I have always appreciated a
pithy quote. Wisdom is found more often in succinct incisiveness
than in verbose pontification (my own Web site notwithstanding).
In short, I buy the fortune cookies "for the articles."
Here, then, in no particular order, are some quotes I admire and
occasionally live by:
"A great truth is a
truth whose opposite is also a great truth."
-- Christopher Morley
"Love is an
exploding cigar we willingly smoke."
-- Lynda Barry
"The least of
things with meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of
things without it."
- and -
"Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate
suffering."
-- Carl Jung
"The question of
human life is: on what level of illusion does one live?"
- and -
"Men need desperately to make panic look like
reason."
-- Ernest Becker
"Change your life;
change your shorts."
-- Tom Waits
"Some ideas are so
stupid that only intellectuals could believe them."
-- George Orwell
"Live as if you
were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the
first time as you are about to act now."
-- Viktor Frankl
"Now they know how
many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall."
-- John Lennon
"The world moves on
a woman's hips,
The world moves and it swivels and bops,
The world moves on a woman's hips,
The world moves and it bounces and hops."
-- David Byrne
"Life is just the
stream I go fishing in."
-- David Henry Thoreau
"Dying is no
solution, nor living either. But who tells you there is a
solution?"
- and -
"Man is not human."
-- Elie Wiesel
"Maybe there's a God
above but all I ever learned from love,
Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you."
- and -
"Every heart to love will come,
But like a refugee."
- and -
"There is a crack in everything,
That's how the light gets in."
-- Leonard Cohen
"Life is the sum of
the functions that resist death."
-- Xavier Bichat (French surgeon)
"The intellect,
like an opera glass, should only be turned up to a certain point;
if you screw it any farther, you see more hazily."
-- Leo Tolstoy
"One of the
symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that
one's work is terribly important."
-- Bertrand Russell
"How the hell do I
know why there were Nazis? I can't work the can opener!"
- and -
"Tradition is the illusion of permanence."
-- Woody Allen
"Art is
too serious to be taken seriously."
-- Ad Reinhardt
"He who knows best
knows how little he knows."
- and -
"A little
rebellion, now and then, is a good thing."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"There is no female
Mozart because there is no female Jack The Ripper."
-- Camille Paglia
"It's so simple to
be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say
it."
-- Lenny Bruce
"If the human brain
were simple enough to understand, we would be too simple to
understand it."
-- One of the developers of Prozac
"The highest
purpose is to have no purpose at all."
-- John Cage
"If you like laws
and sausage, you should never watch either one being made."
-- Bismarck
"The whole object of travel is not
to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a
foreign land."
-- Gilbert Chesterton
"He loves me. We
have great sex. And he fixes my car."
-- Amy Fisher, on her relationship with Joey Buttafuoco
"The world owes you
nothing; it was here first."
- and -
"Sacred cows make the best hamburger."
- and -
"A language is a dialect with an army."
-- Mark Twain
"An intellectual is
a man who doesn't know how to park a bike."
-- Spiro Agnew
"If triangles
invented a god, they would make him three-sided."
-- Baron de Montesquieu
"Invention is the mother of
necessity."
-- Frank Herbert
"The whole world is
a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to
interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco
"One can only find
truth with logic if one has already found truth without it."
-- G.K. Chesterton
"The point of
philosophy is to start with something so simple that it seems not
worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no
one will believe it."
-- Bertrand Russell
"Intuition is
reason in a hurry."
-- Holbrook Jackson
"A hen is only an
egg's way of making another egg."
-- Samuel Butler
"A ship in harbor
is safe, but that is not what ships are for."
-- John Shedd
"There is nothing
more deceptive than an obvious fact."
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"The best way to
glean the truth is to compare the lies."
-- Leon Trotsky
"Only the hand that
erases can write the true thing."
-- Meister Eckhart
"Here be
dragons."
-- Medieval cartographers' notation for unexplored areas on
a map
"I find television
very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into
another room and read a good book."
- and -
"Time wounds all heels."
-- Groucho Marx
"Imagination is
more important than knowledge."
-- Albert Einstein
"The streets are
safe in Philadelphia, it's only the people that make them
unsafe."
-- Former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo
"If I became a
philosopher, it's all been to seduce women basically."
-- Jean Paul Sartre
"Smoking kills, and
if you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your
life."
-- Brooke Shields
"If you don't think
too good, don't think too much."
-- Ted Williams
"We learn from
history that we learn nothing from history."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"The best lack all
conviction, while the worst are full of passionate
intensity."
-- William Butler Yeats
"I believe in an
open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out."
-- Arthur Hays Sulzberger
"Well New York,
after 54 years, your long wait is over."
-- NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, in awarding the Stanley
Cup to the New York Rangers on June 14, 1994
(see "Ice Hockey" page)
"Custom will
reconcile people to any atrocity."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"If one could write
a meaningful suicide note, one would not have to kill
oneself."
-- Edwin Shneidman
"The internet is a
great way to get on the net."
-- Bob Dole
-- How about these Chinese fortune cookies:
"Many a false step is made by
standing still."
"Wise men learn more from fools than
fools learn from wise men."
"Simplicity of character is the
natural result of profundity of thought."
"Life is a tragedy for those who
feel and a comedy for those who think."
...and my personal favorite:
"You love Chinese food."
-- And last but not least, the Quipmaster himself, the one, the only...
"Being natural is simply a
pose."
"Only the shallow know
themselves."
"The basis of optimism is sheer
terror."
"I can resist everything except
temptation."
"Only dull people are brilliant at
breakfast."
"The basis of action is lack of
imagination."
"The true mystery of the world is
the visible."
"The public is wonderfully tolerant;
it forgives everything except genius."
"The secret of life is to appreciate
the pleasure of being terribly deceived."
"Morality is simply the attitude we
adopt toward people whom we personally dislike."
"The only difference between a
caprice and a lifelong passion is that a caprice lasts a little
longer."
"Wickedness is a myth invented by
good people to account for the curious attractiveness of
others."
"What people call their loyalty and
fidelity is either the lethargy of custom or the lack of
imagination."
"There is only one thing in the
world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked
about."
Featured links:
Gallery of "Misused" Quotation Marks
"Blog" of "Unnecessary"
Quotation Marks
Quoth the raven....
Wikiquote
Quote DB
Quoteland
Last Words
Cool Quotes
Dumb Quotes
Quote Gallery
Wino Wisdom
Quotations Page
Quotations Archive
Motivational Quotes
Quotation Web Ring
Quote Book Reviews
Quotations Starting Page
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
Online Dictionary of Quotations
Guide to Philosophy Quotations
Funny Stones (tombstone epitaphs)
Creative Quotations for Creative Thinking
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