Showing posts with label Quotes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Quotes. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Quotations about Yoga & Tai Chi

Yoga teaches us to cure what need not be endured and endure what cannot be cured. ~B.K.S. Iyengar


The yoga mat is a good place to turn when talk therapy and antidepressants aren't enough. ~Amy Weintraub


Yoga is the fountain of youth. You're only as young as your spine is flexible. ~Bob Harper


You cannot do yoga. Yoga is your natural state. What you can do are yoga exercises, which may reveal to you where you are resisting your natural state. ~Sharon Gannon


Yoga is possible for anybody who really wants it. Yoga is universal.... But don't approach yoga with a business mind looking for worldly gain. ~Sri Krishna Pattabhi Jois


By embracing your mother wound as your yoga, you transform what has been a hindrance in your life into a teacher of the heart. ~Phillip Moffitt


Yoga is 99% practice and 1% theory. ~Sri Krishna Pattabhi Jois


Sun salutations can energize and warm you, even on the darkest, coldest winter day. ~Carol Krucoff


I like the physical part, but I'm also drawn to the spiritual. For me, yoga is not just a workout - it's about working on yourself. ~Mary Glover, "Health Profile: Yoga leaves aches and pains behind," Arizona Republic, 2004 April 6


A photographer gets people to pose for him. A yoga instructor gets people to pose for themselves. ~Terri Guillemets


I do yoga so that I can stay flexible enough to kick my own arse if necessary. ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com


The beauty is that people often come here for the stretch, and leave with a lot more. ~Liza Ciano, co-owner & co-director of Yoga Vermont, yogavermont.com


The last time I opened my chakra so I could feel my peace, I got thrown right out of the pub. ~Terri Guillemets


Yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on the telephone, is a spiritual fake. ~Carl Jung


Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape. ~Author Unknown


Vogue and Self are putting out the message of yoginis as buff and perfect. If you start doing yoga for those reasons, fine. Most people get beyond that and see that it's much, much more. ~Patricia Walden


When asked what gift he wanted for his birthday, the yogi replied: "I wish no gifts, only presence." ~Author Unknown


Yoga is bodily gospel. ~Reaven Fields


If I'm losing balance in a pose, I stretch higher and God reaches down to steady me. It works every time, and not just in yoga. ~Terri Guillemets


Yoga, an ancient but perfect science, deals with the evolution of humanity. This evolution includes all aspects of one's being, from bodily health to self-realization. Yoga means union - the union of body with consciousness and consciousness with the soul. Yoga cultivates the ways of maintaining a balanced attitude in day-to-day life and endows skill in the performance of one's actions. ~B.K.S. Iyengar, Astadala Yogamala


Don't just do something - sit there! ~Author Unknown


I was in yoga the other day. I was in full lotus position. My chakras were all aligned. My mind is cleared of all clatter and I'm looking out of my third eye and everything that I'm supposed to be doing. It's amazing what comes up, when you sit in that silence. "Mama keeps whites bright like the sunlight, Mama's got the magic of Clorox 2." ~Ellen DeGeneres


Anyone who practices can obtain success in yoga but not one who is lazy. Constant practice alone is the secret of success. ~Svatmarama, Hatha Yoga Pradipika


Yoga is the practice of quieting the mind. ~Patanjali, translated from Sanskrit


Yoga is the perfect opportunity to be curious about who you are. ~Jason Crandell, quoted in Yoga Journal, November 2005


Yoga is difficult for the one whose mind is not subdued. ~Bhagavad Gita


Corpse pose restores life. Dead parts of your being fall away, the ghosts are released. ~Terri Guillemets


Yoga doesn't take time, it gives time. ~Ganga White


Yoga has a sly, clever way of short-circuiting the mental patterns that cause anxiety. ~Baxter Bell, quoted in "Worry Thwarts," Yoga Journal, March 2006


Concentrating on poses clears the mind, while focusing on the breath helps the body shift out of fight-or-flight mode. ~Melanie Haiken, about yoga and anxiety, "Worry Thwarts," Yoga Journal, March 2006


Warrior pose battles inner weakness and wins focus. You see that there is no war within you. You're on your own side, and you are your own strength. ~Terri Guillemets


Mountain pose teaches us, literally, how to stand on our own two feet.... teaching us to root ourselves into the earth.... Our bodies become a connection between heaven and earth. ~Carol Krucoff


Mountain pose is an affirmation. You can conquer anything with your natural boldness and resolute strength. Only you can reach the peak of your success. ~Terri Guillemets


I tried yoga once but took off for the mall halfway through class, as I had a sudden craving for a soft pretzel and world peace. ~Terri Guillemets


All unimportant matters drop off you in ragdoll pose. Very few things are genuinely important. The Truth sways before you. ~Terri Guillemets


When you inhale, you are taking the strength from God. When you exhale, it represents the service you are giving to the world. ~B.K.S. Iyengar


The autonomic nervous system is divided into the sympathetic system, which is often identified with the fight-or-flight response, and the parasympathetic, which is identified with what's been called the relaxation response. When you do yoga - the deep breathing, the stretching, the movements that release muscle tension, the relaxed focus on being present in your body - you initiate a process that turns the fight-or-flight system off and the relaxation response on. That has a dramatic effect on the body. The heartbeat slows, respiration decreases, blood pressure decreases. The body seizes this chance to turn on the healing mechanisms. ~Richard Faulds


Tree pose grows confidence. ~Terri Guillemets


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


Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end. ~Jiddhu Krishnamurti


For those wounded by civilization, yoga is the most healing salve. ~Terri Guillemets


Chair pose is a defiance of spirit, showing how high you can reach even when you're forced down. ~Terri Guillemets


Basketball is an endurance sport, and you have to learn to control your breath; that's the essence of yoga, too. So, I consciously began using yoga techniques in my practice and playing. I think yoga helped reduce the number and severity of injuries I suffered. As preventative medicine, it's unequaled. ~Kareem Abdul-Jabbar


Before you've practiced, the theory is useless. After you've practiced, the theory is obvious. ~David Williams, an Ashtanga yoga teacher in Maui, Hawaii, quoted from yoga.com


Tai chi does not mean oriental wisdom or something exotic. It is the wisdom of your own senses, your own mind and body together as one process. ~Chungliang Al Huang


It has long been my dream that one day Americans of all ages, creeds and colors will be practicing taijiquan in the parks of this nation as they do in China. Few places in the world have such beautiful open spaces which can and should be used productively at no expense. The result would be tremendous improvement in mental and physical well-being. ~Jou, Tsung Hwa


As the practitioner incorporates the quality of tai chi movement into his life, he finds that he stops banging into things. The result of not falling into each step provides the opportunity to instantaneously ease back from unexpected barriers. ~Wolfe Lowenthal


