to get up to go the bathroom in the middle of the night and fall in.
Rita Rudner

Men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage - they've experienced pain and bought jewelry.
Rita Rudner

Most turkeys taste better the day after, my mother's tasted better the day before.
Rita Rudner

My boyfriend and I broke up. He wanted to get married and I didn't want him to.
Rita Rudner

My grandmother was a very tough woman. She buried three husbands and two of them were just napping.
Rita Rudner

My husband and I are either going to buy a dog or have a child. We can't decide whether to ruin our carpet or ruin our lives.
Rita Rudner

My husband gave me a necklace. It's fake. I requested fake. Maybe I'm paranoid, but in this day and age, I don't want something around my neck that's worth more than my head.
Rita Rudner

My mother buried three husbands - and two of them were only napping.
Rita Rudner

Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them.
Rita Rudner

Some people think having large breasts makes a woman stupid. Actually, it's quite the opposite: a woman having large breasts makes men stupid.
Rita Rudner

Some women hold up dresses that are so ugly and they always say the same thing: 'This looks much better on.' On what? On fire?
Rita Rudner

Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose all respect for humanity. That's how rich I want to be.
Rita Rudner

The time you spend grieving over a man should never exceed the amount of time you actually spent with him.
Rita Rudner

The word 'aerobics' came about when the gym instructors got together and said: If we're going to charge $10 an hour, we can't call it Jumping up and down.
Rita Rudner

They usually have two tellers in my local bank, except when it's very busy, when they have one.
Rita Rudner

To attract men, I wear a perfume called "New Car Interior."
Rita Rudner

We've begun to long for the pitter-patter of little feet - so we bought a dog. Well, it's cheaper, and you get more feet.
Rita Rudner

When I eventually met Mr. Right I had no idea that his first name was Always.
Rita Rudner

Whenever I date a guy, I think, 'Is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?'
Rita Rudner

A committee is a group of the unprepared, appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary.
Fred Allen

A gentleman is any man who wouldn't hit a woman with his hat on.
Fred Allen

A telescope will magnify a star a thousand times, but a good press agent can do even better.
Fred Allen

An actor's popularity is fleeting. His success has the life expectancy of a small boy who is about to look into a gas tank with a lighted match.
Fred Allen

An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.
Fred Allen

An associate producer is the only guy in Hollywood who will associate with a producer.
Fred Allen

California is a fine place to live - if you happen to be an orange.
Fred Allen

Committee - a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done.
Fred Allen

Ed Sullivan will be around as long as someone else has talent.
Fred Allen

Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.
Fred Allen

Her hat is a creation that will never go out of style; it will just look ridiculous year after year.
Fred Allen

Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars.
Fred Allen

I always have trouble remembering three things: faces, names, and - I can't remember what the third thing is.
Fred Allen

I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.
Fred Allen

I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.
Fred Allen

I don't want to own anything that won't fit into my coffin.
Fred Allen

I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.
Fred Allen

I learned law so well, the day I graduated I sued the college, won the case, and got my tuition back.
Fred Allen

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
Fred Allen

I play a musical instrument
a little, but only for my own amazement.
Fred Allen

I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy.
Fred Allen

Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
Fred Allen

It is probably not love that makes the world go around, but rather those mutually supportive alliances through which partners recognize their dependence on each other for the achievement of shared and private goals.
Fred Allen

Life, in my estimation, is a biological misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is to make a hole in one with you.
Fred Allen

Some movie stars wear their sunglasses even in church. They're afraid God might recognize them and ask for autographs.
Fred Allen

Television is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.
Fred Allen

Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.
Fred Allen

Television is the triumph of machine over people.
Fred Allen

The advertising world had space men in it before spacemen existed.
Fred Allen

The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.
Fred Allen

The first time I sang in the church choir; two hundred people changed their religion.
Fred Allen

The last time I saw him he was walking down lover's lane holding his own hand.
Fred Allen

The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference.
Fred Allen

Treat employees like partners, and they act like partners.
Fred Allen

Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.
Fred Allen

We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and comedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.
Fred Allen

What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement?
Fred Allen

You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.
Fred Allen

A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.
Christopher Morley

A man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life.
Christopher Morley

Act like you expect to get into the end zone.
Christopher Morley

All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.
Christopher Morley

All students can learn.
Christopher Morley

Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.
Christopher Morley

Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.
Christopher Morley

Dancing is a wonderful training for girls, it's the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.
Christopher Morley

From now until the end of time no one else will ever see life with my eyes, and I mean to make the best of my chance.
Christopher Morley

God made man merely to hear some praise of what he'd done on those Five Days.
Christopher Morley

Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.
Christopher Morley

High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.
Christopher Morley

Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.
Christopher Morley

I had a million questions to ask God: but when I met Him, they all fled my mind; and it didn't seem to matter.
Christopher Morley

If we discovered that we only had five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say, every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to stammer that they loved them.
Christopher Morley

If you have to keep reminding yourself of a thing, perhaps it isn't so.
Christopher Morley

In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.
Christopher Morley

It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.
Christopher Morley

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.
Christopher Morley

Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going.
Christopher Morley

Man, an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.
Christopher Morley

My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.
Christopher Morley

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.
Christopher Morley

No man is lonely eating spaghetti; it requires so much attention.
Christopher Morley

No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.
Christopher Morley

Only the sinner has the right to preach.
Christopher Morley

People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too.
Christopher Morley

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
Christopher Morley

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.
Christopher Morley

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
Christopher Morley

The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people.
Christopher Morley

The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.
Christopher Morley

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.
Christopher Morley

The trouble with wedlock is that there's not enough wed and too much lock.
Christopher Morley

There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning and yearning.
Christopher Morley

