Compliments Quotes

There is no effect more disproportionate to its cause than the happiness bestowed by a small compliment.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Some folks pay a compliment like they went down in their pocket for it.  ~Kin Hubbard


Women are never disarmed by compliments; men always are.  ~Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband, 1899


'Twas never merry world
Since lowly feigning was called compliment.
~William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night


Like pollen on a honeybee, flattery clings to the things you tell yourself. ~Willis Goth Regier, In Praise of Flattery, 2007


I hate careless flattery, the kind that exhausts you in your effort to believe it.  ~Wilson Mizner


I can live for two months on a good compliment.  ~Mark Twain


What flatterers say, try to make true.  ~German Proverb


Pay with compliments and you will always be wealthy.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com


It is great to get praise from the lips of taciturnity.  ~John Addington Symonds


Flattery works like a drug. ~Willis Goth Regier, In Praise of Flattery, 2007


A compliment is usually accompanied with a bow, as if to beg pardon for paying it.  ~A.W. Hare & J.C. Hare, Guesses at Truth


Men prefer brief praise, pitched high; women are satisfied with praise in a lower key, just so it goes on and on.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Modesty is the only sure bait when you angle for praise.  ~Lord Chesterfield


Current among men,
Like coin, the tinsel clink of compliment.
~Lord Alfred Tennyson, Princess


Flatterers look like friends, as wolves like dogs.  ~George Chapman


A person given to barefaced flattery, will usually balance the account with interest in your absence.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


It is hard to resist a flatterer who gets it right.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


God was just showing off when he created you.  ~From the movie Keeping the Faith


Flattery.... gets its kicks by flirting with insult and ridicule.~Willis Goth Regier, In Praise of Flattery, 2007


Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.  ~George Moore


That guy has muscles in places most people don't have places.  ~Bucky Waters, on Tom Hammonds


Her very frowns are fairer far
Than smiles of other maidens are.
~Hartley Coleridge


The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence.  ~Edward Thomas


Marge, you're as pretty as Princess Leia and as smart as Yoda.  ~Homer Simpson

Community Quotes

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.  I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live.  ~George Bernard Shaw


The impersonal hand of government can never replace the helping hand of a neighbor.  ~Hubert H. Humphrey


One is a member of a country, a profession, a civilization, a religion.  One is not just a man.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wartime Writings 1939-1944, translated from French by Norah Purcell


While the spirit of neighborliness was important on the frontier because neighbors were so few, it is even more important now because our neighbors are so many.  ~Lady Bird Johnson


Each of us is a being in himself and a being in society, each of us needs to understand himself and understand others, take care of others and be taken care of himself.  ~Haniel Long


We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.  ~Franklin Delano Roosevelt


Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne


"Independence"... [is] middle-class blasphemy.  We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.  ~G.B. Shaw, Pygmalion, 1912


A machine has value only as it produces more than it consumes - so check your value to the community.  ~Martin H. Fischer


On this shrunken globe, men can no longer live as strangers.  ~Adlai E. Stevenson


I nod to a passing stranger, and the stranger nods back, and two human beings go off, feeling a little less anonymous.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Man's greatest blunder has been in trying to make peace with the skies instead of making peace with his neighbors.  ~Elbert Hubbard


In the end, poverty, putridity and pestilence; work, wealth and worry; health, happiness and hell, all simmer down into village problems.  ~Martin H. Fischer


A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good, but for neglecting his neighbor's.  ~Richard Whately


We cannot live only for ourselves.  A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.  ~Herman Melville


Few of us could bear to have ourselves for neighbors.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

College Quotes

Academe, n.:  An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.  Academy, n.:  A modern school where football is taught.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in the students.  ~John Ciardi


Of course there's a lot of knowledge in universities:  the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don't take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates.  ~Abbott Lawrence Lowell


A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.  ~Theodore Roosevelt


If you have a college degree you can be absolutely sure of one thing... you have a college degree.  ~Author Unknown


If you feel that you have both feet planted on level ground, then the university has failed you.  ~Robert Goheen, Time, 23 June 1961


It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.  ~Brooks Atkinson, Once Around the Sun, 1951


A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.  ~W.H. Auden


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


A lot of fellows nowadays have a B.A., M.D., or Ph.D.  Unfortunately, they don't have a J.O.B.  ~"Fats" Domino


Fathers send their sons to college either because they went to college or they didn't.  ~L.L. Hendren


College is the best time of your life.  When else are your parents going to spend several thousand dollars a year just for you to go to a strange town and get drunk every night?  ~David Wood


A liberal education... frees a man from the prison-house of his class, race, time, place, background, family and even his nation.  ~Robert Maynard Hutchins


Does college pay?  They do if you are a good open-field runner.  ~Will Rogers


A college education shows a man how little other people know.  ~Thomas Chandler Haliburton


The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another.  ~J. Frank Dobie


I never graduated from Iowa, but I was only there for two terms - Truman's and Eisenhower's.  ~Alex Karras


The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure.  ~Sydney J. Harris


College football is a sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.  ~Elbert Hubbard


College is a place to keep warm between high school and an early marriage.  ~George Gobel


A liberal-arts education is supposed to provide you with a value system, a standard, a set of ideas, not a job.  ~Caroline Bird


I learned three important things in college - to use a library, to memorize quickly and visually, to drop asleep at any time given a horizontal surface and fifteen minutes.  ~Agnes DeMille, Dance to the Piper, 1952


The new appears as a minority point of view, and hence is unpopular.  The function of a university is to give it a sanctuary.  ~Martin H. Fischer


I have a degree in liberal arts.  Do you want fries with that?  ~Author unknown, as seen on a T-shirt


Hitler destroyed the German university with design; we destroyed ours without.  ~Martin H. Fischer


No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.  ~J. Robert Oppenheimer


The purpose of primary education is the development of your weak characteristics; the purpose of university education, the development of your strong.  ~Nevin Fenneman


I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments.  Of course they graduate the best - it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country.  They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money - provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.  ~Peter DeVries


Standardization is the fertilizer of college education.  A little may be useful, but flowers do not grow in pure manure.  ~Martin H. Fischer


The purpose of a liberal education is to make you philosophical enough to accept the fact that you will never make much money.  ~Author Unknown


