Random Quotations
Authors that have more than 2 quotes:
Douglas Adams,
Albert Einstein,
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
André Gide,
Mignon McLaughlin
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| Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. |
| - Douglas Adams |
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| Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen. |
| - Douglas Adams |
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| The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't. |
| - Douglas Adams |
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| No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself. |
| - Henry B. Adams |
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| Admiration is a very short-lived passion, that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object. |
| - Joseph Addison |
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| Anybody can win, unless there happens to be a second entry. |
| - George Ade |
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| The best things said come last. People will talk for hours saying nothing much and then linger at the door with words that come with a rush from the heart. |
| - Alan Alda |
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| A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized. |
| - Fred Allen |
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| I learned law so well, the day I graduated I sued the college, won the case, and got my tuition back. |
| - Fred Allen |
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| Can we actually "know" the universe? My God, it's hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown. |
| - Woody Allen |
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| The universe is merely a fleeting idea in God's mind - a pretty uncomfortable thought, particularly if you've just made a down payment on a house. |
| - Woody Allen |
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| In every age "the good old days" were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them. |
| - Brooks Atkinson |
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| A compromise is an agreement whereby both parties get what neither of them wanted. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| A gentleman is a man who can play the accordion but doesn't. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| A great name for a new country song: If I'd Shot You Sooner, I'd Be Out of Jail by Now. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Ability is what will get you to the top if the boss has no daughter. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| And on the eighth day God said, "Okay, Murphy, you're in charge!" |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile way and you have their shoes. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Conscience gets a lot of credit that belongs to cold feet. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| I plan on living forever. So far, so good. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends? |
| - Unknown Author |
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| It's always been and always will be the same in the world: The horse does the work and the coachman is tipped. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| It's always darkest before the dawn. So if you're going to steal your neighbor's newspaper, that's the time to do it. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| It's frustrating when you know all the answers, but nobody bothers to ask you the questions. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Never do anything that you wouldn't want to explain to the paramedics. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Shin: a device for finding furniture in the dark. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| The chicken came first - God would look silly sitting on an egg. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| The man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Today is the last day of some of your life. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| When somebody tells you nothing is impossible, ask him to dribble a football. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Who says nothing is impossible. I've been doing nothing for years. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Without geography, you're nowhere. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| No one is listening until you fart. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| How can angels fall asleep when the devil leaves his porch light on? |
| - Unknown Author |
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| People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them. |
| - Dave Barry |
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| She was what we used to call a suicide blond - dyed by her own hand. |
| - Saul Bellow |
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| A scout troop consists of twelve little kids dressed like schmucks following a big schmuck dressed like a kid. |
| - Jack Benny |
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| House, n. A hollow edifice erected for the habitation of man, rat, mouse, beetle, cockroach, fly, mosquito, flea, bacillus, and microbe. |
| - Ambrose Bierce |
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| I have six locks on my door all in a row. When I go out, I lock every other one. I figure no matter how long somebody stands there picking the locks, they are always locking three. |
| - Elayne Boosler |
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| Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself. |
| - Rita Mae Brown |
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| A wise man is not governed by others, nor does he try to govern them; he prefers that reason alone prevail. |
| - Jean de La Bruyère |
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| If The Phone Doesn't Ring, It's Me. |
| - Jimmy Buffet |
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| You can never plan the future by the past. |
| - Edmund Burke |
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| Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world. |
| - Albert Camus |
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| To live is in itself a value judgment. To breathe is to judge. |
| - Albert Camus |
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| No man sees far; the most see no farther than their noses. |
| - Thomas Carlyle |
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| The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules, whose would you use? |
| - Dale Carnegie |
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| The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless. |
| - Sébastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort |
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| A scholar who loves comfort is not fit to be called a scholar. |
| - Confucius |
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| There is a kind way of assisting our fellow-creatures which is enough to break their hearts while it saves their outer envelope. |
| - Joseph Conrad |
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| The Act of God designation on all insurance policies... means roughly that you cannot be insured for the accidents that are most likely to happen to you. If your ox kicks a hole in your neighbor's Maserati, however, indemnity is instantaneous. |
| - Alan Coren |