There is only one rule for being a good talker - learn to listen.
Christopher Morley

There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.
Christopher Morley

We call a child's mind 'small' simply by habit; perhaps it is larger than ours is, for it can take in almost anything without effort.
Christopher Morley

We've had bad luck with our kids - they've all grown up.
Christopher Morley

When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.
Christopher Morley

Why do they put the Gideon bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late?
Christopher Morley

Words are a commodity in which there is never any slump.
Christopher Morley

A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down.
Robert Benchley

A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.
Robert Benchley

A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.
Robert Benchley

A real hangover is nothing to try out family remedies on. The only cure for a real hangover is death.
Robert Benchley

After an author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get a new book out of him each year.
Robert Benchley

An ardent supporter of the hometown team should go to a game prepared to take offense, no matter what happens.
Robert Benchley

Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed be doing at that moment.
Robert Benchley

Anyone who tries to keep track of what is happening in China is going to end up by wearing all the skin of his left ear from twirling around on it.
Robert Benchley

At fifteen one is first beginning to realize that everything isn't money and power in this world, and is casting about for joys that do not turn to dross in one's hands.
Robert Benchley

Behind every argument is someone's ignorance.
Robert Benchley

Dachshunds are ideal dogs for small children, as they are already stretched and pulled to such a length that the child cannot do much harm one way or the other.
Robert Benchley

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
Robert Benchley

Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with that it's compounding a felony.
Robert Benchley

Even nowadays a man can't step up and kill a woman without feeling just a bit unchivalrous.
Robert Benchley

For a nation which has an almost evil reputation for bustle, bustle, bustle, and rush, rush, rush, we spend an enormous amount of time standing around in line in front of windows, just waiting.
Robert Benchley

Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.
Robert Benchley

I do most of my work sitting down; that's where I shine.
Robert Benchley

I have been told by hospital authorities that more copies of my works are left behind by departing patients than those of any other author.
Robert Benchley

I have tried to know absolutely nothing about a great many things, and I have succeeded fairly well.
Robert Benchley

I know I'm drinking myself to a slow death, but then I'm in no hurry.
Robert Benchley

If Mr. Einstein doesn't like the natural laws of the universe, let him go back to where he came from.
Robert Benchley

In a house where there are small children the bathroom soon takes on the appearance of the Old Curiosity Shop.
Robert Benchley

In America there are two classes of travel - first class, and with children.
Robert Benchley

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
Robert Benchley

Most of the arguments to which I am party fall somewhat short of being impressive, owing to the fact that neither I nor my opponent knows what we are talking about.
Robert Benchley

Nothing makes a man feel older than to hear a band coming up the street and not to have the impulse to rush downstairs and out on to the sidewalk.
Robert Benchley

Other men wear white suits in summer and it doesn't seem to bother them. But my white suit seems to be a little whiter than theirs. I think also that it may have something written on the back of it, although I can't find it when I take the suit off.
Robert Benchley

Tell us your phobias and we will tell you what you are afraid of.
Robert Benchley

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.
Robert Benchley

The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
Robert Benchley

The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.
Robert Benchley

There is a note in the front of the volume saying that no public reading may be given without first getting the author's permission. It ought to be made much more difficult to do than that.
Robert Benchley

There seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. It seems to worry them.
Robert Benchley

We are constantly being surprised that people did things well before we were born.
Robert Benchley

We call ourselves a free nation, and yet we let ourselves be told what cabs we can and can't take by a man at a hotel door, simply because he has a drum major's uniform on.
Robert Benchley

Why don't you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?
Robert Benchley

You might think that after thousands of years of coming up too soon and getting frozen, the crocus family would have had a little sense knocked into it.
Robert Benchley

A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.
Doris Lessing

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
Doris Lessing

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
Doris Lessing

For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.
Doris Lessing

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
Doris Lessing

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
Doris Lessing

In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
Doris Lessing

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
Doris Lessing

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Doris Lessing

It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
Doris Lessing

Literature is analysis after the event.
Doris Lessing

Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
Doris Lessing

Pearls mean tears.
Doris Lessing

Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.
Doris Lessing

Small things amuse small minds.
Doris Lessing

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.
Doris Lessing

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Doris Lessing

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
Doris Lessing

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
Doris Lessing

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
Doris Lessing

There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.
Doris Lessing

Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
Doris Lessing

This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.
Doris Lessing

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
Doris Lessing

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
Doris Lessing

What is a hero without love for mankind.
Doris Lessing

What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.
Doris Lessing

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.
Doris Lessing

You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
Doris Lessing

A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
Emo Philips

Actually, my cd was released in 1985, in return for two German missionaries and a Dutch urologist.
Emo Philips

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.
Emo Philips

England is better only because I stand out there as 'unusual'.
Emo Philips

He taught me never to smile, which helps me when I visit disaster sites.
Emo Philips

How many people here have telekenetic powers? Raise my hand.
Emo Philips

I asked my girlfriend, 'Will you marry me?' She said, 'We'll have to ask my father.' So we had a seance and Jack Ruby says, 'Hello!'
Emo Philips

I discovered my wife in bed with another man, and I was crushed. So I said, 'Get off me, you two!'
Emo Philips

I go from stool to stool in singles bars hoping to get lucky, but there's never any gum under any of them.
Emo Philips

I got in a fight one time with a really big guy, and he said, "I'm going to mop the floor with your face." I said, "You'll be sorry." He said, "Oh, yeah? Why?" I said, "Well, you won't be able to get into the corners very well."
Emo Philips

I got some new underwear the other day. Well, new to me.
Emo Philips

I love to go down to the schoolyard and watch all the little children jump up and down and run around yelling and screaming. They don't know I'm only using blanks.
Emo Philips

