Quotes
A collection of quotes I find interesting—updated as I discover more. If you have one that you think would make a good addition, leave a comment and I’ll include it.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
- Henry David Thoreau
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
- Walter Lippmann
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.
- George Bernard Shaw
be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.
-Dr. Seuss
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
- Tom Stoppard
Her virtue was that she said what she thought, her vice that what she thought didn’t amount to much.
- Peter Ustinov
The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.
- Elbert Hubbard
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures.
- Daniel Webster
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.
- Sir Francis Bacon
When you encounter seemingly good advice that contradicts other seemingly good advice, ignore them both.
- Al Franken
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
- Thomas Jefferson
The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
- Sophocles
To avoid situations in which you might make mistakes may be the biggest mistake of all.
- Peter McWilliams
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
- Ellen Goodman
The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.
- Benjamin Disraeli
Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
- Alfred Lord Tennyson
When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.
- Albert Einstein
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.
- Michael Crichton
Most people would rather be certain they’re miserable than risk being happy.
- Robert Anthony
The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.
- Hunter S. Thompson
It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong—or absolutely right.
- Albert Guinon
Nobody got anywhere in the world by simply being content.
- Louis L’Amour
We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”
- Tom Stoppard
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
- George Orwell
Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.
- Howard Aiken
We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.
- Frank Tibolt
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
- Aesop
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.
- Mark Twain
People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
- Hermann Hesse
It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.- Mark Twain