Of all the exercises, I should say that T'ai Chi is the best. It can ward off disease, banish worry and tension, bring improved physical health and prolong life. It is a good hobby for your whole life, the older you are, the better. It is suitable for everyone - the weak, the sick, the aged, children, the disabled and blind. It is also an economical exercise. As long as one has three square feet of space, one can take a trip to paradise and stay there to enjoy life for thirty minutes without spending a single cent. ~T.T. Liang (Liang Tung-Tsai, 1900-2002), T'ai Chi Ch'uan for Health and Self-Defense


Think of the circular path of each movement, in Tai Chi every movement is in curve or circle that has no ending or beginning. ~Paul Lam


Tai chi is the one exercise that can universally help solve our growing health crisis. It has stood the test of thousands of years. We have a generation of baby boomers with increasing health problems; old people who are sick, in pain, fearful, and cranky; a middle class that is increasingly incapable of affording most of the drugs that are prescribed for their ailments; children that are flaccid, diabetic and asthmatic. People of all ages are addicted to drugs, alcohol, sugar, cigarettes, and caffeine. Stress follows almost everyone like a shadow. ~Bruce Frantzis

Quotations about Writing

So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it. ~Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, 1948


The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. ~Anaïs Nin


You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. ~Ray Bradbury


Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. ~E.L. Doctorow


A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. ~Charles Peguy


And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. ~Sylvia Plath


I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. ~Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977


I try to leave out the parts that people skip. ~Elmore Leonard


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


What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. ~Logan Pearsall Smith, "All Trivia," Afterthoughts, 1931


The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium. ~Norbet Platt


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


Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. ~Sharon O'Brien


Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very;" your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain


I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. ~James Michener


The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say. ~Mark Twain


The wastebasket is a writer's best friend. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer


Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction. ~Dylan Thomas, letter to Vernon Watkins, March 1938


Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. ~William Wordsworth


The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. ~Vladimir Nabakov


Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. ~Anton Chekhov


Easy reading is damn hard writing. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne


Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies. ~Terri Guillemets


Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. ~Orson Scott Card


A metaphor is like a simile. ~Author Unknown


The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter - it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. ~Mark Twain, letter to George Bainton, 1888 (Thanks, Andrew & Barbara), variation of Josh Billings' "Don't mistake vivacity for wit, thare iz about az much difference az thare iz between lightning and a lightning bug."


The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it. ~Jules Renard, "Diary," February 1895


Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. ~Author Unknown


A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. ~Karl Kraus


A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. ~Samuel McChord Crothers, "Every Man's Natural Desire to Be Somebody Else," The Dame School of Experience, 1920


When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can. ~Samuel Lover, Handy Andy, 1842


I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. ~James Michener


Writing is my time machine, takes me to the precise time and place I belong. ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com


If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. ~Isaac Asimov


I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork. ~Peter De Vries


Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne


A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind. ~Catherine Drinker Bowen, Atlantic, December 1957


To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make. ~Truman Capote, McCall's, November 1967


A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right. ~John K. Hutchens, New York Herald Tribune, 10 September 1961


I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. ~English Professor (Name Unknown), Ohio University


Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. ~Hannah Arendt


It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order. ~Ann Beattie, Picturing Will, 1989


For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle. ~John Cheever


Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don't start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a
great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
~William Safire, "Great Rules of Writing"


No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous. ~Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907


Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. ~Gene Fowler


Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable. ~Francis Bacon


The expression "to write something down" suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it. ~William Gass, "Habitations of the Word," Kenyon Review, October 1984


Be obscure clearly. ~E.B. White


Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. ~Flannery O'Connor


It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page. ~Joan Baez



When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence. ~Samuel Butler


Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains; God composes, why shouldn't we? ~Terri Guillemets


Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may. ~Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversation: Diogenes and Plato


Let me walk through the fields of paper
touching with my wand
dry stems and stunted
butterflies....
~Denise Levertov, "A Walk through the Notebooks"


When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man. ~Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670


Every writer I know has trouble writing. ~Joseph Heller


Writer's block is a disease for which there is no cure, only respite. ~Terri Guillemets


A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one. ~Baltasar Gracián


When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing. ~Enrique Jardiel Poncela


I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces. ~Harold Ross


When you are describing,
A shape, or sound, or tint;
Don't state the matter plainly,
But put it in a hint;
And learn to look at all things,
With a sort of mental squint.
~Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)


Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. ~Sholem Asch


The ablest writer is only a gardener first, and then a cook: his tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his strongest and most nutritive thoughts; and when they are ripe, to dress them, wholesomely, and yet so that they may have a relish. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. ~Lord Byron


If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it. ~Anais Nin


I'd rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer. ~Jack Smith


An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts. ~Juvenal, Satires


Writing is a struggle against silence. ~Carlos Fuentes


Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it. ~Jack London, "Getting Into Print," 1905


The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation. ~Elias Canetti


It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories. ~Paul Gallico, "Confessions of a Story Writer," 1946


All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer


One hates an author that's all author. ~George Gordon, Lord Byron, "Beppo"


What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window. ~Burton Rascoe


The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. ~Agatha Christie


An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners' names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else. ~Etty Hillesum, quoted in Ten Fun Things to Do Before You Die by Karol Jackowski


A writer's mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head. ~Ethel Wilson


Publication - is the auction of the Mind of Man. ~Emily Dickinson


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


There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters. ~Miguel de Cervantes


Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake. ~E.L. Doctorow


The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure. ~Henry David Thoreau


You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke. ~Arthur Polotnik


An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff. ~Adlai Stevenson, as quoted in You Said a Mouthful edited by Ronald D. Fuchs


The first goal of writing is to have one's words read successfully. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Most editors are failed writers - but so are most writers. ~T.S. Eliot


What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told. ~André Gide


Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free. ~Samuel Johnson


Lists are the butterfly nets that catch my fleeting thoughts... ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com


A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident. ~W. Somerset Maugham, Summing Up, 1938


They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works. ~Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621


The road to hell is paved with adverbs. ~Stephen King


It is plagiarism when you take something out of a book and use it as your own. If you take it out of several books then it is research. ~Quoted by Ralph Foss, 1932 (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)


My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin. ~Karl Kraus


As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out. ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894


As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall. ~Virginia Woolf


I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension. ~Norman Mailer


To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all. ~Lord Byron


Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes. ~Theodore Dreiser, 1900


It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else. ~Havelock Ellis


Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason. They made no such demand upon those who wrote them. ~Charles Caleb Colton


You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. ~Saul Bellow


Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. ~Author Unknown, commonly misattributed to Samuel Johnson (*) (Thanks, Frank Lynch)


How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. ~Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 19 August 1851


I am a man, and alive.... For this reason I am a novelist. And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog. ~D.H. Lawrence, preface to Shestov, All Things Are Possible, 1938