I love to go to the playground and watch the children jumping up and down. They don't know I'm firing blanks.
Emo Philips

I once had a large gay following, but I ducked into an alleyway and lost him.
Emo Philips

I once heard two ladies going on and on about the pains of childbirth and how men don't seem to know what real pain is. I asked if either of them ever got themselves caught in a zipper.
Emo Philips

I was at a bar nursing a beer. My nipple was getting quite soggy.
Emo Philips

I was in a bar the other night, hopping from barstool to barstool, trying to get lucky, but there wasn't any gum under any of them.
Emo Philips

I was sleeping the other night, alone, thanks to the exterminator.
Emo Philips

I was the kid next door's imaginary friend.
Emo Philips

I was walking down fifth avenue today and I found a wallet, and I was gonna keep it, rather than return it, but I thought: well, if I lost a hundred and fifty dollars, how would I feel? And I realized I would want to be taught a lesson.
Emo Philips

I was with this girl the other night and from the way she was responding to my skillful caresses, you would have sworn that she was conscious from the top of her head to the tag on her toes.
Emo Philips

I'm a great lover, I'll bet.
Emo Philips

In our school you were searched for guns and knifes on the way in and if you didn't have any, they gave you some.
Emo Philips

My classmates would copulate with anything that moved, but I never saw any reason to limit myself.
Emo Philips

My computer beat me at checkers, but I sure beat it at kickboxing.
Emo Philips

My jokes are in my head and I have a duplicate copy of my jokes in a lot of British comics' heads, where they are safe.
Emo Philips

My mother was like a sister to me, only we didn't have sex quite so often.
Emo Philips

People always ask me, "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" Well, I don't have an alibi.
Emo Philips

Probably the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have to murder a loved one because they're the devil.
Emo Philips

Probably the worst time in a person's life is when they have to kill a family member because they are the devil. But otherwise it's been a pretty good day.
Emo Philips

Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps.
Emo Philips

Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.
Emo Philips

The way I understand it, the Russians are sort of a combination of evil and incompetence... sort of like the Post Office with tanks.
Emo Philips

Well, my brother says Hello. So, hooray for speech therapy.
Emo Philips

Whatever happened to the good ole days, when children worked in factories?
Emo Philips

When I wake up in the morning, I just can't get started until I've had that first, piping hot pot of coffee. Oh, I've tried other enemas.
Emo Philips

When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.
Emo Philips

Women: You can't live with them, and you can't get them to dress up in a skimpy little Nazi costume and beat you with a warm squash or something.
Emo Philips

You don't appreciate a lot of stuff in school until you get older. Little things like being spanked every day by a middle-aged woman: Stuff you pay good money for in later life.
Emo Philips

You know what I hate? Indian givers... no, I take that back.
Emo Philips

A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
Milton Friedman

Columbus did not seek a new route to the Indies in response to a majority directive.
Milton Friedman

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
Milton Friedman

Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.
Milton Friedman

Governments never learn. Only people learn.
Milton Friedman

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
Milton Friedman

History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.
Milton Friedman

I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.
Milton Friedman

I'm in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.
Milton Friedman

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.
Milton Friedman

Inflation is taxation without legislation.
Milton Friedman

Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
Milton Friedman

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
Milton Friedman

Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.
Milton Friedman

Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.
Milton Friedman

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
Milton Friedman

One man's opportunism is another man's statesmanship.
Milton Friedman

Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
Milton Friedman

The black market was a way of getting around government controls. It was a way of enabling the free market to work. It was a way of opening up, enabling people.
Milton Friedman

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
Milton Friedman

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.
Milton Friedman

The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
Milton Friedman

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
Milton Friedman

The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes.
Milton Friedman

The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.
Milton Friedman

The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.
Milton Friedman

The power to do good is also the power to do harm.
Milton Friedman

The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of a system.
Milton Friedman

There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Milton Friedman

Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
Milton Friedman

Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.
Milton Friedman

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
Milton Friedman

A man should never neglect his family for business.
Walt Disney

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.
Walt Disney

All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.
Walt Disney

All the adversity I've had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me... You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.
Walt Disney

All your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them.
Walt Disney

Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.
Walt Disney

Animation is different from other parts. Its language is the language of caricature. Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon's unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals.
Walt Disney

Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.
Walt Disney

Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource - the minds of our children.
Walt Disney

Disneyland is a show.
Walt Disney

Disneyland is a work of love. We didn't go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.
Walt Disney

Disneyland is the star, everything else is in the supporting role.
Walt Disney

Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.
Walt Disney

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.
Walt Disney

I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company.
Walt Disney

I believe in being an innovator.
Walt Disney

I do not like to repeat successes, I like to go on to other things.
Walt Disney

I don't like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It's just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.
Walt Disney

I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn't know how to get along without it.
Walt Disney

I have no use for people who throw their weight around as celebrities, or for those who fawn over you just because you are famous.
Walt Disney

I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known.
Walt Disney

I never called my work an 'art' It's part of show business, the business of building entertainment.
Walt Disney

I only hope that we don't lose sight of one thing - that it was all started by a mouse.
Walt Disney

I started, actually, to make my first animated cartoon in 1920. Of course, they were very crude things then and I used sort of little puppet things.
Walt Disney

I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make them personalities.
Walt Disney

I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.
Walt Disney

I'd say it's been my biggest problem all my life... it's money. It takes a lot of money to make these dreams come true.
Walt Disney

If you can dream it, you can do it.
Walt Disney

It's kind of fun to do the impossible.
Walt Disney

It's no secret that we were sticking just about every nickel we had on the chance that people would really be interested in something totally new and unique in the field of entertainment.
Walt Disney