The elective system offered a bewildering freedom of choice, leaving some graduates with the impression that they had nibbled at dozens of canapés of knowledge and never had their fill.  ~Ted Morgan


The quality of a university is measured more by the kind of student it turns out than the kind it takes in.  ~Robert J. Kibbee


A place where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll


A university is a college with a stadium seating over 40,000.  ~Leonard L. Levinson

Charm Quotes

"Charm" - which means the power to effect work without employing brute force - is indispensable to women.  Charm is a woman's strength just as strength is a man's charm.  ~Havelock Ellis


Charm is... a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.  ~Albert Camus, The Fall, 1956


Modesty is the gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it.  ~Oliver Herford


Charm is the quality in others that makes us more satisfied with ourselves.  ~Henri Frédéric Amiel


All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.  ~Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise


Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world lets them.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith


Charisma is not so much getting people to like you as getting people to like themselves when you're around. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


It's a sort of bloom on a woman.  If you have it, you don't need to have anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have.  ~James Matthew Barrie, What Every Woman Knows, about charm


There is a sort of charm in ugliness, if the person has some redeeming qualities and is only ugly enough.  ~Josh Billings


It is absurd to divide people into good and bad.  People are either charming or tedious.  ~Oscar Wilde


Charm is a glow within a woman that casts a most becoming light on others.  ~John Mason Brown


Charisma is a fancy name given to the knack of giving people your full attention.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


There is no personal charm so great as the charm of a cheerful temperament.  ~Henry Van Dyke


Forbidden things have a secret charm.  ~Publius Cornelius Tacitus


There's a difference between beauty and charm.  A beautiful woman is one I notice.  A charming woman is one who notices me.  ~John Erskine

Civilization Quotes

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.  ~Sigmund Freud


Culture is roughly anything we do and the monkeys don't.  ~Lord Raglan


We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.  ~Syrus


We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public.  ~Bryan White


Progress may have been all right once, but it went on too long...  ~Ogden Nash, "Come, Come, Kerouac! My Generation is Beater Than Yours," New Yorker, 1959 April 4 (Thanks, Garson O'Toole of quoteinvestigator.com!)


Civilization is hideously fragile... there's not much between us and the Horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.  ~C.P. Snow


Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.  ~Confucius


Man - despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments - owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.  ~Author and exact wording unknown, I've been told this was quoted by Paul Harvey


I've made an odd discovery.  Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility.  Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.  ~Bertrand Russell


We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden


We pass through this world but once.  Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.  ~Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man


And the wind shall say "Here were decent godless people;
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls."
~T.S. Eliot


We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.  ~Albert Einstein


When you can't do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.  ~Lois McMaster Bujold


K is for "Kenghis Khan."  He was a very nice person.  History has no record of him.  There is a moral in that, somewhere.  ~Harlan Ellison, From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet


Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
~T.S. Eliot, The Rock, 1934


Is man's civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?  ~Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, vol III, book V, chapter 7


Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life.  Otherwise it would die of civilization.  ~Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, 3 September 1855


Leash: n, a means by which animals, formerly running wild, are prevented from running tame, also.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


We are at the very beginning of time for the human race.  It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems.  But there are tens of thousands of years in the future.  Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.  ~Richard P. Feynman


Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.  ~Aldous Huxley


Animals have these advantages over man:  they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.  ~Voltaire, letter to Count Schomberg, 31 August 1769


Codi:  Gives you the willies, doesn't it?  The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop?  [referring to cliff dwellings]
Loyd:  No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams


People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.  ~Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, 2 March 1861


[M]odern man is just ancient man... with way better electronics.  ~Author unknown, "A Short History of Breakfast," from a Jack in the Box tray liner, 2006


What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.  ~Henry Havelock Ellis


Civilization begins with soap.  ~Galveston Times, quoted in Quotations for Special Occasions by Maud van Buren


A living civilization creates; a dying, builds museums.  ~Martin H. Fischer


One... gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion.  It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed.  ~Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion


There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.  ~Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897


Society is a made-up formula of what we are supposed to be, kept alive by those who believe in it.... I laugh in the ugly face of society, with all its fabricated dimensions.  ~Author Unknown


The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.  ~John Muir, letter to J.B. McChesney, 19 September 1871


Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.  ~B.F.Skinner


[T]he progress of civilization corresponds with the spread of general nausea.  ~Edgar Saltus, The Philosophy of Disenchantment


When tillage begins, other arts follow.  The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.  ~Daniel Webster, Remarks on Agriculture


Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.  ~H.G. Wells, The Outline of History


I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It's so... heroic. ~George Carlin


They civilize what's pretty
By puttin' up a city
Where nothin' that's
Pretty can grow....
They civilize left
They civilize right
Till nothing is left
Till nothing is right
~Alan Jay Lerner, "The First Thing You Know," Paint Your Wagon, 1969


Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.  ~Mark Twain, quoted in More Maxims of Mark compiled by Merle Johnson, 1927


Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.  ~Abraham Joshua Heschel


It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.  ~Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents


Take off all your clothes and walk down the street waving a machete and firing an Uzi, and terrified citizens will phone the police and report, "There's a naked person outside!"  ~Mike Nichols


It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization.  But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.  ~Alfred North Whitehead


Civilization is what makes you sick.  ~Paul Gauguin


The dying process begins the minute we are born, but it accelerates during dinner parties.  ~Carol Matthau


The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.  ~Richard Bach


Where there are humans
you'll find flies,
and Buddhas.
~Issa


Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.  ~Arnold Toynbee


We are so clothed in rationalization and dissemblance that we can recognize but dimly the deep primal impulses that motivate us. ~James Ramsey Ullman


Flowers don't open to the clock
but to the sunshine spontaneous;
for modern humans that manner
of instinct is now extraneous.
~Terri Guillemets


Good manners: The noise you don't make when you're eating soup. ~Bennett Cerf


Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity.  ~Thor Heyerdahl, Fatu-Hiva


If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.  ~Stanley Garn


I stood on a tower in the wet,
And New Year and Old Year met,
And winds were roaring and blowing:
And I said, "O years, that meet in tears,
Have ye aught that is worth the knowing?
Science enough and exploring,
Wanderers coming and going,
Matter enough for deploring,
But aught that is worth the knowing?"
~Alfred Tennyson


Civilization:  a thin veneer over barbarianism.  ~John M. Shanahan, The Most Brilliant Thoughts of All Time (In Two Lines or Less)


Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.  ~Brian Aldiss


Evolution made civilization steward of this planet.  A hundred thousand years later, the steward stood before evolution not helper but destroyer, not healer but parasite.  So evolution withdrew its gift, passed civilization by, rescued the planet from intelligence and handed it to love.  ~Richard Bach

Change Quotes

He who rejects change is the architect of decay.  The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.  ~Harold Wilson


If you don't like something change it; if you can't change it, change the way you think about it.  ~Mary Engelbreit


It is not necessary to change.  Survival is not mandatory.  ~W. Edwards Deming  (Thanks, Michelle)


All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.  ~Anatole France


When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.  ~Victor Frankl


Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure.  But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it.  Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer.  ~Shunryu Suzuki


The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.  ~Henry Miller


You must welcome change as the rule but not as your ruler.  ~Denis Waitley


Change is inevitable - except from a vending machine.  ~Robert C. Gallagher


If you're in a bad situation, don't worry it'll change.  If you're in a good situation, don't worry it'll change.  ~John A. Simone, Sr.


There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse!  As I have often found in travelling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position, and be bruised in a new place.  ~Washington Irving


When you are through changing, you are through.  ~Bruce Barton


Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.  ~John Kenneth Galbraith


What can we take on trust
in this uncertain life? Happiness, greatness,
pride - nothing is secure, nothing keeps.
~Euripides, Hecuba


They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.  ~Confucius


Change always comes bearing gifts.  ~Price Pritchett


The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions.  ~Ellen Glasgow


Life is its own journey, presupposes its own change and movement, and one tries to arrest them at one's eternal peril.  ~Laurens van der Post


Growth is the only evidence of life.  ~John Henry Newman, Apologia pro vita sua, 1864


Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed.  ~Irene Peter


Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.  ~Faith Baldwin


The circumstances of the world are so variable that an irrevocable purpose or opinion is almost synonymous with a foolish one.  ~William H. Seward


The birds are molting.  If only man could molt also - his mind once a year its errors, his heart once a year its useless passions.  ~James Allen


The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.  ~William Blake


Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Mutability"


You can avoid having ulcers by adapting to the situation:  If you fall in the mud puddle, check your pockets for fish.  ~Author Unknown


Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.  ~Marcel Proust


Stubbornness does have its helpful features.  You always know what you are going to be thinking tomorrow. ~Glen Beaman


If nothing ever changed, there'd be no butterflies.  ~Author Unknown

I put a dollar in one of those change machines.  Nothing changed.  ~George Carlin


We did not change as we grew older; we just became more clearly ourselves.  ~Lynn Hall


It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.  ~Author unknown, commonly misattributed to Charles Darwin


Change may come to you in trinkets and I hope it adorns your life gracefully.  ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com


To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.  ~Henri Bergson


The wheel of change moves on, and those who were down go up and those who were up go down.  ~Jawaharlal Nehru


We would rather be ruined than changed;
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
~W.H. Auden


What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Those who expect moments of change to be comfortable and free of conflict have not learned their history.  ~Joan Wallach Scott


You never have a friend all figured out. Just when you think you know what makes them tick, they tock. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.  ~Ellen Glasgow


Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves!  ~Andre Gide


If you want to make enemies, try to change something.  ~Woodrow Wilson


After you've done a thing the same way for two years, look it over carefully.  After five years, look at it with suspicion.  And after ten years, throw it away and start all over.  ~Alfred Edward Perlman, New York Times, 3 July 1958


Continuity gives us roots; change gives us branches, letting us stretch and grow and reach new heights.  ~Pauline R. Kezer


If you would attain to what you are not yet, you must always be displeased by what you are.  For where you are pleased with yourself there you have remained.  Keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing.  ~Saint Augustine


We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.  ~John Steinbeck, America and Americans


A good question is never answered.  It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.  ~John Ciardi


Little stones that are pelted into the lake of consciousness should not throw the whole lake into commotion. ~Paramahansa Yogananda, God Talks With Arjuna


The bamboo that bends is stronger than the oak that resists.  ~Japanese Proverb


Everything comes to pass, nothing comes to stay. ~Matthew Flickstein


The devil could change.  He was once an angel and may be evolving still.  ~Laurence J. Peter


Nothing that is can pause or stay;
The moon will wax, the moon will wane,
The mist and cloud will turn to rain,
The rain to mist and cloud again,
Tomorrow be today.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight.  ~Ezra Pound


Every beginning is a consequence - every beginning ends some thing.  ~Paul Valery


It's the most unhappy people who most fear change.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


People don't change.  Only their costumes do.  ~Gene Moore


God grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know it's me.  ~Author Unknown


She looked like autumn, when leaves turned and fruit ripened. ~Sarah Addison Allen, Garden Spells


We all have big changes in our lives that are more or less a second chance.  ~Harrison Ford


Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower


No two men ever judged alike of the same thing, and it is impossible to find two opinions exactly similar, not only in different men but in the same men at different times.  ~Michel Montaigne


If you want to truly understand something, try to change it.  ~Kurt Lewin


Every single thing changes and is changing always in this world.  Yet with the same light the moon goes on shining.  ~Saigyo


Things do not change; we change.  ~Henry David Thoreau


Our only security is our ability to change.  ~John Lilly


Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.  ~Bertold Brecht


He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.  ~Francis Bacon, "On Innovation," Essays, 1597


Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.  ~Francis Bacon


A scholar who loves comfort is not fit to be called a scholar.  ~Confucius, Analects


Sudden resolutions, like the sudden rise of the mercury in the barometer, indicate nothing but the changeableness of the weather. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.  ~Arthur Schopenhauer


When you jump for joy, beware that no one moves the ground from beneath your feet.  ~Stanislaw Lec


The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me.  The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.  ~George Bernard Shaw

Butterfly Quotes

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.  ~Rabindranath Tagore


May the wings of the butterfly kiss the sun
And find your shoulder to light on,
To bring you luck, happiness and riches
Today, tomorrow and beyond.
~Irish Blessing


Butterflies are self propelled flowers.  ~R.H. Heinlein


If nothing ever changed, there'd be no butterflies.  ~Author Unknown


The caterpillar does all the work but the butterfly gets all the publicity.  ~Attributed to George Carlin


