Inviting people to laugh with you while you are laughing at yourself is a good thing to do. You may be the fool but you're the fool in charge.

~ Carl Reiner

Carthago delenda est. (Carthage must be destroyed.)

~ Cato the Elder (a Roman statesman who ended his speeches with this during the Punic Wars)

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

(A now discredited theory in biology by Ernst Haeckel who claimed that each stage in the development of an individual [ontogeny] represents one of the adult forms that appeared in its species’ evolutionary history [phylogeny].)

I don’t make it a practice to have conversations with God. I realize that there are some people in the country who do. I’ve found that I prefer other methods of gaining knowledge, like books and the internet.

~ Fareed Zakaria, The DailyShow

When asked how he knew whether the next action he took would be right or wrong, Ghandi answered: Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest person you have ever seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to that person, if they will gain anything by it, if it will restore them to a control over their own life and destiny,...then you are doing the right thing.

~ Gandhi's Talisman (paraphrased), 1948

Are you righteous? Kind?
Does your confidence lie in this?
Are you loved by all?

Know that I was, too.

Do you imagine your sufferings will be less
Because you loved goodness?
Truth?

~ The Thin Red Line

Deep in his heart, every man longs for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue.... Every woman yearns to be fought for, wants an adventure to share, wants to have a beauty to unveil.

~ John Eldredge, Wild at Heart

Being an adult is really challenging. When you're young, you can rely for so long on being promising, and then you have to stop being promising. You want to say, "Hey, can't I be promising any more?"

~ Ethan Hawke

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

~ Richard Dawkins, Ted 2002

The main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

~ Thomas Carlyle

Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions with one common element: the rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture. The scientist is thus by nature a rebel, loyal not to social demands but only to reason and the imagination.

~ Dyson Freeman

Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?

~ Keats (before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 25)

I learned that some fights cannot be won. And that is OK. And that some fights that cannot be won should be fought anyway.

~ Jason Prystowsky

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

~ Rabindranath Tagore

Your best shot at happiness, self-worth and personal satisfaction -- the things that constitute real success -- is not in earning as much as you can but in performing as well as you can something that you consider worthwhile.

~ William Raspberry

The first time I made a lot of money, I made them cut me two checks and they couldn't understand why... and I took one and gave it to the accountants and one and went out and bought a boat, because when I started this whole thing out, I said if I [could] just make enough money to buy a boat and find a bar to play in, I'll be happy. To me it was my insurance policy, because if everything fell through or God knows - one year you can be on top and the next year nobody knows your name anymore - well at least I'll have my boat and I can sail away.

~ Jimmy Buffett

Anywhere you're vulnerable, you're funny (to the observer, you're funny), you know, when your knickers are down. And I love life with the knickers down.

~ Billy Connelly

Power is like being a lady... if you have to tell people you are, you aren't.

~ Margaret Thatcher

...[I]t's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted.

~ Richard Russo, Straight Man

We play music because we love to play. If that passage is too difficult for you, cut it out. No one will know.

~ Pablo Alfaro, violinist and violin maker

Never gallop Pegasus to death.

~ Alexander Pope

Isaac Asimov, considered one of the most influential and prolific science and science fiction writers of our time, took almost ten years to finish his PhD in Chemistry at Columbia University (1939-1948). His graduate work was interrupted by military service in WWII and writing such classics as the Foundation and Robot series and Nightfall among others. He is quoted as saying: "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, isn't 'Eureka!' but rather 'hmm....that's funny.'"

~ Jorge Cham, PhD comics

None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science. In other studies you go to as far as others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder.

~ Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

You do not die from being born, nor from having lived, nor from old age. You die from something.... There is no such thing as a natural death: Nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

~ Simone de Beauvoir, writing of her mother's death in A Very Easy Death

A normal individual is a person who has not been sufficiently examined.

~ Anonymous

No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.

~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

~ Ford Prefect, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

The more bizarre a thing is, the less mysterious it is likely to prove....

~ Sherlock Holmes, The Case of the Redheaded League

The truly efficient laborer will not crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task, surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure, and then do what he loves best.

~ H.D. Thoreau

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

~ H.D. Thoreau, Walden

Ethos anthropos daimon. (A person's character is their fate.)

~ Heraklitos

We are what we repeatedly do; excellence therefore is not an act but a habit.

~ Aristotle

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

~ T.S. Eliot

I'm offended by people who get offended.

~ Gabriel K. Bradley

The way of wisdom: when you think you know something, that is a most perfect barrier against learning.

~ Frank Herbert (Leto II to Duncan Idaho), The God Emperor of Dune

Bene Gesserit Credo

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it is gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

~ Frank Herbert, Dune

Ladies, my kingdom may not be vast, but I am king of it.

~ Schumann (when several society women asked him to play more upbeat music)

On a summer morning
I sat down on a hillside
to think about God -

a worthy pastime.
Near me, I saw
a single cricket;
it was moving the grains of the hillside

this way and that way.
How great was its energy,
how humble its effort.
Let us hope

it will always be like this,
each of us going on
in our inexplicable ways
building the universe.

~ Mary Oliver, Song of the Builders

I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.

~ Helen Keller

Because, no matter what happens, I still have you. Because, no matter what human wreckage I see around me, I still have you. And--in you--I still know what a human being can be.... Kira, the highest thing in man is not his god. It's that in him which knows the reverence due a god. And you, Kira, are my highest reverence....

~ Ayn Rand, We The Living

Natures of your kind, with strong, delicate senses, the soul-oriented, the dreamers, poets, lovers are almost always superior to us creatures of the mind....You live fully; you were endowed with the strength of love, the ability to feel. Whereas we creatures of reason, we don't live fully; we live in an arid land, even though we often seem to guide and rule you. Yours is the plenitude of life, the sap of the fruit, the garden of passion, the beautiful landscape of art. Your home is the earth; ours is the world of ideas. You are in danger of drowning in the world of the senses; ours is the danger of suffocating in an airless void. You are an artist; I am a thinker. You sleep at the mother's breast; I wake in the desert. For me the sun shines; for you the moon and the stars.

~ Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.

~ Margaret Cho

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

~ William Shakespeare, Hamlet

You're lucky; you believe in your own twaddle.

~ The Seventh Seal

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Last updated January 2008

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