Laughter is America's most important export.
Walt Disney

Mickey Mouse is, to me, a symbol of independence. He was a means to an end.
Walt Disney

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.
Walt Disney

Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood.
Walt Disney

Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.
Walt Disney

Of all the things I've done, the most vital is coordinating those who work with me and aiming their efforts at a certain goal.
Walt Disney

Or heritage and ideals, our code and standards - the things we live by and teach our children - are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.
Walt Disney

People still think of me as a cartoonist, but the only thing I lift a pen or pencil for these days is to sign a contract, a check, or an autograph.
Walt Disney

The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.
Walt Disney

The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.
Walt Disney

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island.
Walt Disney

There's nothing funnier than the human animal.
Walt Disney

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.
Walt Disney

We are not trying to entertain the critics. I'll take my chances with the public.
Walt Disney

We believed in our idea - a family park where parents and children could have fun- together.
Walt Disney

We did it Disneyland, in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster - closed and forgotten within the first year.
Walt Disney

We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.
Walt Disney

We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.
Walt Disney

When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it's because he's so human; and that is the secret of his popularity.
Walt Disney

When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable.
Walt Disney

When you're curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.
Walt Disney

Whenever I go on a ride, I'm always thinking of what's wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.
Walt Disney

You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.
Walt Disney

You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world, but it requires people to make the dream a reality.
Walt Disney

You can't just let nature run wild.
Walt Disney

You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.
Walt Disney

You reach a point where you don't work for money.
Walt Disney

You're dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.
Walt Disney

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.
C. S. Lewis

A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
C. S. Lewis

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
C. S. Lewis

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
C. S. Lewis

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
C. S. Lewis

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
C. S. Lewis

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
C. S. Lewis

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
C. S. Lewis

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
C. S. Lewis

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
C. S. Lewis

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
C. S. Lewis

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
C. S. Lewis

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
C. S. Lewis

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
C. S. Lewis

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
C. S. Lewis

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
C. S. Lewis

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
C. S. Lewis

Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
C. S. Lewis

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.
C. S. Lewis

Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
C. S. Lewis

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
C. S. Lewis

I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
C. S. Lewis

I sometimes wander whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
C. S. Lewis

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
C. S. Lewis

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
C. S. Lewis

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
C. S. Lewis

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
C. S. Lewis

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
C. S. Lewis

It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
C. S. Lewis

Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
C. S. Lewis

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
C. S. Lewis

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.
C. S. Lewis

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
C. S. Lewis

Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
C. S. Lewis

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
C. S. Lewis

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
C. S. Lewis

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
C. S. Lewis

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
C. S. Lewis

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
C. S. Lewis

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.
C. S. Lewis

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.
C. S. Lewis

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
C. S. Lewis

The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
C. S. Lewis

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
C. S. Lewis

The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
C. S. Lewis

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
C. S. Lewis

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way."
C. S. Lewis

There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.
C. S. Lewis

Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.
C. S. Lewis

This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
C. S. Lewis

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
C. S. Lewis

We are what we believe we are.
C. S. Lewis

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.
C. S. Lewis

What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.
C. S. Lewis

With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
C. S. Lewis

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
C. S. Lewis

You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
C. S. Lewis

You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.
C. S. Lewis

A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.
Groucho Marx

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.
Groucho Marx

A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.
Groucho Marx

A man's only as old as the woman he feels.
Groucho Marx

A woman is an occasional pleasure but a cigar is always a smoke.
Groucho Marx

Alimony is like buying hay for a dead horse.
Groucho Marx

All people are born alike - except Republicans and Democrats.
Groucho Marx

Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.
Groucho Marx

Before I speak, I have something important to say.
Groucho Marx

Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.
Groucho Marx

Either he's dead or my watch has stopped.
Groucho Marx

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.
Groucho Marx

Getting older is no problem. You just have to live long enough.
Groucho Marx

Go, and never darken my towels again.
Groucho Marx

Humor is reason gone mad.
Groucho Marx

I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions - the curtain was up.
Groucho Marx

I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.
Groucho Marx

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
Groucho Marx

I have a mind to join a club and beat you over the head with it.
Groucho Marx

I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.
Groucho Marx

I intend to live forever, or die trying.
Groucho Marx

I must confess, I was born at a very early age.
Groucho Marx

I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.
Groucho Marx

I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.
Groucho Marx

I read in the newspapers they are going to have 30 minutes of intellectual stuff on television every Monday from 7:30 to 8. to educate America. They couldn't educate America if they started at 6:30.
Groucho Marx

I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.
Groucho Marx

I remember the first time I had sex - I kept the receipt.
Groucho Marx

I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.
Groucho Marx

I wish to be cremated. One tenth of my ashes shall be given to my agent, as written in our contract.
Groucho Marx

I won't belong to any organization that would have me as a member.
Groucho Marx

I worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.
Groucho Marx

I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it.
Groucho Marx

I'm leaving because the weather is too good. I hate London when it's not raining.
Groucho Marx

I'm not feeling very well - I need a doctor immediately. Ring the nearest golf course.
Groucho Marx

I've got the brain of a four year old. I'll bet he was glad to be rid of it.
Groucho Marx

I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.
Groucho Marx

If I held you any closer I would be on the other side of you.
Groucho Marx

If you've heard this story before, don't stop me, because I'd like to hear it again.
Groucho Marx

In Hollywood, brides keep the bouquets and throw away the groom.
Groucho Marx

It isn't necessary to have relatives in Kansas City in order to be unhappy.
Groucho Marx

Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do that for him.
Groucho Marx

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?
Groucho Marx

Marry me and I'll never look at another horse!
Groucho Marx

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
Groucho Marx

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
Groucho Marx

My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something.
Groucho Marx

My mother loved children - she would have given anything if I had been one.
Groucho Marx