The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible. ~Washington Irving


Ink surrounds me all the time
On my bed sheets, recorded in rhyme
Quills 'ever scribbling in my head
Sometimes damnit I forget what they said.
Ink has settled into my fingerprints
But to keep the words I fear to rinse...
~Terri Guillemets


Write your first draft with your heart. Re-write with your head. ~From the movie Finding Forrester


It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write. ~Sinclair Lewis


Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen? ~Friedrich Nietzsche


Writing is both mask and unveiling. ~E.B. White


Let's hope the institution of marriage survives its detractors, for without it there would be no more adultery and without adultery two thirds of our novelists would stand in line for unemployment checks. ~Peter S. Prescott


It's not plagiarism - I'm recycling words, as any good environmentally conscious writer would do. ~Uniek Swain


True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.
~Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism"


Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself. ~Franz Kafka


An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. ~Gustave Flaubert


If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don't remove it - I might be writing in my dreams. ~Terri Guillemets




There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one's own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one's pen. ~Leo Tolstoy


A man will turn over half a library to make one book. ~Samuel Johnson


What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach. ~Logan Pearsall Smith


No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published. ~Russell Lynes


A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order. ~Jean Luc Godard


Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life. ~James Norman Hall


Whatever an author puts between the two covers of his book is public property; whatever of himself he does not put there is his private property, as much as if he had never written a word. ~Gail Hamilton


Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially. ~A. Bronson Alcott


The artist's only responsibility is his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies. ~Faulkner, quoted in M. Cowley, Writers at Work, 1958


A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. ~Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades, 1947


The reason why many people are so fond of using superlatives, is, they are so positive that the poor positive is not half positive enough for them. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. ~Colette, Casual Chance, 1964


Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted. ~Jules Renard, Journal, 10 April 1895


The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. ~Ray Bradbury


Being an author is having angels whisper in your ear - and devils, too. ~Terri Guillemets


Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all. ~Franklin P. Adams, Half a Loaf, 1927


You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world. ~G.K. Chesterton


The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. ~André Gide, Journals, 1894


Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death - fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant. ~Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic, 1963


The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax. ~Alfred Kazin, Think, February 1963


i never think at all when i write
nobody can do two things at the same time
and do them both well
~Don Marquis, Archy's Life of Mehitabel, 1933


Our passions shape our books; repose writes them in the intervals. ~Proust, The Past Recaptured, 1927


Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. ~Samuel Johnson, "Recalling the Advice of a College Tutor," Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1791


An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate. ~Chateaubriand, Le Génie du Christianisme, 1802


Keep a diary and one day it'll keep you. ~Mae West


The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads. ~William Styron, interview, Writers at Work, 1958


There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft. ~Jessamyn West, Saturday Review, 21 September 1957


I do not like to write - I like to have written. ~Gloria Steinem


Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. ~George Orwell, "Why I Write," 1947 (Thanks, Jennifer)


One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. ~Hart Crane


He that uses many words for the explaining any subject doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink. ~John Ray


Writing is a product of silence. ~Carrie Latet


A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. ~G.K. Chesterton


Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence. ~Fay Weldon


Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. ~Rainer Maria Rilke


Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such. ~Samuel Butler


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


No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman. ~Van Wyck Brooks


The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it. ~Ernest Hemingway, interview in Paris Review, Spring 1958


The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new. ~Samuel Johnson


The best style is the style you don't notice. ~Somerset Maugham


There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen and writes. ~William Makepeace Thackeray


I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. ~John Updike


Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible. ~Leo Tolstoy


Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will. ~Goethe

Quotations about Worrying

If I had my life to live over, I would perhaps have more actual troubles but I'd have fewer imaginary ones. ~Don Herold


Drag your thoughts away from your troubles... by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it. ~Mark Twain


Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday. ~Author Unknown


Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which will never happen. ~James Russel Lowell


If things go wrong, don't go with them. ~Roger Babson


Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy. ~Leo Buscaglia


Do not anticipate trouble or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight. ~Benjamin Franklin


If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep. ~Dale Carnegie


I've developed a new philosophy... I only dread one day at a time. ~Charlie Brown (Charles Schulz)


Troubles are a lot like people - they grow bigger if you nurse them. ~Author Unknown


If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today. ~E. Joseph Cossman


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


I keep the telephone of my mind open to peace, harmony, health, love and abundance. Then, whenever doubt, anxiety or fear try to call me, they keep getting a busy signal - and soon they'll forget my number. ~Edith Armstrong


Nerves provide me with energy. They work for me. It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that I get worried. ~Mike Nichols


I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. ~Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things"


People gather bundles of sticks to build bridges they never cross. ~Author Unknown


You can't wring your hands and roll up your sleeves at the same time. ~Pat Schroeder


The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one. ~Elbert Hubbard, The Note Book, 1927


Worrying is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do, but it gets you nowhere. ~Glenn Turner


People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them. ~George Bernard Shaw, "Family Affection," Parents and Children, 1914


Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination. ~Christian Nevell Bovee


Somehow our devils are never quite what we expect when we meet them face to face. ~Nelson DeMille


For peace of mind, resign as general manager of the universe. ~Author Unknown


We experience moments absolutely free from worry. These brief respites are called panic. ~Cullen Hightower


If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you'll die a lot of times. ~Dean Smith


It only seems as if you are doing something when you're worrying. ~Lucy Maud Montgomery


A hundredload of worry will not pay an ounce of debt. ~George Herbert


As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey. ~Thomas A. Edison


Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow. ~Swedish Proverb


Never bear more than one kind of trouble at a time. Some people bear three - all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have. ~Edward Everett Hale


That the birds of worry and care fly over you head, this you cannot change, but that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent. ~Chinese Proverb


We can easily manage if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed to it. But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday's burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it. ~John Newton


Worry ducks when purpose flies overhead. ~Terri Guillemets



It is the little bits of things that fret and worry us; we can dodge a elephant, but we can't dodge a fly. ~Josh Billings


Worry, doubt, fear and despair are the enemies which slowly bring us down to the ground and turn us to dust before we die. ~Attributed to Douglas MacArthur


You can never worry your way to enlightenment. ~Terri Guillemets


When you suffer an attack of nerves you're being attacked by the nervous system. What chance has a man got against a system? ~Russell Hoban


Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is to small to be made into a burden. ~Corrie ten Boom, Clippings from My Notebook


I am reminded of the advice of my neighbor. "Never worry about your heart till it stops beating." ~E.B. White


There are two days in the week about which and upon which I never worry... Yesterday and Tomorrow. ~Robert Jones Burdette


A day of worry is more exhausting than a day of work. ~John Lubbock


As a rule, what is out of sight disturbs men's minds more seriously than what they see. ~Julius Caesar