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| We talk much more about individualism and liberty than our ancestors. But as so often happens, when anything becomes conscious, the consciousness is compensatory for absence in practice. |
| - John Dewey |
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| To understand any living thing, you must, so to say, creep within and feel the beating of its heart. |
| - W. MacNeile Dixon |
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| I believe in rules. Sure I do. If there weren't any rules, how could you break them? |
| - Leo Durocher |
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| Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous. |
| - Albert Einstein |
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| Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust - we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper. |
| - Albert Einstein |
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| Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. |
| - Albert Einstein |
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| Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things. |
| - George Eliot |
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| A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good. |
| - T.S. Eliot |
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| The conflict of forces and the struggle of opposing wills are of the essence of our universe and alone hold it together. |
| - Havelock Ellis |
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| All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients. |
| - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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| People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them. |
| - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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| The reward of a thing well done is to have done it. |
| - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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| We learn geology the morning after the earthquake. |
| - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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| A signature always reveals a man's character - and sometimes even his name. |
| - Evan Esar |
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| I can live with doubt and uncertainty. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. |
| - Richard P. Feynman |
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| Nothing so much prevents our being natural as the desire to seem so. |
| - François |
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| We confess to little faults only to persuade ourselves that we have no great ones. |
| - François |
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| Understanding a person does not mean condoning; it only means that one does not accuse him as if one were God or a judge placed above him. |
| - Erich Fromm |
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| If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error. |
| - John Kenneth Galbraith |
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| From the satisfaction of desire there may arise, accompanying joy and as it were sheltering behind it, something not unlike despair. |
| - André Gide |
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| The most decisive actions of our life... are most often unconsidered actions. |
| - André Gide |
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| True eloquence forgoes eloquence. |
| - André Gide |
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| Man's highest merit always is, as much as possible, to rule external circumstances and as little as possible to let himself be ruled by them. |
| - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
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| The mark of highest originality lies in the ability to develop a familiar idea so fruitfully that it would seem no one else would ever have discovered so much to be hidden in it. |
| - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
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| The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good. |
| - Robert Graves |
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| An impossibility does not disturb us until its accomplishment shows what fools we were. |
| - Henry S. Haskins |
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| Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. |
| - Hermann Hesse |
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| Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there. |
| - Eric Hoffer |
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| The passion to get ahead is sometimes born of the fear lest we be left behind. |
| - Eric Hoffer |
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| Men are idolaters and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it out of wood, you must make it out of words. |
| - Oliver Wendell, Sr. Holmes |
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| If we cannot be happy and powerful and prey on others, we invent conscience and prey on ourselves. |
| - Elbert Hubbard |
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| It's pretty hard to be efficient without being obnoxious. |
| - Kin Hubbard |
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| The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously. |
| - Hubert H. Humphrey |
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| Maybe this world is another planet's hell. |
| - Aldous Huxley |
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| Some minds seem almost to create themselves, springing up under every disadvantage and working their solitary but irresistible way through a thousand obstacles. |
| - Washington Irving |
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| All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods. |
| - William James |
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| The mind is seldom quickened to very vigorous operations but by pain, or the dread of pain. We do not disturb ourselves with the detection of fallacies which do us no harm. |
| - Samuel Johnson |
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| Women speak because they wish to speak, whereas a man speaks only when driven to speech by something outside himself - like, for instance, he can't find any clean socks. |
| - Jean Kerr |
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| Those who are quite satisfied sit still and do nothing; those who are not quite satisfied are the sole benefactors of the world. |
| - Walter Savage Landor |
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| My old father used to have a saying: If you make a bad bargain, hug it all the tighter. |
| - Abraham Lincoln |
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| It is not impossibilities which fill us with the deepest despair, but possibilities which we have failed to realize. |
| - Robert Mallett |
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| There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself. |
| - William Somerset Maugham |
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| If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain. |
| - André Maurois |
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| Anything you lose automatically doubles in value. |
| - Mignon McLaughlin |
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| If an article is attractive, or useful, or inexpensive, they'll stop making it tomorrow; if it's all three, they stopped making it yesterday. |
| - Mignon McLaughlin |