Next time I see you, remind me not to talk to you.
Groucho Marx

No man goes before his time - unless the boss leaves early.
Groucho Marx

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know.
Groucho Marx

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
Groucho Marx

Please accept my resignation. I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.
Groucho Marx

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows - marriage does.
Groucho Marx

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Groucho Marx

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.
Groucho Marx

Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted.
Groucho Marx

Room service? Send up a larger room.
Groucho Marx

She got her looks from her father. He's a plastic surgeon.
Groucho Marx

The first thing which I can record concerning myself is, that I was born. These are wonderful words. This life, to which neither time nor eternity can bring diminution - this everlasting living soul, began. My mind loses itself in these depths.
Groucho Marx

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
Groucho Marx

There's one way to find out if a man is honest - ask him. If he says, "Yes," you know he is a crook.
Groucho Marx

Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Groucho Marx

Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.
Groucho Marx

Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?
Groucho Marx

Whoever named it necking was a poor judge of anatomy.
Groucho Marx

Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can't make head nor tail out of it.
Groucho Marx

Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?
Groucho Marx

Why, I'd horse-whip you if I had a horse.
Groucho Marx

Wives are people who feel they don't dance enough.
Groucho Marx

Women should be obscene and not heard.
Groucho Marx

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.
Maya Angelou

All great achievements require time.
Maya Angelou

All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.
Maya Angelou

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
Maya Angelou

As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.
Maya Angelou

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.
Maya Angelou

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.
Maya Angelou

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.
Maya Angelou

Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.
Maya Angelou

Effective action is always unjust.
Maya Angelou

For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.
Maya Angelou

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
Maya Angelou

How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!
Maya Angelou

I believe that every person is born with talent.
Maya Angelou

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.
Maya Angelou

I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.
Maya Angelou

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.
Maya Angelou

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.
Maya Angelou

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou

I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back.
Maya Angelou

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.
Maya Angelou

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.
Maya Angelou

If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.
Maya Angelou

If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.
Maya Angelou

If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.
Maya Angelou

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.
Maya Angelou

Life loves the liver of it.
Maya Angelou

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: ''I'm with you kid. Let's go.''
Maya Angelou

Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.
Maya Angelou

Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at it destination full of hope.
Maya Angelou

Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.
Maya Angelou

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
Maya Angelou

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.
Maya Angelou

My life has been one great big joke, a dance that's walked a song that's spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.
Maya Angelou

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.
Maya Angelou

Nothing will work unless you do.
Maya Angelou

One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.
Maya Angelou

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.
Maya Angelou

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.
Maya Angelou

Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.
Maya Angelou

Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.
Maya Angelou

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
Maya Angelou

The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.
Maya Angelou

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.
Maya Angelou

The need for change bulldozed road down the center of my mind.
Maya Angelou

The sadness of the women's movement is that they don't allow the necessity of love. See, I don't personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.
Maya Angelou

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.
Maya Angelou

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
Maya Angelou

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.
Maya Angelou

There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.
Maya Angelou

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
Maya Angelou

We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.
Maya Angelou

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God's creation.
Maya Angelou

While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man's humanity to man.
Maya Angelou

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.
Maya Angelou

It is by doing Whatever, that one becomes Whoever - Remi Gaillard

If you want to youtube this guy you will get a laugh, try snail + his name. It appears he lives life by this principle

A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.
Henry Ward Beecher

A Christian is nothing but a sinful man who has put himself to school for Christ for the honest purpose of becoming better.
Henry Ward Beecher

A church debt is the devil's salary.
Henry Ward Beecher

A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.
Henry Ward Beecher

A man that does not know how to be angry does not know how to be good.
Henry Ward Beecher

A man's true state of power and riches is to be in himself.
Henry Ward Beecher

A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs. It's jolted by every pebble on the road.
Henry Ward Beecher

A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.
Henry Ward Beecher

All ambitions are lawful except those that climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
Henry Ward Beecher

All men are tempted. There is no man that lives that can't be broken down, provided it is the right temptation, put in the right spot.
Henry Ward Beecher

Beware of him who hates the laugh of a child.
Henry Ward Beecher

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
Henry Ward Beecher

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.
Henry Ward Beecher

Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven.
Henry Ward Beecher

Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they are going to catch you in next.
Henry Ward Beecher

Clothes and manners do not make the man; but, when he is made, they greatly improve his appearance.
Henry Ward Beecher

Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.
Henry Ward Beecher

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
Henry Ward Beecher

Every charitable act is a stepping stone toward heaven.
Henry Ward Beecher

Every man should keep a fair-sized cemetery in which to bury the faults of his friends.
Henry Ward Beecher

Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith.
Henry Ward Beecher

Every young man would do well to remember that all successful business stands on the foundation of morality.
Henry Ward Beecher

Expedients are for the hour, but principles are for the ages.
Henry Ward Beecher

Faith is spiritualized imagination.
Henry Ward Beecher

Flowers are the sweetest things God ever made and forgot to put a soul into.
Henry Ward Beecher

Gambling with cards or dice or stocks is all one thing. It's getting money without giving an equivalent for it.
Henry Ward Beecher

God appoints our graces to be nurses to other men's weaknesses.
Henry Ward Beecher

God asks no man whether he will accept life. That is not the choice. You must take it. The only choice is how.
Henry Ward Beecher

God made man to go by motives, and he will not go without them, any more than a boat without steam or a balloon without gas.
Henry Ward Beecher

God pardons like a mother, who kisses the offense into everlasting forgiveness.
Henry Ward Beecher

Good nature is worth more than knowledge, more than money, more than honor, to the persons who possess it.
Henry Ward Beecher

Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul.
Henry Ward Beecher

Greatness lies, not in being strong, but in the right using of strength; and strength is not used rightly when it serves only to carry a man above his fellows for his own solitary glory. He is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.
Henry Ward Beecher

He is greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.
Henry Ward Beecher

He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has.
Henry Ward Beecher

Heaven will be inherited by every man who has heaven in his soul.
Henry Ward Beecher

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody expects of you. Never excuse yourself.
Henry Ward Beecher

I can forgive, but I cannot forget, is only another way of saying, I will not forgive. Forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note - torn in two, and burned up, so that it never can be shown against one.
Henry Ward Beecher

I don't like these cold, precise, perfect people, who, in order not to speak wrong, never speak at all, and in order not to do wrong, never do anything.
Henry Ward Beecher

I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love.
Henry Ward Beecher

I pray on the principle that wine knocks the cork out of a bottle. There is an inward fermentation, and there must be a vent.
Henry Ward Beecher

If a man cannot be a Christian in the place where he is, he cannot be a Christian anywhere.
Henry Ward Beecher

In this world it is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich.
Henry Ward Beecher

In this world, full often, our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.
Henry Ward Beecher

It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage.
Henry Ward Beecher

It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim milk.
Henry Ward Beecher

It is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich.
Henry Ward Beecher

It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.
Henry Ward Beecher

It is the heart that makes a man rich. He is rich according to what he is, not according to what he has.
Henry Ward Beecher

It's easier to go down a hill than up it but the view is much better at the top.
Henry Ward Beecher

It's not the work which kills people, it's the worry. It's not the revolution that destroys machinery it's the friction.
Henry Ward Beecher

Laugh at your friends, and if your friends are sore; So much the better, you may laugh the more.
Henry Ward Beecher

Laughter is day, and sobriety is night; a smile is the twilight that hovers gently between both, more bewitching than either.
Henry Ward Beecher

Laughter is not a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is the best ending for one.
Henry Ward Beecher

Law represents the effort of man to organize society; governments, the efforts of selfishness to overthrow liberty.
Henry Ward Beecher

Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another's heart, or its flame burns low.
Henry Ward Beecher

Love is the river of life in the world.
Henry Ward Beecher

Mirth is the sweet wine of human life. It should be offered sparkling with zestful life unto God.
Henry Ward Beecher

Never forget what a person says to you when they are angry.
Henry Ward Beecher

Next to ingratitude the most painful thing to bear is gratitude.
Henry Ward Beecher

No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.
Henry Ward Beecher

No matter what looms ahead, if you can eat today, enjoy today, mix good cheer with friends today enjoy it and bless God for it.
Henry Ward Beecher

Now comes the mystery.
Henry Ward Beecher

Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.
Henry Ward Beecher

Of all the music that reached farthest into heaven, it is the beating of a loving heart.
Henry Ward Beecher

Our best successes often come after our greatest disappointments.
Henry Ward Beecher

Pride slays thanksgiving, but an humble mind is the soil out of which thanks naturally grow. A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.
Henry Ward Beecher

Riches are not an end of life, but an instrument of life.
Henry Ward Beecher

Selfishness is that detestable vice which no one will forgive in others, and no one is without himself.
Henry Ward Beecher

Success is full of promise till one gets it, and then it seems like a nest from which the bird has flown.
Henry Ward Beecher

Suffering is part of the divine idea.
Henry Ward Beecher

Tears are often the telescope by which men see far into heaven.
Henry Ward Beecher

The ability to convert ideas to things is the secret of outward success.
Henry Ward Beecher

The advertisements in a newspaper are more full knowledge in respect to what is going on in a state or community than the editorial columns are.
Henry Ward Beecher

The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.
Henry Ward Beecher

The babe at first feeds upon the mother's bosom, but it is always on her heart.
Henry Ward Beecher

The Church is not a gallery for the exhibition of eminent Christians, but a school for the education of imperfect ones.
Henry Ward Beecher

The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.
Henry Ward Beecher

The dog is the god of frolic.
Henry Ward Beecher

The dog was created specially for children. He is a god of frolic.
Henry Ward Beecher

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.
Henry Ward Beecher

The humblest individual exerts some influence, either for good or evil, upon others.
Henry Ward Beecher

The ignorant classes are the dangerous classes.
Henry Ward Beecher

The moment an ill can be patiently handled, it is disarmed of its poison, though not of its pain.
Henry Ward Beecher

The most dangerous people are the ignorant.
Henry Ward Beecher

The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom.
Henry Ward Beecher

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
Henry Ward Beecher

The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.
Henry Ward Beecher

The real man is one who always finds excuses for others, but never excuses himself.
Henry Ward Beecher

The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.
Henry Ward Beecher

The sun does not shine for a few trees and flowers, but for the wide world's joy.
Henry Ward Beecher

The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not, and never persist in trying to set people right.
Henry Ward Beecher

The unthankful heart... discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweep through the day and, as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings!
Henry Ward Beecher

The world's battlefields have been in the heart chiefly; more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet, than on the most memorable battlefields in history.
Henry Ward Beecher

The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government.
Henry Ward Beecher

Theology is a science of mind applied to God.
Henry Ward Beecher

There are joys which long to be ours. God sends ten thousands truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.
Henry Ward Beecher

There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them - the senses, intelligent companions, and books.
Henry Ward Beecher

There is no faculty of the human soul so persistent and universal as that of hatred.
Henry Ward Beecher

There is no friendship, no love, like that of the parent for the child.
Henry Ward Beecher

To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.
Henry Ward Beecher

To become an able and successful man in any profession, three things are necessary, nature, study and practice.
Henry Ward Beecher