If worrying were an Olympic sport, you'd get the gold for sure. ~Stephenie Geist


I refuse to be burdened by vague worries. If something wants to worry me, it will have to make itself clear. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Worry is rust upon the blade. ~Henry Ward Hughes


Heavy thoughts bring on physical maladies; when the soul is oppressed so is the body. ~Martin Luther


I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow. It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us. ~Dorothy Day


Worry is a complete cycle of inefficient thought revolving about a pivot of fear. ~Author Unknown


Loneliness, insomnia, and change: the fear of these is even worse than the reality. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down. ~George MacDonald


Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are! ~Charles Dickens


Some patients I see are actually draining into their bodies the diseased thoughts of their minds. ~Zacharty Bercovitz


Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From the evil which never arrived.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson


I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. ~Mark Twain


My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened. ~Michel de Montaigne


If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you. ~Calvin Coolidge


When one has too great a dread of what is impending, one feels some relief when the trouble has come. ~Joseph Joubert


Some men storm imaginary Alps all their lives, and die in the foothills cursing difficulties which do not exist. ~Edgar Watson Howe


How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened. ~Thomas Jefferson


When I really worry about something, I don't just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something. Only, I don't go. I'm too worried to go. I don't want to interrupt my worrying to go. ~J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye


Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained. ~Arthur Somers Roche


We have to fight them daily, like fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies. ~Etty Hillesum


There are people who are always anticipating trouble, and in this way they manage to enjoy many sorrows that never really happen to them. ~Josh Billings


Only man clogs his happiness with care, destroying what is with thoughts of what may be. ~John Dryden


Love looks forward, hate looks back, anxiety has eyes all over its head. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due. ~William Ralph Inge


There are more things, Lucilius, that frighten us than injure us, and we suffer more in imagination than in reality. ~Seneca


We are more disturbed by a calamity which threatens us than by one which has befallen us. ~John Lancaster Spalding


We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth's creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives. ~Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail, 1979


Grief has limits, whereas apprehension has none. For we grieve only for what we know has happened, but we fear all that possibly may happen. ~Pliny the Younger


Blessed is the person who is too busy to worry in the daytime and too sleepy to worry at night. ~Author Unknown


Do not be afraid of tomorrow; for God is already there. ~Author Unknown


Real difficulties can be overcome, it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable. ~Theodore N. Vail


No man ever sank under the burden of the day. It is when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear. ~George MacDonald


Rule number one is, don't sweat the small stuff. Rule number two is, it's all small stuff. ~Robert Eliot


They need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. ~Jack Kerouac


He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears. ~Montaigne, Essays, 1588


No human thing is of serious importance. ~Plato, The Republic


Fear can keep us up all night long, but faith makes one fine pillow. ~Philip Gulley


Don't fight with the pillow, but lay down your head
And kick every worriment out of the bed.
~Edmund Vance Cooke


Every evening I turn my worries over to God. He's going to be up all night anyway. ~Mary C. Crowley

Quotations about Women

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base. ~Dave Barry


Women like silent men. They think they're listening. ~Marcel Achard, Quote, 4 November 1956


Sure God created man before woman. But then you always make a rough draft before the final masterpiece. ~Author Unknown


Some men know that a light touch of the tongue, running from a woman's toes to her ears, lingering in the softest way possible in various places in between, given often enough and sincerely enough, would add immeasurably to world peace. ~Marianne Williamson, "A Woman's Worth"


Women cannot complain about men anymore until they start getting better taste in them. ~Bill Maher


A male gynecologist is like an auto mechanic who has never owned a car. ~Carrie Snow


You start out happy that you have no hips or boobs. All of a sudden you get them, and it feels sloppy. Then just when you start liking them, they start drooping. ~Cindy Crawford


Every girl should use what Mother Nature gave her before Father Time takes it away. ~Laurence J. Peter


The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think. ~Author Unknown


A woman can say more in a sigh than a man can say in a sermon. ~Arnold Haultain


Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult. ~Charlotte Whitton


Women are always beautiful. ~Ville Valo


The two women exchanged the kind of glance women use when no knife is handy. ~Ellery Queen


Curve: The loveliest distance between two points. ~Mae West


Can you imagine a world without men? No crime and lots of happy fat women. ~Nicole Hollander


Women get the last word in every argument. Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument. ~Author Unknown


Next to the wound, what women make best is the bandage. ~Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly


A pessimist is a man who thinks all women are bad. An optimist is a man who hopes they are. ~Chauncey Mitchell Depew


The rarest thing in the world is a woman who is pleased with photographs of herself. ~Elizabeth Metcalf


There is a special place in hell for women who do not help other women. ~Madeleine K. Albright


A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction. ~Oscar Wilde


There's something luxurious about having a girl light your cigarette. In fact, I got married once on account of that. ~Harold Robbins


When a man talks dirty to a woman, it's sexual harassment. When a woman talks dirty to a man, it's $3.95 a minute. ~Author Unknown


Men get laid, but women get screwed. ~Quentin Crisp


The most popular image of the female despite the exigencies of the clothing trade is all boobs and buttocks, a hallucinating sequence of parabolae and bulges. ~Germaine Greer


Whether they give or refuse, it delights women just the same to have been asked. ~Ovid


Howiver, I'm not denyin' the women are foolish: God Almighty made 'em to match the men. ~George Eliot, "The Harvest Supper," Adam Bede


Women are like elephants to me. I like to look at them, but I wouldn't want to own one. ~W.C. Fields


Women really do rule the world. They just haven't figured it out yet. When they do, and they will, we're all in big big trouble. ~"Doctor Leon," drleons.com


Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent. ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche


I expect Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man. ~George Meredith


Men who don't like girls with brains don't like girls. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Women keep a special corner of their hearts for sins they have never committed. ~Cornelia Otis Skinner


Lovely female shapes are terrible complicators of the difficulties and dangers of this earthly life, especially for their owners. ~George du Maurier


Every woman is wrong until she cries, and then she is right - instantly. ~Sam Slick (Thomas Chandler Haliburton)


The essence of life is the smile of round female bottoms, under the shadow of cosmic boredom. ~Guy de Maupassant


I have an idea that the phrase "weaker sex" was coined by some woman to disarm some man she was preparing to overwhelm. ~Ogden Nash


When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking. ~Gail Sheehy


The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams. ~Simone de Beauvoir


They call it PMS because Mad Cow Disease was already taken. ~Author Unknown


Be to her virtues very kind,
Be to her faults a little blind.
~Matthew Prior


They may talk of a comet, or a burning mountain, or some such bagatelle; but to me a modest woman, dressed out in all her finery, is the most tremendous object of the whole creation. ~Oliver Goldsmith


A highbrow is a man who has found something more interesting than women. ~Edgar Wallace


It upsets women to be, or not to be, stared at hungrily. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