What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.  ~Richard Bach


But these are flowers that fly and all but sing:
And now from having ridden out desire
They lie closed over in the wind and cling
Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire.
~Robert Frost, "Blue-Butterfly Day"


I saw a poet chase a butterfly in a meadow.  He put his net on a bench where a boy sat reading a book.  It's a misfortune that it is usually the other way round.  ~Karl Kraus


Beautiful and graceful, varied and enchanting, small but approachable, butterflies lead you to the sunny side of life.  And everyone deserves a little sunshine.  ~Jeffrey Glassberg


The butterfly is a flying flower,
The flower a tethered butterfly.
~Ponce Denis Écouchard Lebrun


Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne


There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.  ~Richard Buckminster Fuller


They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.  ~Edith Wharton


With the rose the butterfly's deep in love,
A thousand times hovering round;
But round himself, all tender like gold,
The sun's sweet ray is hovering found.
~Heinrich Heine, "New Spring"


"Just living is not enough," said the butterfly, "one must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower."  ~Hans Christian Andersen


Love is like a butterfly:  It goes where it pleases and it pleases wherever it goes.  ~Author Unknown


I've watched you now a full half-hour;
Self-poised upon that yellow flower
And, little Butterfly!  Indeed
I know not if you sleep or feed.
How motionless! - not frozen seas
More motionless! and then
What joy awaits you, when the breeze
Hath found you out among the trees,
And calls you forth again!
~William Wordsworth, "To a Butterfly"


I only ask to be free.  The butterflies are free.  ~Charles Dickens


The butterfly's attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry:  deeper motives contribute to it.  We would not think them so beautiful if they did not fly, or if they flew straight and briskly like bees, or if they stung, or above all if they did not enact the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis: the latter assumes in our eyes the value of a badly decoded message, a symbol, a sign.  ~Primo Levi


And what's a butterfly? At best,
He's but a caterpillar, at rest.
~John Grey


Flowers and butterflies drift in color, illuminating spring.  ~Author Unknown


We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.  ~Carl Sagan


This great purple butterfly,
In the prison of my hands,
Has a learning in his eye
Not a poor fool understands.
~William Butler Yeats, "Another Song of a Fool"


[N]ot quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures.  ~Elizabeth Goudge


The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight.
~Robert Graves, "Flying Crooked"


The green grass and the happy skies
court the fluttering butterflies.  ~Terri Guillemets


Know thyself!  A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly.  Whoever observes himself arrests his own development.  A caterpillar who wanted to know itself well would never become a butterfly.  ~Andre Gide


Do ye not comprehend that we are worms,
Born to bring forth the angelic butterfly
That flieth unto judgment without screen?
~Dante Alighieri


Bees sip honey from flowers and hum their thanks when they leave.
The gaudy butterfly is sure that the flowers owe thanks to him.
~Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds


We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.  ~Author Unknown


Go on, hitch a ride on the back of a butterfly.  There's no better way to fly.  ~Pat Monahan, Scott Michael Underwood, and James W. Stafford, "Get To Me"


The fluttering of a butterfly's wings can effect climate changes on the other side of the planet.  ~Paul Erlich


And the case of butterflies so rich it looks
As if all summer settled there and died.
~Philip Larkin, "Autumn"


Once I read a story about a butterfly in the subway, and today, I saw one.  It got on at 42nd, and off at 59th, where, I assume it was going to Bloomingdales to buy a hat that will turn out to be a mistake - as almost all hats are.  ~Nikolaus Laszlo, Nora Ephron, and Delia Ephron, You've Got Mail


A million butterflies rose up from South America,
All together, and flew in a gold storm toward Spain...
~Winfield Townley Scott, "Annual Legend"


In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly.  But with humans it is the other way around:  a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.  ~Anton Chekhov


Gray sail against the sky,
Gray butterfly!
Have you a dream for going.
Or are you the blind wind's blowing?
~Dana Burnet, "A Sail at Twilight"


The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me.  I grow older.
~Li Po


This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.  ~Joseph Conrad


Just like the butterfly, I too will awaken in my own time.  ~Deborah Chaskin


Moss covered paths between scarlet peonies,
Pale jade mountains fill your rustic windows.
I envy you, drunk with flowers,
Butterflies swirling in your dreams.
~Ch'ien Ch'i, translated by Kenneth Rexroth


Women, don't get a tattoo.  That butterfly looks great on your breast when you're twenty or thirty, but when you get to seventy, it stretches into a condor.  ~Billy Elmer


Where have those flowers and butterflies all gone
That science may have staked the future on?
He seems to say the reason why so much
Should come to nothing must be fairly faced.
~Robert Frost, "Pod of the Milkweed"


As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one's attending upon you; but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.  ~Marianne Moore, "To a Steam Roller"


We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass, and the butterflies as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are.  We adults, on the other hand, have outgrown them and have to lower ourselves to stoop down to them.  It seems to me that the grass hates us when we confess our love for it.  Whoever would partake of all good things must understand how to be small at times.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche


The tulip and the butterfly
Appear in gayer coats than I:
Let me be dressed fine as I will,
Flies, worms, and flowers exceed me still.
~Isaac Watts


We are closer to the ants than to butterflies.  Very few people can endure much leisure.  ~Gerald Brenan


Nerves and butterflies are fine - they're a physical sign that you're mentally ready and eager.  You have to get the butterflies to fly in formation, that's the trick.  ~Steve Bull


The least thing upset him on the links.  He missed short putts because of the uproar of butterflies in the adjoining meadows.  ~P.G. Wodehouse


Grown-ups love figures.  When you tell them that you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters.  They never say to you, "What does his voice sound like?  What games does he love best?  Does he collect butterflies?" Instead, they demand:  "How old is he?  How many brothers has he?  How much does he weigh?  How much money does his father make?"  Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943, translated from French


It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.  How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?  For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.  That is where the writer scores over his fellows:  he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.  ~Vita Sackville-West


I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.  ~Chuang Tzu

Business Quotes

In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins:  cash and experience.  Take the experience first; the cash will come later.  ~Harold Geneen


A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.  ~Henry Ford


Business is a combination of war and sport.  ~André Maurois


The absolute fundamental aim is to make money out of satisfying customers.  ~John Egan


Wise are those who learn that the bottom line doesn't always have to be their top priority.  ~William Arthur Ward


Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


It is not the employer who pays the wages.  He only handles the money.  It is the product that pays the wages.  ~Henry Ford, 1922, also sometimes quoted as "It is the customer that pays the wages"


Hire character.  Train skill.  ~Peter Schutz


I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.  ~Henry David Thoreau


The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency.  The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.  ~Bill Gates


Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus puerisque, 1881


I don't pay good wages because I have a lot of money; I have a lot of money because I pay good wages.  ~Robert Bosch


Professionalism is a frame of mind, not a paycheck.  ~Cecil Castle


In college, Yuppies major in business administration.  If to meet certain requirements they have to take a liberal arts course, they take Business Poetry.  ~Dave Barry


Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in man.  ~Author Unknown


Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.  ~Edward R. Murrow


Make the workmanship surpass the materials.  ~Ovid


A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.  ~Howard Scott


The executive exists to make sensible exceptions to general rules.  ~Elting E. Morison


There are so many men who can figure costs, and so few who can measure values.  ~Author Unknown


For all of its faults, it gives most hardworking people a chance to improve themselves economically, even as the deck is stacked in favor of the privileged few.  Here are the choices most of us face in such a system:  Get bitter or get busy.  ~Bill O'Reilly, about capitalism


Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.  ~Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought


People that pay for things never complain.  It's the guy you give something to that you can't please.  ~Will Rogers


To be successful, you have to have your heart in your business, and your business in your heart.  ~Thomas Watson, Sr.


I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well.  ~Alan Greenspan

Men err when they think they can be inhuman exploiters in their business life, and loving husbands and fathers at home.  ~Smiley Blanton


Let's be honest.  There's not a business anywhere that is without problems.  Business is complicated and imperfect.  Every business everywhere is staffed with imperfect human beings and exists by providing a product or service to other imperfect human beings.  ~Bob Parsons


Successful enterprises are usually led by a proven chief executive who is a competent benevolent dictator.  ~Richard Pratt


The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.  ~Henry Ford


The NBA is never just a business.  It's always business.  It's always personal.  All good businesses are personal.  The best businesses are very personal.  ~Mark Cuban


It is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises but only performance is reality. ~Harold Geneen


You can't file a conversation. ~Quoted by Forest Houtenschil


Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Teach a man to create an artificial shortage of fish and he will eat steak. ~Jay Leno


The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.  ~Confucius


It is unfortunate we can't buy many business executives for what they are worth and sell them for what they think they are worth.  ~Malcolm Forbes


Too many people think only of their own profit.  But business opportunity seldom knocks on the door of self-centered people.  No customer ever goes to a store merely to please the storekeeper.  ~Kazuo Inamori


A man of business may talk of philosophy; a man who has none may practise it.  ~Alexander Pope, Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1727


Government in the U.S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country.  ~Norman Cousins


Work as if you own the company and soon you just might.  ~Mike Dolan, www.hawaiianlife.com


To take something from a person and keep it for oneself:  that is robbery.  To take something from one person and then turn it over to another in exchange for as much money as you can get:  that is business.  Robbery is so much more stupid, since it is satisfied with a single, frequently dangerous profit; whereas in business it can be doubled without danger.  ~Octave Mirbeau, Torture Garden


Dealing with people is probably the biggest problem you face, especially if you are in business.  Yes, and that is also true if you are a housewife, architect or engineer.  ~Dale Carnegie


A consultant is a man sent in after the battle to bayonet the wounded.  ~Author Unknown


The results of quality work last longer than the shock of high prices.  ~Author Unknown


It doesn't matter how many times you fail.  It doesn't matter how many times you almost get it right.  No one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you.  All you have to do is learn from them and those around you because... All that matters in business is that you get it right once.  Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are.  ~Mark Cuban


Commerce, n. A kind of transaction in which A plunders from B the goods of C, and for compensation B picks the pocket of D of money belonging to E.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's World Book, 1906


You can fool all the people all the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough.  ~Joseph E. Levine

Brothers Quotes

Brothers and sisters are as close as hands and feet.  ~Vietnamese Proverb


I, who have no sisters or brothers, look with some degree of innocent envy on those who may be said to be born to friends.  ~James Boswell


Sometimes being a brother is even better than being a superhero.  ~Marc Brown


It takes two men to make one brother.  ~Israel Zangwill


There's no other love like the love for a brother.  There's no other love like the love from a brother.  ~Terri Guillemets


I don't believe an accident of birth makes people sisters or brothers.  It makes them siblings, gives them mutuality of parentage.  Sisterhood and brotherhood is a condition people have to work at.  ~Maya Angelou


A friend is a brother who was once a bother.  ~Author Unknown


A brother shares childhood memories and grown-up dreams.  ~Author Unknown


Our brothers and sisters are there with us from the dawn of our personal stories to the inevitable dusk.  ~Susan Scarf Merrell


If you want to know how your girl will treat you after marriage, just listen to her talking to her little brother.  ~Sam Levenson


It snowed last year too:  I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.  ~Dylan Thomas


A brother is a friend given by Nature.  ~Jean Baptiste Legouve


I sought my soul, but my soul I could not see.  I sought my God, but my God eluded me.  I sought my brother and I found all three.  ~Author Unknown


The best way to get a puppy is to beg for a baby brother - and they'll settle for a puppy every time.  ~Winston Pendelton


All for one and one for all
My brother and my friend
What fun we have
The time we share
Brothers 'til the end.
~Author Unknown


Never make a companion equal to a brother.  ~Hesiod


It was nice growing up with someone like you - someone to lean on, someone to count on... someone to tell on!  ~Author Unknown


A sibling may be the keeper of one's identity, the only person with the keys to one's unfettered, more fundamental self.  ~Marian Sandmaier


Our siblings push buttons that cast us in roles we felt sure we had let go of long ago - the baby, the peacekeeper, the caretaker, the avoider.... It doesn't seem to matter how much time has elapsed or how far we've traveled.  ~Jane Mersky Leder


Help your brother's boat across, and your own will reach the shore.  ~Hindu Proverb


The younger brother must help to pay for the pleasures of the elder.  ~Jane Austen, Mansfield Park



Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply...  ~Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, 1814


When brothers agree, no fortress is so strong as their common life.  ~Antisthenes