To know that one has a secret is to know half the secret itself.
Henry Ward Beecher

We are always on the anvil; by trials God is shaping us for higher things.
Henry Ward Beecher

We never know the love of a parent till we become parents ourselves.
Henry Ward Beecher

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.
Henry Ward Beecher

We sleep, but the loom of life never stops, and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up in the morning.
Henry Ward Beecher

We steal if we touch tomorrow. It is God's.
Henry Ward Beecher

Well married a person has wings, poorly married shackles.
Henry Ward Beecher

What a mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin.
Henry Ward Beecher

What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.
Henry Ward Beecher

When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung.
Henry Ward Beecher

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
Henry Ward Beecher

You and I do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.
Henry Ward Beecher

You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.
Henry Ward Beecher

You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave.
Henry Ward Beecher

Young love is a flame; very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep-burning, unquenchable.
Henry Ward Beecher

Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.
George Edward Woodberry

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?
George Edward Woodberry

Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse. Murphy's First Corollary If you tell the boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, the next morning you will have a flat tire.
George Edward Woodberry

"Old times" never come back and I suppose it's just as well. What comes back is a new morning every day in the year, and that's better.
George Edward Woodberry

A demagogue is a person with whom we disagree as to which gang should mismanage the country.
Don Marquis

A hypocrite is a person who - but who isn't?
Don Marquis

A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.
Don Marquis

A sequel is an admission that you've been reduced to imitating yourself.
Don Marquis

Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.
Don Marquis

An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.
Don Marquis

An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it.
Don Marquis

An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience.
Don Marquis

Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.
Don Marquis

Bores bore each other too; but it never seems to teach them anything.
Don Marquis

By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before he orders, there is little else about him worth knowing.
Don Marquis

Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.
Don Marquis

Every cloud has its silver lining but it is sometimes a little difficult to get it to the mint.
Don Marquis

Fate often puts all the material for happiness and prosperity into a man's hands just to see how miserable he can make himself with them.
Don Marquis

Fishing is a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in old clothes.
Don Marquis

Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.
Don Marquis

Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control.
Don Marquis

I have often noticed that ancestors never boast of the descendants who boast of ancestors. I would rather start a family than finish one. Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.
Don Marquis

I would rather start a family than finish one.
Don Marquis

Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.
Don Marquis

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.
Don Marquis

In all systems of theology the devil figures as a male person. Yes, it is women who keep the church going.
Don Marquis

In order to influence a child, one must be careful not to be that child's parent or grandparent.
Don Marquis

It takes all sorts of people to make the underworld.
Don Marquis

Man cannot be uplifted; he must be seduced into virtue.
Don Marquis

Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.
Don Marquis

Of middle age the best that can be said is that a middle-aged person has likely learned how to have a little fun in spite of his troubles.
Don Marquis

One of the most important things to remember about infant care is: don't change diapers in midstream.
Don Marquis

Ours is a world where people don't know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it.
Don Marquis

Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Don Marquis

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.
Don Marquis

Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.
Don Marquis

Prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer and denies you the beer to cry into.
Don Marquis

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis

Punctuality is one of the cardinal business virtues: always insist on it in your subordinates.
Don Marquis

Some persons are likeable in spite of their unswerving integrity.
Don Marquis

Successful people are the ones who think up things for the rest of the world to keep busy at.
Don Marquis

The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.
Don Marquis

The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.
Don Marquis

The trouble with the public is that there is too much of it; what we need in public is less quantity and more quality.
Don Marquis

There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us.
Don Marquis

There is nothing so habit-forming as money.
Don Marquis

We pay for the mistakes of our ancestors, and it seems only fair that they should leave us the money to pay with.
Don Marquis

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'
Don Marquis

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis

A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.
George Bernard Shaw

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.
George Bernard Shaw

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
George Bernard Shaw

A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.
George Bernard Shaw

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
George Bernard Shaw

A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
George Bernard Shaw

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
George Bernard Shaw

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.
George Bernard Shaw

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.
George Bernard Shaw

A man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
George Bernard Shaw

A man who has no office to go, to I don't care who he is, is a trial of which you can have no conception.
George Bernard Shaw

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
George Bernard Shaw

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.
George Bernard Shaw

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
George Bernard Shaw

All great truths begin as blasphemies.
George Bernard Shaw

All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.
George Bernard Shaw

Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.
George Bernard Shaw

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.
George Bernard Shaw

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.
George Bernard Shaw

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
George Bernard Shaw

An index is a great leveller.
George Bernard Shaw

Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.
George Bernard Shaw

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
George Bernard Shaw

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.
George Bernard Shaw

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.
George Bernard Shaw

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
George Bernard Shaw

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
George Bernard Shaw

Better never than late.
George Bernard Shaw

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
George Bernard Shaw

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.
George Bernard Shaw

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.
George Bernard Shaw

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.
George Bernard Shaw

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.
George Bernard Shaw

Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.
George Bernard Shaw

Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt.
George Bernard Shaw

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
George Bernard Shaw

Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
George Bernard Shaw

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
George Bernard Shaw

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
George Bernard Shaw

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
George Bernard Shaw

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.
George Bernard Shaw

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.
George Bernard Shaw

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
George Bernard Shaw

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
George Bernard Shaw

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.
George Bernard Shaw

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
George Bernard Shaw

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
George Bernard Shaw

Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.
George Bernard Shaw

Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.
George Bernard Shaw

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
George Bernard Shaw

Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.
George Bernard Shaw

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.
George Bernard Shaw

General consultant to mankind.
George Bernard Shaw

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.
George Bernard Shaw

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
George Bernard Shaw

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
George Bernard Shaw

He's a man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
George Bernard Shaw