You see, dear, it is not true that woman was made from man's rib; she was really made from his funny bone. ~J.M. Barrie, What Every Woman Knows


If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning. ~Aristotle Onassis


Men will always delight in a woman whose voice is lined with velvet. ~Brendan Francis


Men really prefer reasonably attractive women; they go after the sensational ones to impress other men. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966



I married beneath me - all women do. ~Nancy Astor, speech, Oldham, England, 1951


Women dress alike all over the world: they dress to be annoying to other women. ~Elsa Schiaparelli


Women are never stronger than when they arm themselves with their weakness. ~Marie de Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise du Deffand, Letters to Voltaire


If President Nixon's secretary, Rosemary Woods, had been Moses' secretary, there would only be eight commandments. ~Art Buchwald, 1974


Woman begins by resisting a man's advances and ends by blocking his retreat. ~Oscar Wilde


I'd much rather be a woman than a man. Women can cry, they can wear cute clothes, and they're the first to be rescued off sinking ships. ~Gilda Radner


She wore a short skirt and a tight sweater and her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak. ~Woody Allen, Getting Even, 1973


It is only rarely that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman. ~Alexandre Dumas, fils


I'd rather have two girls at seventeen than one at thirty-four. ~Fred Allen


When a woman comes to her glass, she does not employ her time in making herself look more advantageously what she really is, but endeavours to be as much another creature as she possibly can. Whether this happens because they stay so long and attend their work so diligently that they forget the faces and persons which they first sat down with, or whatever it is, they seldom rise from the toilet the same woman they appeared when they began to dress. ~Joseph Addison


All women are basically in competition with each other for a handful of eligible men. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


A woman should soften but not weaken a man. ~Sigmund Freud


Women are in league with each other, a secret conspiracy of hearts and pheromones. ~Camille Paglia


No woman will ever be satisfied because no man will ever have a chocolate penis that shoots out money. ~Author Unknown


When I glimpse the backs of women's knees I seem to hear the first movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. ~Author Unknown


A woman wears her tears like jewelry. ~Author Unknown


If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody. ~J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye


No woman wants to see herself too clearly. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


I prefer the word homemaker, because housewife always implies that there may be a wife someplace else. ~Bella Abzug


The basic Female body comes with the following accessories: garter belt, panti-girdle, crinoline, camisole, bustle, brassiere, stomacher, chemise, virgin zone, spike heels, nose ring, veil, kid gloves, fishnet stockings, fichu, bandeau, Merry Widow, weepers, chokers, barrettes, bangles, beads, lorgnette, feather boa, basic black, compact, Lycra stretch one-piece with modesty panel, designer peignoir, flannel nightie, lace teddy, bed, head. ~Margaret Atwood


Women go to beauty parlors for the unmussed look men hate. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Women polish the silver and water the plants and wait to be really needed. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


You have to have the kind of body that doesn't need a girdle in order to get to pose in one. ~Carolyn Kenmore


A woman's hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them. ~George Eliot


There are women who do not like to cause suffering to many men at a time, and who prefer to concentrate on one man: These are the faithful women. ~Alfred Capus


No matter how good she looks, some other guy is sick and tired of putting up with her crap. ~Author Unknown


Physically, a man is a man for a much longer time than a woman is a woman. ~Honoré de Balzac, The Physiology of Marriage


The girls that are always easy on the eyes are never easy on the heart. ~Author Unknown


Men enjoy being thought of as hunters, but are generally too lazy to hunt. Women, on the other hand, love to hunt, but would rather nobody knew it. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


I've reached the age where competence is a turn-on. ~Billy Joel


A man gives many question marks, however, a woman is a whole mystery. ~Diana Stürm


In passing, also, I would like to say that the first time Adam had a chance he laid the blame on woman. ~Nancy Astor, My Two Countries


God did it on purpose so that we may love you men instead of laughing at you. ~Mrs Patrick Campbell, in reply to a male acquaintance who asked why women seem to have no sense of humor


Men at most differ as Heaven and Earth, but women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell. ~Alfred Lord Tennyson


A woman asks little of love: only that she be able to feel like a heroine. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


The chief excitement in a woman's life is spotting women who are fatter than she is. ~Helen Rowland


I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason. ~Stanley Baldwin


And verily, a woman need know but one man well, in order to understand all men; whereas a man may know all women and understand not one of them. ~Helen Rowland


I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out. ~George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss


Men look at themselves in mirrors. Women look for themselves. ~Elissa Melamed


If your husband expects you to laugh, do so; if he expects you to cry, don't; if you don't know what he expects, what are you doing married? ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


There are three ways to spread news: telegram, television, and tellawoman. ~Author Unknown


Women do not find it difficult nowadays to behave like men, but they often find it extremely difficult to behave like gentlemen. ~Compton Mackenzie, Literature in My Time, 1933


One is not born a woman, one becomes one. ~Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949


Let us leave the beautiful women to men with no imagination. ~Marcel Proust, Albertine disparue, 1925


Women deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of twenty-eight and forty. ~James Thurber, Time, 15 August 1960


Dramatic art in her opinion is knowing how to fill a sweater. ~Bette Davis, about Jayne Mansfield


A woman's whole life is a history of the affections. ~Washington Irving


The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge


After about 20 years of marriage, I'm finally starting to scratch the surface of that one. And I think the answer lies somewhere between conversation and chocolate. ~Mel Gibson, about what women want


Women who make men talk better than they are accustomed to are always popular. ~E.V. Lucas


I'm not against half naked girls - not as often as I'd like to be. ~Benny Hill


A man is as good as he has to be, and a woman is as bad as she dares. ~Elbert Hubbard


You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment. ~Dave Barry, "Things That It Took Me 50 Years to Learn"


The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them. ~Robert Graves


What men desire is a virgin who is a whore. ~Edward Dahlbert


Women are afraid of mice and of murder, and of very little in between. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


A woman should be an illusion. ~Ian Fleming


There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature. ~Stephen Stills


It is because of men that women dislike one another. ~Jean de La Bruyère, Characters, 1688


Look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man and work like a dog. ~Caroline K. Simon


If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt. ~Thomas Carlyle


Women who feel naked without their lipstick are well over thirty. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Women are like dogs really. They love like dogs, a little insistently. And they like to fetch and carry and come back wistfully after hard words, and learn rather easily to carry a basket. ~Mary Roberts Rinehart


It's the good girls who keep the diaries; the bad girls never have the time. ~Tallulah Bankhead


A husband only worries about a particular Other Man; a wife distrusts her whole species. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful. ~Karl Kraus


A man chases a woman until she catches him. ~American Proverb


Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem. ~G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions, 1910


Beauty is the first present Nature gives to women, and the first it takes away. ~Méré


There's just something about letting a girl have her way with you. ~A.C. Van Cherub