The mildest, drowsiest sister has been known to turn tiger if her sibling is in trouble. ~Clara Ortega


After a girl is grown, her little brothers — now her protectors — seem like big brothers. ~Terri Guillemets


To the outside world we all grow old. But not to brothers and sisters. We know each other as we always were. We know each other's hearts. We share private family jokes. We remember family feuds and secrets, family griefs and joys. We live outside the touch of time. ~Clara Ortega


Our siblings.  They resemble us just enough to make all their differences confusing, and no matter what we choose to make of this, we are cast in relation to them our whole lives long.  ~Susan Scarf Merrell


Sibling relationships - and 80 percent of Americans have at least one - outlast marriages, survive the death of parents, resurface after quarrels that would sink any friendship.  They flourish in a thousand incarnations of closeness and distance, warmth, loyalty and distrust.  ~Erica E. Goode, "The Secret World of Siblings," U.S. News & World Report, 10 January 1994


Siblings are the people we practice on, the people who teach us about fairness and cooperation and kindness and caring - quite often the hard way.  ~Pamela Dugdale


Blessed is the servant who loves his brother as much when he is sick and useless as when he is well and can be of service to him.  And blessed is he who loves his brother as well when he is afar off as when he is by his side, and who would say nothing behind his back he might not, in love, say before his face.  ~St Francis of Assisi


Being pretty on the inside means you don't hit your brother and you eat all your peas - that's what my grandma taught me.  ~Lord Chesterfield


My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard.  Mother would come out and say, "You're tearing up the grass."  "We're not raising grass," Dad would reply.  "We're raising boys."  ~Harmon Killebrew


The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out his nose.  ~Garrison Keillor


As we grew up, my brothers acted like they didn't care,
but I always knew they looked out for me and were there!
~Catherine Pulsifer, Inspirational Words of Wisdom


One can be a brother only in something.  Where there is no tie that binds men, men are not united but merely lined up.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras

Breathing Quotes

When you own your breath, nobody can steal your peace.  ~Author Unknown


What we call 'I' is just a swinging door, which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. ~Shunryu Suzuki


When the breath wanders the mind also is unsteady.  But when the breath is calmed the mind too will be still, and the yogi achieves long life.  Therefore, one should learn to control the breath.  ~Svatmarama, Hatha Yoga Pradipika


A healthy mind has an easy breath.  ~Author Unknown


If you woke up breathing, congratulations!  You have another chance.  ~Andrea Boydston


Inhale, and God approaches you.  Hold the inhalation, and God remains with you.  Exhale, and you approach God.  Hold the exhalation, and surrender to God.  ~Krishnamacharya


Breathing is the greatest pleasure in life.  ~Giovanni Papini


Smile, breathe and go slowly.  ~Thich Nhat Hanh


Breath is Spirit.  The act of breathing is Living.  ~Author Unknown


Ancestral Teacher Qiu said, "If the breathing is at all unsettled, life is not your own." ~"Heaven and Earth," c. Ming dynasty work Anthology on the Cultivation of Realization by unknown author, translated by Thomas Cleary in Taoist Meditation


For breath is life, and if you breathe well you will live long on earth.  ~Sanskrit Proverb


The nose is for breathing, the mouth is for eating.  ~Proverb


Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor. ~Thích Nhất Hạnh


Walking through the house at night is wonderful to me; a symphony of breath, each person a separate instrument as they collectively breathe in time to the metronome of life itself.  ~Edwin Leap, www.edwinleap.com


To one who has been long in city pent,
'Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven, - to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
~John Keats, Sonnet XIV


He lives most life whoever breathes most air.  ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning


Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts.  ~Thich Nhat Hanh


Focusing on the act of breathing clears the mind of all daily distractions and clears our energy enabling us to better connect with the Spirit within.  ~Author Unknown


Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.  ~Erich Fromm


As a fire blazes brightly when the covering of ash over it is scattered by the wind, the divine fire within the body shines in all its majesty when the ashes of desire are scattered by the practice of pranayama. ~B.K.S. Iyengar


You know that our breathing is the inhaling and exhaling of air.  The organ that serves for this is the lungs that lie round the heart, so that the air passing through them thereby envelops the heart.  Thus breathing is a natural way to the heart.  And so, having collected your mind within you, lead it into the channel of breathing through which air reaches the heart and, together with this inhaled air, force your mind to descend into the heart and to remain there.  ~Nicephorus the Solitary


Breathing, according to me, corresponds to taking charge of one's own life. ~Luce Irigaray, Between East and West


I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart:  I am, I am, I am.  ~Sylvia Plath


Freedom is strangely ephemeral.  It is something like breathing; one only becomes acutely aware of its importance when one is choking.  ~William E. Simon


In this very breath that we now take lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us. ~Peter Matthiessen


Fear less, hope more; eat less, chew more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; hate less, love more; and all good things are yours.  ~Swedish Proverb


The path of humanity is always coordinated with heaven and earth in the alternation of movement and stillness. Human energy is always in communion with heaven and earth in the alteration of exhalation and inhalation. ~"Heaven and Earth," c. Ming dynasty work Anthology on the Cultivation of Realization by unknown author, translated by Thomas Cleary in Taoist Meditation


The best things in life are nearest:  Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you.  Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.  ~Robert Louis Stevenson


Fear is excitement without the breath.  ~Fritz Perls


Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.  ~L. Frank Baum


The practice is simply this: keep coming back to your breath during the day. Just take a moment. This will give your mind a steadiness and your breath a gracefulness.... There's so much to let go of, isn't there? Your nostalgia and your regrets. Your fantasies and your fears. What you think you want instead of what is happening right now. Breathe. ~Rodney Yee, Yoga: The Poetry of the Body


Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?  ~Mary Oliver


What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?  ~Mary Oliver


What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.  ~John Updike


We too should make ourselves empty, that the great soul of the universe may fill us with its breath.  ~Laurence Binyon


Learn how to exhale, the inhale will take care of itself.  ~Carla Melucci Ardito


There is one way of breathing that is shameful and constricted.  Then, there's another way: a breath of love that takes you all the way to infinity.  ~Rumi


Breathe.  Let go.  And remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure.  ~Oprah Winfrey


The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.  Erma Bombeck


In an underdeveloped country, don't drink the water; in a developed country, don't breathe the air.  ~Changing Times magazine