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| If there is something you must do and you cannot do it, you cannot do anything else. |
| - Mignon McLaughlin |
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| No matter how brilliantly an idea is stated, we will not really be moved unless we have already half-thought of it ourselves. |
| - Mignon McLaughlin |
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| Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to weave. |
| - Mignon McLaughlin |
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| Our strength is often composed of the weakness we're damned if we're going to show. |
| - Mignon McLaughlin |
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| We're seldom drawn to a character we admire; only to a personality we like. |
| - Mignon McLaughlin |
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| Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them. |
| - Henry Louis Mencken |
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| The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. |
| - Henry Miller |
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| I suppose that everyone of us hopes secretly for immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live forever in this world, whatever he may be doing, himself, in the next. |
| - A.A. Milne |
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| Some defeats [are] more triumphant than victories. |
| - Michel de Montaigne |
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| Most men are more capable of great actions than of good ones. |
| - Baron de Montesquieu |
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| Why do they put the Gideon Bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late, and not in the barroom downstairs? |
| - Christopher Morley |
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| After all, what is your host's purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi. |
| - P.J. O'Rourke |
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| Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish. |
| - Ovid |
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| Revolutions are not made: they come. A revolution is as natural as an oak tree. It comes out of the past; its foundations are laid far back. |
| - Wendell Phillips |
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| I remembered a story of how Bach was approached by a young admirer one day and asked, "But Papa Bach, how do you manage to think of all these new tunes?" "My dear fellow," Bach is said to have answered, according to my version, "I have no need to think of them. I have the greatest difficulty not to step on them when I get out of bed in the morning and start moving around my room." |
| - Laurens Van der Post |
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| The sinning is the best part of repentance. |
| - Arab Proverb |
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| If fortune smiles, who doesn't? If fortune doesn't, who does? |
| - Chinese Proverb |
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| Keep a thing seven years and it's bound to come in handy. |
| - Russian Proverb |
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| Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there. |
| - Branch Rickey |
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| How is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person? |
| - Francois de la Rochefoucauld |
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| It takes more strength of character to withstand good fortune than bad. |
| - Francois de la Rochefoucauld |
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| Admiration and familiarity are strangers. |
| - George Sand |
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| Theory helps us bear our ignorance of facts. |
| - George Santayana |
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| It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to. |
| - George Santayana |
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| Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first, it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self-evident. |
| - Arthur Schopenhauer |
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| Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It is already tomorrow in Australia. |
| - Charles M. Schulz |
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| There's no such thing as fun for the whole family. |
| - Jerry Seinfeld |
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| Perseverance... keeps honor bright: to have done, is to hang quite out of fashion, like a rusty nail in monumental mockery. |
| - William Shakespeare |
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| Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same. |
| - George Bernard Shaw |
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| It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. |
| - Robert Louis Stevenson |
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| We look for some reward of our endeavours and are disappointed; not success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do well. |
| - Robert Louis Stevenson |
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| After all, the main question will be the opener: "Hello, are you there?" If the reply should turn out to be "Yes, hello," we might want to stop there and think about that, for quite a long time. |
| - Lewis Thomas |
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| Light comes to us unexpectedly and obliquely. Perhaps it amuses the gods to try us. They want to see whether we are asleep. |
| - H.M. Tomlinson |
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| Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man - the biography of the man himself cannot be written. |
| - Mark Twain |
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| God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through. |
| - Paul Valéry |
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| Doubt is not a pleasant state of mind, but certainty is absurd. |
| - Voltaire |
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| All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific. |
| - Jane Wagner |
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| I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning. |
| - Andy Warhol |
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| The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us. |
| - Bill Watterson |
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| I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could. |
| - Orson Welles |
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| Keep a diary and one day it'll keep you. |
| - Mae West |
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| She's the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong. |
| - Mae West |
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| The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual - namely to You. |
| - Walt Whitman |
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| There is luxury in self-reproach.... When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us. |
| - Oscar Wilde |
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| I think the enemy is here before us.... I think the enemy is simple selfishness and compulsive greed.... I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land. |
| - Thomas Wolfe |
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| You can't have everything... where would you put it? |
| - Steven Wright |
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