Brains are an asset, if you hide them. ~Mae West


With men, as with women, the main struggle is between vanity and comfort; but with men, comfort often wins. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Once a woman has given you her heart, you can never get rid of the rest of her. ~John Vanbrugh, The Relapse, 1696


Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate? ~Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, 1970


A woman can look both moral and exciting... if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle. ~Edna Ferber


Women have very little idea of how much men hate them. ~Germaine Greer


Do you not know I am a woman? when I think, I must speak. ~William Shakespeare, As You Like It


Being a woman is of special interest only to aspiring male transsexuals. To actual women, it is simply a good excuse not to play football. ~Fran Lebowitz


You're booty-blinded. You know what that is? It's like being snow-blinded only it ain't no snow, it's a cute little piece of ass. ~From the movie I Spy


Women are never landlocked: they're always mere minutes away from the briny deep of tears. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


To get to a woman's heart, a man must first use his own. ~Mike Dobbertin, quoted in A 5th Portion of Chicken Soup for the Soul


Through sources, we have obtained the following alien assessment of the human species: The male wants to be valued for what he pretends to be. The female wants to be overvalued for what she truly is. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Woman's virtue is man's greatest invention. ~Cornelia Otis Skinner, attributed


Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little. ~Samuel Johnson


Women speak two languages - one of which is verbal. ~William Shakespeare


Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more. ~James Thurber


I hate women because they always know where things are. ~Voltaire


Good-looking girls break hearts, and goodhearted girls mend them. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Fighting is essentially a masculine idea; a woman's weapon is her tongue. ~Hermione Gingold


The people I'm furious with are the women's liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming women are brighter than men. That's true, but it should be kept quiet or it ruins the whole racket. ~Anita Loos, New York Times, 10 February 1974


Women always worry about the things that men forget; men always worry about the things women remember. ~Author Unknown


No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not. ~H.L. Mencken

Quotes about Wise Words

Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be. ~Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ, c.1420


You've got a lot of choices. If getting out of bed in the morning is a chore and you're not smiling on a regular basis, try another choice. ~Steven D. Woodhull (U.S. geologist, 1976-)


What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, translated from French by Lewis Galantière


Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It happens every day. ~Albert Camus, The Fall, 1956


Good for the body is the work of the body, and good for the soul is the work of the soul, and good for either is the work of the other. ~Henry David Thoreau


Remember, if you’re headed in the wrong direction, God allows U-turns! ~Allison Gappa Bottke


Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. And this is all life really means. ~Robert Louis Stevenson


If you don't like how things are, change it! You're not a tree. ~Jim Rohn


In what you say of another, apply the test of kindness, necessity and truth, and let nothing pass your lips without a 2/3 majority. ~Liz Armbruster, on www.robertbrault.com


See everything; overlook a great deal; correct a little. ~Pope John XXIII


Give thanks for what you are now, and keep fighting for what you want to be tomorrow. ~Fernanda Miramontes-Landeros


Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


You will turn over many a futile new leaf till you learn we must all write on scratched-out pages. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Now that it's all over, what did you really do yesterday that's worth mentioning? ~Coleman Cox


Laziness will cause you pain. ~Slogan on T-shirt worn at the Vee Arnis Jitsu School of Self-Defense


If you surrender to the wind, you can ride it. ~Toni Morrison


Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity. ~Max Lerner, Actions and Passions, 1949


Never miss an opportunity to make others happy, even if you have to leave them alone in order to do it. ~Author Unknown


Sometimes it's more important to be human, than to have good taste. ~Brecht


[O]wning your burdens is half the battle. ~From the television show Scrubs


Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. ~Victor Hugo


We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood. ~William James


You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him. ~Leo Aikman


Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty. ~Frank Herbert, Dune Chronicles


The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile. ~Plato


Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. ~Jonathan Kozel


Tough and funny and a little bit kind: that is as near to perfection as a human being can be. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


I would not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum. ~Frances Willard


Always when judging
Who people are,
Remember to footnote
The words "So far."
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


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, variation of an excerpt from "The Serenity Prayer" by Reinhold Neibuhr


A day is Eternity's seed, and we are its Gardeners. ~Erika Harris, lifeblazing.com


People cannot go wrong, if you don't let them. They cannot go right, unless you let them. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Excess on occasion is exhilirating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. ~W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, 1938


The vow that binds too strictly snaps itself. ~Alfred Lord Tennyson, "The Last Tournament," Idylls of the King


I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes. ~Sara Teasdale, "The Philosopher"


Every one should keep a mental wastepaper basket and the older he grows the more things he will consign to it - torn up to irrecoverable tatters. ~Samuel Butler


Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. ~Theodore Roosevelt


Whatever we worship, short of God, is sure to be our undoing. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Toss your dashed hopes not into a trash bin but into a drawer where you are likely to rummage some bright morning. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.... People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back. ~Alice Walker, The Color Purple, 1982


Be pleasant until ten o'clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself. ~Elbert Hubbard


On the bathing-tub of King T'ang the following words were engraved: "If you would one day renovate yourself, do so from day to day. Yea, let there be daily renovation." ~Confucian Analects


The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra. ~Jimmy Johnson


What a strange narrowness of mind now is that, to think the things we have not known are better than the things we have known. ~Samuel Johnson


To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning. ~John W. Gardner


There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go. ~Tennessee Williams (Thomas Lanier)


Face what you think you believe and you will be surprised. ~William Hale White


Just remember, there's a right way and a wrong way to do everything and the wrong way is to keep trying to make everybody else do it the right way. ~M*A*S*H, Colonel Potter


Don't look where you fall, but where you slipped. ~African Proverb


One can enjoy a wood fire worthily only when he warms his thoughts by it as well as his hands and feet. ~Odell Shepherd



Practical life teaches us that people may differ and that both may be wrong: it also teaches us that people may differ and both be right. Anchor yourself fast in the latter faith, or the former will sweep your heart away. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice that which we are for what we could become. ~Charles DuBois


Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. ~Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn


If you keep rephrasing the question, it gradually becomes the answer. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


[T]ime you enjoy wasting is not wasted time. ~Marthe Troly-Curtin, Phrynette Married, 1912 (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)


It is every man's obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it. ~Albert Einstein


Have a heart that never hardens, a temper that never tires, a touch that never hurts. ~Charles Dickens


If only I may grow: firmer, simpler, quieter, warmer. ~Dag Hammarskjold


We have a choice every day - to act on yesterday's good intentions or get an early start on tomorrow's regrets. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


When you start treating people like people, they become people. ~Paul Vitale


Be kind to your shadow. ~Rebecca Lawless


I thought growing up was something that happened automatically as you got older. But it turns out it's something you have to choose to do. ~From the television show Scrubs


The only way you may correct the bad things in your past is to add better things to your future. ~Shiloh Morrison