We live in an ocean of air like fish in a body of water.  By our breathing we are attuned to our atmosphere.  If we inhibit our breathing we isolate ourselves from the medium in which we exist.  In all Oriental and mystic philosophies, the breath holds the secret to the highest bliss.  ~Alexander Lowen


I love to breathe.  Oxygen is sexy!  ~Kris Carr


To live is not breathing it is action.  ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau


Angels are all around us, all the time, in the very air we breathe.  ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994

Books Quotes

A good book on your shelf is a friend that turns its back on you and remains a friend.  ~Author Unknown


A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face.  It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy.  ~Edward P. Morgan


The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.  ~James Bryce


Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.  ~Author Unknown


A good book should leave you... slightly exhausted at the end.  You live several lives while reading it.  ~William Styron, interview, Writers at Work, 1958


There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.  ~G.K. Chesterton


Many people, other than the authors, contribute to the making of a book, from the first person who had the bright idea of alphabetic writing through the inventor of movable type to the lumberjacks who felled the trees that were pulped for its printing.  It is not customary to acknowledge the trees themselves, though their commitment is total.  ~Forsyth and Rada, Machine Learning


If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.  ~Toni Morrison


A good book has no ending.  ~R.D. Cumming


I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.  ~Anna Quindlen, "Enough Bookshelves," New York Times, 7 August 1991


Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.  ~Charles W. Eliot


Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.  ~P.J. O'Rourke


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


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


The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.  ~Mark Twain, attributed


[I]t is pleasanter to eat one's own peas out of one's own garden, than to buy them by the peck at Covent Garden; and a book reads the better, which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots and dog's-ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins, or over a pipe.... ~Charles Lamb, letter to S.T. Coleridge, 11 October 1802


Let books be your dining table,
And you shall be full of delights
Let them be your mattress
And you shall sleep restful nights.
~Author Unknown


I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.  ~George Robert Gissing


A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.  ~Chinese Proverb


There's nothing to match curling up with a good book when there's a repair job to be done around the house.  ~Joe Ryan


Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.  ~William Hazlitt


My test of a good novel is dreading to begin the last chapter.  ~Thomas Helm


A dirty book is rarely dusty.  ~Author Unknown


As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it.  I need resistance to celebrate!  ~William James


You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.  ~Paul Sweeney


It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.  ~Oscar Wilde


A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.  ~Franz Kafka


Lord! when you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.  Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.  ~Christopher Morley


Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.  ~Abraham Lincoln


The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.  ~Andrew Ross

I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage.  ~Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, Pensées Diverses


To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare.  ~Kenko Yoshida


Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.  ~Jessamyn West


I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.  ~E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951


TV.  If kids are entertained by two letters, imagine the fun they'll have with twenty-six.  Open your child's imagination.  Open a book.  ~Author Unknown


People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith, Trivia, 1917


Books had instant replay long before televised sports.  ~Bern Williams


How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden


To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor’s prohibited list.  ~John Aikin


In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation.  ~Stéphane Mallarmé


Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.  ~James Russell Lowell


Books can be dangerous.  The best ones should be labeled "This could change your life."  ~Helen Exley


There is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know:  to touch words and have them touch you back.  ~Jim Fiebig


This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.  ~Elbert Hubbard


Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience:  this is the ideal life.  ~Mark Twain


A book is to me like a hat or coat - a very uncomfortable thing until the newness has been worn off.  ~Charles B. Fairbanks


If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe?  The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions.  ~Author Unknown


Books are the glass of council to dress ourselves by.  ~Bulstrode Whitlock


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


Reading means borrowing.  ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms


Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life.  ~Jesse Lee Bennett


Book lovers never go to bed alone.  ~Author Unknown


Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read.  One does not love breathing.  ~Harper Lee


The scholar only knows how dear these silent, yet eloquent, companions of pure thoughts and innocent hours become in the season of adversity.  When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value.  ~Washington Irving


When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before.  ~Clifton Fadiman


For friends... do but look upon good Books:  they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble.  ~Francis Bacon


A book that is shut is but a block.  ~Thomas Fuller


In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.  ~Thomas Carlyle


There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away.  No one has stepped twice into the same river.  But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?  ~Marina Tsvetaeva


The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived.  ~Howard Pyle


No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.  ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning


Medicine for the soul.  ~Inscription over the door of the Library at Thebes


Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.  ~E.P. Whipple


These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.  From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.  ~Gilbert Highet


"Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are" is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.  ~François Mauriac


There are worse crimes than burning books.  One of them is not reading them.  ~Joseph Brodsky


Books are embalmed minds.  ~Bovee


Children don't read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of alienation.  They have no use for psychology.... They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.... When a book is boring, they yawn openly.  They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions.  ~Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1978


I divide all readers into two classes; those who read to remember and those who read to forget.  ~William Lyon Phelps


Set your pace to a stroll. Stop whenever you want. Interrupt, jump back and forth, I won't mind. This book should be as easy as laughter. It is stuffed with small things to take away. Please help yourself. ~Willis Goth Regier, In Praise of Flattery, 2007


The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.  ~Henry Ward Beecher


Nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind.  ~Charles Dudley Warner


If you have never said "Excuse me" to a parking meter or bashed your shins on a fireplug, you are probably wasting too much valuable reading time.  ~Sherri Chasin Calvo


The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.  ~Ross MacDonald


The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.  ~Samuel Butler


I have friends whose society is delightful to me; they are persons of all countries and of all ages; distinguished in war, in council, and in letters; easy to live with, always at my command.  ~Francesco Petrarch


Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.  ~Augustine Birrell, Obiter Dicta, "Book Buying"


To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.  ~Edmund Burke


The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book.  ~André Maurois


A house without books is like a room without windows.  ~Heinrich Mann


From my point of view, a book is a literary prescription put up for the benefit of someone who needs it.  ~S.M. Crothers


He fed his spirit with the bread of books.  ~Edwin Markham


Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book.  ~John Ruskin


Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death hath no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.  ~J. Swartz


A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counsellor, a multitude of counsellors.  ~Henry Ward Beecher


I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults. ~Desiderius Erasmus


Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.  ~John LeCarre


Never judge a book by its movie.  ~J.W. Eagan


"To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the forced product of another man's brain. Now I think a man of quality and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own." —Lord Foppington in the Relapse  An ingenious acquaintance of my own was so much struck with this bright sally of his Lordship, that he has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality. At the hazard of losing some credit on this head, I must confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to other people's thoughts. I dream away my life in others' speculations. I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me. ~Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia, 1820