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
George Bernard Shaw

Hell is full of musical amateurs.
George Bernard Shaw

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.
George Bernard Shaw

Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.
George Bernard Shaw

I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.
George Bernard Shaw

I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.
George Bernard Shaw

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.
George Bernard Shaw

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.
George Bernard Shaw

I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.
George Bernard Shaw

I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.
George Bernard Shaw

I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.
George Bernard Shaw

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.
George Bernard Shaw

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
George Bernard Shaw

I want to be all used up when I die.
George Bernard Shaw

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.
George Bernard Shaw

I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.
George Bernard Shaw

I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.
George Bernard Shaw

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.
George Bernard Shaw

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
George Bernard Shaw

If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do.
George Bernard Shaw

If women were particular about men's characters, they would never get married at all.
George Bernard Shaw

If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.
George Bernard Shaw

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
George Bernard Shaw

If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves.
George Bernard Shaw

If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people's opinions will rush in from all quarters.
George Bernard Shaw

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.
George Bernard Shaw

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
George Bernard Shaw

In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it's more dangerous to lose than to win.
George Bernard Shaw

In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
George Bernard Shaw

In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.
George Bernard Shaw

Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
George Bernard Shaw

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
George Bernard Shaw

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
George Bernard Shaw

It is most unwise for people in love to marry.
George Bernard Shaw

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.
George Bernard Shaw

It's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture.
George Bernard Shaw

It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.
George Bernard Shaw

Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.
George Bernard Shaw

Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.
George Bernard Shaw

Lack of money is the root of all evil.
George Bernard Shaw

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw

Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it.
George Bernard Shaw

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
George Bernard Shaw

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
George Bernard Shaw

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.
George Bernard Shaw

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
George Bernard Shaw

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.
George Bernard Shaw

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.
George Bernard Shaw

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.
George Bernard Shaw

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
George Bernard Shaw

Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability.
George Bernard Shaw

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
George Bernard Shaw

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.
George Bernard Shaw

Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.
George Bernard Shaw

Most people do not pray; they only beg.
George Bernard Shaw

My reputation grows with every failure.
George Bernard Shaw

Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.
George Bernard Shaw

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.
George Bernard Shaw

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.
George Bernard Shaw

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.
George Bernard Shaw

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.
George Bernard Shaw

Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.
George Bernard Shaw

Oh, the tiger will love you. There is no sincerer love than the love of food.
George Bernard Shaw

Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.
George Bernard Shaw

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
George Bernard Shaw

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.
George Bernard Shaw

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.
George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
George Bernard Shaw

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.
George Bernard Shaw

People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.
George Bernard Shaw

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.
George Bernard Shaw

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.
George Bernard Shaw

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.
George Bernard Shaw

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
George Bernard Shaw

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
George Bernard Shaw

Property is organized robbery.
George Bernard Shaw

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.
George Bernard Shaw

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.
George Bernard Shaw

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
George Bernard Shaw

She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.
George Bernard Shaw

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
George Bernard Shaw

Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.
George Bernard Shaw

Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not?
George Bernard Shaw

Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.
George Bernard Shaw

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.
George Bernard Shaw

Syllables govern the world.
George Bernard Shaw

Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.
George Bernard Shaw

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.
George Bernard Shaw

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.
George Bernard Shaw

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.
George Bernard Shaw

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
George Bernard Shaw

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.
George Bernard Shaw

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
George Bernard Shaw

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
George Bernard Shaw

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.
George Bernard Shaw

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
George Bernard Shaw

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.
George Bernard Shaw

The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.
George Bernard Shaw

The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
George Bernard Shaw

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.
George Bernard Shaw

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
George Bernard Shaw

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
George Bernard Shaw

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.
George Bernard Shaw

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.
George Bernard Shaw

The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.
George Bernard Shaw

The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.
George Bernard Shaw

The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.
George Bernard Shaw

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.
George Bernard Shaw

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them, make them.
George Bernard Shaw

The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.
George Bernard Shaw

The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.
George Bernard Shaw

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
George Bernard Shaw

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.
George Bernard Shaw

The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.
George Bernard Shaw

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
George Bernard Shaw

The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.
George Bernard Shaw

The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.
George Bernard Shaw

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
George Bernard Shaw

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.
George Bernard Shaw

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
George Bernard Shaw

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.
George Bernard Shaw

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.
George Bernard Shaw

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.
George Bernard Shaw

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.
George Bernard Shaw

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.
George Bernard Shaw

There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot.
George Bernard Shaw

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
George Bernard Shaw

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
George Bernard Shaw

Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.
George Bernard Shaw

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.
George Bernard Shaw

Very few people can afford to be poor.
George Bernard Shaw

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
George Bernard Shaw

Virtue is insufficient temptation.
George Bernard Shaw

We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
George Bernard Shaw

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
George Bernard Shaw

We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.
George Bernard Shaw

We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
George Bernard Shaw

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
George Bernard Shaw

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
George Bernard Shaw

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.
George Bernard Shaw

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation.
George Bernard Shaw

What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
George Bernard Shaw

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?
George Bernard Shaw

What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?
George Bernard Shaw

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
George Bernard Shaw

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn't got any.
George Bernard Shaw

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
George Bernard Shaw

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
George Bernard Shaw

When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.
George Bernard Shaw

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.
George Bernard Shaw

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!
George Bernard Shaw

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.
George Bernard Shaw

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
George Bernard Shaw

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.
George Bernard Shaw

You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub.
George Bernard Shaw

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.
George Bernard Shaw

You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
George Bernard Shaw

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.
George Bernard Shaw

You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
George Bernard Shaw

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
George Bernard Shaw

Youth is wasted on the young.
George Bernard Shaw