If you have to do it every day, for God's sake learn to do it well. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Most of the shadows of this life are caused by our standing in our own sunshine. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


You do not have the right to quit trying. (The universe wobbles when you do.) You have the right to quit Toxic People. (They're contagious.) ~Dr. SunWolf


Dare to be imperfect and one day there will tug at your sleeve a soulmate. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. ~Robert Louis Stevenson


In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest. ~Henry Miller, The Books in My Life


Never explain. Your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe it anyway. ~Elbert Hubbard, A Thousand and One Epigrams, 1911


Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong. ~Dandemis


Whatever you are be a good one. ~Abraham Lincoln


It's better to fight for something than against something. ~Author Unknown


The day will happen whether or not you get up. ~John Ciardi


Create each day anew by clothing yourself with heaven and earth, bathing yourself with wisdom and love, and placing yourself in the heart of Mother Nature. ~Morihei Ueshiba


Nature gave men two ends - one to sit on and one to think with. Ever since then man's success or failure has been dependent on the one he used most. ~George R. Kirkpatrick


One should always play fair when one has the winning cards. ~Oscar Wilde


Strength will grow from the heart, blossom as results, and wither in others' hearts as seeds. ~Mikhael Dominico


Think of your faults the first part of the night when you are awake, and the faults of others the latter part of the night when you are asleep. ~Chinese Proverb


When you live in reaction, you give your power away. Then you get to experience what you gave your power to. ~N. Smith


Do not fall before you are pushed. ~English Proverb


When "Why not do it?" barely outweights "Why do it?" - don't do it. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


If you hate your lot but wouldn't trade it, it's not your lot you hate. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Half the failures in life arise from pulling in the horse as he is leaping. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


When you invite trouble, it's usually quick to accept. ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.


Giving up doesn't always mean you are weak. Sometimes it means that you are strong enough to let go. ~Author Unknown


Promise only what you can deliver. Then deliver more than you promise. ~Author Unknown


All philosophy in two words, - sustain and abstain. ~Epictetus


Always watch where you are going. Otherwise, you may step on a piece of the Forest that was left out by mistake. ~Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired by A.A. Milne


Don't compromise yourself. You're all you've got. ~Janis Joplin


Every ten years a man should give himself a good kick in the pants. ~Edward Steichen


Life is like riding a bicycle - in order to keep your balance, you must keep moving. ~Albert Einstein


The biggest problem in the world
Could have been solved when it was small.
~Witter Bynner, The Way of Life According to Laotzu


Be the master of your fate, be the captain of your soul, but do not hesitate, should the chance befall you, to be the slave of your heart. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


In the hopes of reaching the moon men fail to see the flowers that blossom at their feet. ~Albert Schweitzer


Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up. ~Robert Frost


What you can't get out of, get into wholeheartedly. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


The winds of grace are always blowing, but you have to raise the sail. ~Ramakrishna


Surely a man needs a closed place wherein he may strike root and, like the seed, become. But also he needs the great Milky Way above him and the vast sea spaces, though neither stars nor ocean serve his daily needs. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands, translated from French by Stuart Gilbert


Never believe in mirrors or newspapers. ~Tom Stoppard


I may be justifying my pockets of chaos, but I will always choose people over perfection and the heart over task and tidy. ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com


Never confuse thoughtlessness with malice. ~Robert Charles Whitehead


Yet some things you miss and some things you lose by keeping your arm outstretched. ~Author Unknown


The most valuable lesson man has learned from his dog is to kick a few blades of grass over it and move on. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


You want to run out in front, prepare to be tripped from behind. ~S.A. Sachs


Now and then it is a joy to have one's table red with wine and roses. ~Oscar Wilde


It wasn't raining when Noah built the ark. ~Howard Ruff, How to Prosper in the Coming Bad Years, 1979


Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you're tired, go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand. ~Bruce Lee


Every day is conquerable by its hours, and every hour by its minutes. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


While seeking revenge, dig two graves - one for yourself. ~Doug Horton


To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy. ~Hippocrates


Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others. ~Buddha


Make somebody happy today. Mind your own business. ~Ann Landers


Things sweet the taste prove in digestion sour. ~William Shakespeare, King Richard the Second, 1595


Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them? ~Abraham Lincoln


Lend, by your imperfections, self-esteem to others, and you will be invited everywhere. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door," he used to say. "You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." ~J.R.R. Tolkien, "Three Is Company," The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954


There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures. ~James Thurber


The essential question is not, "How busy are you?" but "What are you busy at?" ~Oprah Winfrey


Don't get your knickers in a knot. Nothing is solved and it just makes you walk funny. ~Kathryn Carpenter


Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven. ~G.C. Lichtenberg


Being loved by all is little fun
Unless you're also loved by one.
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Be still like a mountain and flow like a great river. ~Lao Tzu


We must have passed through life unobservantly, if we have never perceived that a man is very much himself what he thinks of others. ~Frederick W. Faber


Never saw off the branch you are on, unless you are being hanged from it. ~Stanislaw Lec


Watch the little things; a small leak will sink a great ship. ~Benjamin Franklin


Don't despise empiric truth. Lots of things work in practice for which the laboratory has never found proof. ~Martin H. Fischer


Is bread the better for kneading? so is the heart. Knead it then by spiritual exercises; or God must knead it by afflictions. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


The best way to predict your future is to create it. ~Peter Drucker


You've got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was. ~Irish Proverb


Beware of a man of one book. ~English Proverb


Never make your home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You'll find what you need to furnish it - memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey. ~Tad Williams


It is better to sleep on things beforehand than lie awake about them afterwards. ~Baltasar Gracian


Go with your heart, buddy. Our brains only screw things up. ~Chris Fedak and Allison Adler, Chuck, "Chuck Versus the Ring"


It is the false shame of fools to try to conceal wounds that have not healed. ~Horace


Leaves are light, and useless, and idle, and wavering, and changeable; they even dance; and yet God in his wisdom has made them a part of oaks. And in so doing he has given us a lesson, not to deny the stout-heartedness within because we see the lightsomeness without. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone. ~Henry David Thoreau


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 three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense. ~Thomas Edison


Aspire to a lower level of harm. ~Anonymous


I try not to kid myself. You know, I don't mind romancing someone else, but to fool yourself is pretty devastating and dangerous. ~Bill Veeck


You can't truthfully explain your smallest action without fully revealing your character. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


It's all right letting yourself go as long as you can let yourself back. ~Mick Jagger


When you lose, don't lose the lesson. ~Author Unknown


There is often less danger in the things we fear than in the things we desire. ~John C. Collins


Your future depends on many things, but mostly on you. ~Frank Tyger


Dig the well before you are thirsty. ~Chinese Proverb


Wish for nothing so much that you forget to make it come true. ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com


Friends and neighbors complain that taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might the more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly. ~Benjamin Franklin