Far more seemly were it for thee to have thy study full of books, than thy purse full of money.  ~John Lyly


The wise man reads both books and life itself.  ~Lin Yutang


I like intellectual reading.  It's to my mind what fiber is to my body.  ~Grey Livingston


I often derive a peculiar satisfaction in conversing with the ancient and modern dead, - who yet live and speak excellently in their works.  My neighbors think me often alone, - and yet at such times I am in company with more than five hundred mutes - each of whom, at my pleasure, communicates his ideas to me by dumb signs - quite as intelligently as any person living can do by uttering of words.  ~Laurence Sterne


You may have tangible wealth untold;
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I you can never be -
I had a mother who read to me.
~Strickland Gillilan (Thanks, Laurel)


When a new book is published, read an old one.  ~Samuel Rogers


He who lends a book is an idiot.  He who returns the book is more of an idiot.  ~Arabic Proverb


Borrowers of books - those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.  ~Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia, "The Two Races of Men," 1822


The mere brute pleasure of reading - the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.  ~Lord Chesterfield


An ordinary man can... surround himself with two thousand books... and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.  ~Augustine Birrell


Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity.  ~George Steiner


We are too civil to books.  For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


From every book invisible threads reach out to other books; and as the mind comes to use and control those threads the whole panorama of the world's life, past and present, becomes constantly more varied and interesting, while at the same time the mind's own powers of reflection and judgment are exercised and strengthened.  ~Helen E. Haines


To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.  ~W. Somerset Maugham


How vast an estate it is that we came into as the intellectual heirs of all the watchers and searchers and thinkers and singers of the generations that are dead!  What a heritage of stored wealth!  What perishing poverty of mind we should be left in without it!  ~J.N. Larned


Books are a uniquely portable magic.  ~Stephen King


That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.  ~Amos Bronson Alcott


The multitude of books is making us ignorant.  ~Voltaire


There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book; books are well written or badly written.  ~Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891


Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.  ~Richard Steele, Tatler, 1710


The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes


One to whom books are as strangers has not yet learned to live. He is a solitary, though he dwell amid a vast population. On the other hand, he to whom books are as friends possesses a Key to the Garden of Delights, where the purest pleasures are open for his entertainment, and where he has for his companions the master minds of all the ages. ~Charles Noel Douglas, "Introduction," Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical


My imagination doesn't require anything more of the book than to provide a framework within which it can wander. ~Alphonse Daudet


Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time).  It is the only way of discovering what they contain.  A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.  ~E.M. Forster


Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book!  A message to us from the dead, - from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away; and yet these, on those little sheets of paper, speak to us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.  ~Charles Kingsley


Let your bookcases and your shelves be your gardens and your pleasure-grounds.  Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh.  ~Judah Ibn Tibbon


One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind. ~Ishmael Reed, Writin' is Fightin': Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper, p.186


Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs. These evil white scabs rip off with difficulty, leaving leprous wounds and traces of slime to which adhere the dust and fluff of ages, making me wish for a special gummy hell to which the inventor of these stickers would be condemned. ~Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night


Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.  ~Francis Bacon


Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.  ~Walter Pater


No person who can read is ever successful at cleaning out an attic.  ~Ann Landers


If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page. ~Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night


That place that does contain
My books, the best companions, is to me
A glorious court, where hourly I converse
With the old sages and philosophers;
And sometimes, for variety, I confer
With kings and emperors, and weigh their counsels;
Calling their victories, if unjustly got,
Unto a strict account, and, in my fancy,
Deface their ill-placed statues.
~Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher


You can't get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me. ~C.S. Lewis, quoted by Walter Hooper


A truly good book teaches me better than to read it.  I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint.... What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.  ~Henry David Thoreau


To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one.  ~Chinese Saying


O for a Booke and a shadie nooke, eyther in-a-doore or out;
With the grene leaves whisp'ring overhede, or the Streete cryes all about.
Where I maie Reade all at my ease, both of the Newe and Olde;
For a jollie goode Booke whereon to looke is better to me than Golde.
~John Wilson


Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.  ~Anatole France


A man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading.  ~Jeremy Collier


Books are immortal sons deifying their sires.  ~Plato


No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.  ~Mary Wortley Montagu


I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.  ~Woodrow Wilson


Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution - such call I good books.  ~Henry David Thoreau


It often requires more courage to read some books than it does to fight a battle.  ~Sutton Elbert Griggs


Many persons read and like fiction.  It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this.  ~Rose Macaulay


Browsing the dim back corner
Of a musty antique shop
Opened an old book of poetry
Angels flew out from the pages
I caught the whiff of a soul
The ink seemed fresh as today
Was that voices whispering?
The tree of the paper still grows.
~Terri Guillemets


Americans like fat books and thin women.  ~Russell Baker


What holy cities are to nomadic tribes - a symbol of race and a bond of union - great books are to the wandering souls of men:  they are the Meccas of the mind.  ~G.E. Woodberry


God be thanked for books! they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.  ~W.E. Channing


A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement.  ~Holbrook Jackson


A blessed companion is a book, - a book that, fitly chosen, is a lifelong friend,... a book that, at a touch, pours its heart into our own.  ~Douglas Jerrold


Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.  ~William Styron


A large, still book is a piece of quietness, succulent and nourishing in a noisy world, which I approach and imbibe with "a sort of greedy enjoyment," as Marcel Proust said of those rooms of his old home whose air was "saturated with the bouquet of silence."  ~Holbrook Jackson


'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude, 1870


We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.  ~Henry Miller


Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.  ~Harold Bloom


One of the advantages of reading books is that you get to play with someone else's imaginary friends, at all hours of the night.  ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com


The book of the moment often has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; but the great book has its revenge.  It lives to see its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it finds its final resting-place in the garret or the auction room.  ~Hamilton Wright Mabie


The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary.  It is the only art which can be practised at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness.  ~Holbrook Jackson


I knew a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house; but gradually went through all the Latin poets in those moments.  ~Lord Chesterfield


This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.  ~Logan Pearsall Smith


Books are delightful society.  If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.  ~William Ewart Gladstone


Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves.  ~Jeremy Collier