Be nice to those you meet on the way up. They're the same folks you'll meet on the way down. ~Walter Winchell, 1932


When you throw dirt, you lose ground. ~Texan Proverb


The great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up. ~Albert Schweitzer


Everyone should learn to do one thing supremely well because he likes it, and one thing supremely well because he detests it. ~Brigham Young


Sometimes the only way you can take a really good look at yourself is through somebody else's eyes. ~From the television show Scrubs


Sometimes the best way to hold onto something is to let it go. ~Author Unknown


It isn't what you know that counts, it's what you think of in time. ~Author Unknown


The future lies before you, like paths of pure white snow. Be careful how you tread it, for every step will show. ~Author Unknown


For visions come not to polluted eyes. ~Mary Howitt


Speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon-balls and to-tomorrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Remedy it, or welcome it: a wise man's only two choices. ~Terri Guillemets


To know the road ahead, ask those coming back. ~Chinese Proverb


The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool. ~Richard Feynman


Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk. ~Joaquin de Setanti


God is good, but never dance in a small boat. ~Irish Saying


It is better to stir up a question without deciding it, than to decide it without stirring it up. ~Joseph Joubert


Sandwich every bit of criticism between two thick layers of praise. ~Mary Kay Ash


Where you find quality, you will find a craftsman, not a quality-control expert. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are. ~Malcolm S. Forbes


I used to believe that anything was better than nothing. Now I know that sometimes nothing is better. ~Glenda Jackson

Quotations about Wisdom

Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit. ~Elbert Hubbard


We can be Knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom. ~Michel de Montaigne


Wisdom begins at the end. ~Daniel Webster


Patience is the companion of wisdom. ~St. Augustine


Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk. ~Doug Larson


Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it. ~David Star Jordan, The Philosophy of Despair


He who devotes sixteen hours a day to hard study may become at sixty as wise as he thought himself at twenty. ~Mary Wilson Little


Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself. ~Tom Wilson


How can you be a sage if you're pretty? You can't get your wizard papers without wrinkles. ~Bill Veeck


The years teach much which the days never knew. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


When I can look Life in the eyes,
Grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth,
And taken in exchange - my youth.
~Sara Teasdale


The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. ~Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations, 1988


Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another. ~Juvenal, Satires


A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top. ~Author Unknown


I believe that all wisdom consists in caring immensely for a few right things, and not caring a straw about the rest. ~John Buchan


It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it. ~A.A. Hodge


A child can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer. ~Author Unknown


A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study. ~Chinese Proverb


Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences. ~Norman Cousins


He dares to be a fool, and that is the first step in the direction of wisdom. ~James Gibbons Huneker


Wisdom comes by disillusionment. ~George Santayana


Wisdom is the quality that keeps you from getting into situations where you need it. ~Doug Larson


Some folks are wise and some are otherwise. ~Tobias Smollett


Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar. ~William Wordsworth


The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.


Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. ~Alfred Lord Tennyson


Wisdom outweighs any wealth. ~Sophocles


If wisdom and diamonds grew on the same tree we could soon tell how much men loved wisdom. ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911


The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.. ~William Shakespeare, As You Like It


One must spend time in gathering knowledge to give it out richly. ~Edward C. Steadman


The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. ~William James


It is more easy to be wise for others than for ourselves. ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld


Learning sleeps and snores in libraries, but wisdom is everywhere, wide awake, on tiptoe. ~Josh Billings


Wisdom is never on the menu, you have to own the restaurant. ~Carrie Latet


There are subjects in which I wish to become knowledgeable, and subjects in which I wish to remain wise. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


The child, offered the mother's breast,
Will not in the beginning grab it;
But soon it clings to it with zest.
And thus at wisdom's copious breasts
You'll drink each day with greater zest.
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Every wise man lives in an observatory. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification. ~Martin H. Fischer


A man begins cutting his wisdom teeth the first time he bites off more than he can chew. ~Herb Caen


There is a wisdom of the head, and... a wisdom of the heart. ~Charles Dickens


Common-sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge


No man was ever wise by chance. ~Seneca


We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future. ~George Bernard Shaw

Quotations about Winter

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show. ~Andrew Wyeth


Winter is nature's way of saying, "Up yours." ~Robert Byrne


There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you.... In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself. ~Ruth Stout


One of my current pet theories is that the winter is a kind of evangelist, more subtle than Billy Graham, of course, but of the same stuff. ~Shirley Ann Grau


Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius. ~Pietro Aretino


The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood. ~John Burroughs


Winter is the time of promise because there is so little to do - or because you can now and then permit yourself the luxury of thinking so. ~Stanley Crawford


I like these cold, gray winter days. Days like these let you savor a bad mood. ~Bill Watterson


Every mile is two in winter. ~George Herbert


"Hear! hear!" screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where I had heard a tittering for some time, "winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it." ~Henry David Thoreau, 28 November 1858 journal entry


When the bold branches
Bid farewell to rainbow leaves -
Welcome wool sweaters.
~B. Cybrill


I was just thinking, if it is really religion with these nudist colonies, they sure must turn atheists in the wintertime. ~Will Rogers


Every winter,
When the great sun has turned his face away,
The earth goes down into a vale of grief,
And fasts, and weeps, and shrouds herself in sables,
Leaving her wedding-garlands to decay -
Then leaps in spring to his returning kisses.
~Charles Kingsley


To shorten winter, borrow some money due in spring. ~W.J. Vogel


O, wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
~Percy Bysshe Shelley


Winter came down to our home one night
Quietly pirouetting in on silvery-toed slippers of snow,
And we, we were children once again.
~Bill Morgan, Jr.


Spring, summer, and fall fill us with hope; winter alone reminds us of the human condition. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Winter either bites with its teeth or lashes with its tail. ~Proverb


The color of springtime is in the flowers, the color of winter is in the imagination. ~Terri Guillemets


Brew me a cup for a winter's night.
For the wind howls loud and the furies fight;
Spice it with love and stir it with care,
And I'll toast our bright eyes,
my sweetheart fair.
~Minna Thomas Antrim


Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories. ~From the movie An Affair to Remember


In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. ~William Blake


Of winter's lifeless world each tree
Now seems a perfect part;
Yet each one holds summer's secret
Deep down within its heart.
~Charles G. Stater


Blow, blow, thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind as man's ingratitude. ~William Shakespeare


Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home. ~Edith Sitwell


Winter is the season in which people try to keep the house as warm as it was in the summer, when they complained about the heat. ~Author Unknown


One kind word can warm three winter months. ~Japanese Proverb


Antisthenes says that in a certain faraway land the cold is so intense that words freeze as soon as they are uttered, and after some time then thaw and become audible, so that words spoken in winter go unheard until the next summer. ~Plutarch, Moralia