It's not the critic who counts. Not the man who points out how the doer of deeds might have done them better. Instead, the credit belongs to the man in the arena whose face is marred by sweat and blood and tears.-- Theodore Roosevelt
The truth is that all of us attain the greatest success and happiness possible in this life whenever we use our native capacities to their greatest extent.-- Dr. Smiley Blanton
Do not measure your loss by itself; if you do, it will seem intolerable; but if you will take all human affairs into account you will find that some comfort is to be derived from them.-- Saint Basil
Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - - the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.-- Donald H. Rumsfeld
The first duty of a leader is to make himself be loved without courting love. To be loved without 'playing up' to anyone - even to himself.-- Andre Malraux
Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.-- John F. Kennedy
The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, 'In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!'-- John F. Kennedy
If a civil word or two will render a man happy, he must be a wretch indeed who will not give them to him. Such a disposition is like lighting another man's candle by one's own, which loses none of its brilliancy by what the other gains.-- William Penn
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.-- John F. Kennedy
It does no harm just once in a while to acknowledge that the whole country isn't in flames, that there are people in the country besides politicians, entertainers, and criminals.-- Charles Kuralt
If a child shows himself to be incorrigible, he should be decently and quietly beheaded at the age of twelve, lest he grow to maturity marry, and perpetuate his kind.-- Don Marquis
I have seen the hippopotamus, both asleep and awake; and I can assure you that, awake or asleep, he is the ugliest of the works of God.-- Thomas Babington Macaulay
MINSTREL, adj. Formerly a poet, singer or musician; now a nigger with a color less than skin deep and a humor more than flesh and blood can bear.-- Ambrose Bierce
The Internet has no such organization - files are made available at random locations. To search through this chaos, we need smart tools, programs that find resources for us.-- Clifford Stoll
Weh I was a kid I prayed every night for a bike until I figured out that that's not the way that God works, so I stole a bike and then asked him for forgiveness.-- Emo Phillips
It is better wither to be silent, or to say things of more value than silence. Sooner throw a pearl at hazard than an idle or useless word; and do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in a few.-- Pythagoras
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not a poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.-- Rainer Maria Rilke
Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, that will determine our destiny. There is pride in that, even arrogance, but there is also experience and truth. In any event, it is the only way we can live.-- Robert F. Kennedy
But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on -- and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end.-- J. R. R. Tolkien
The general cry is against ingratitude, but the complaint is misplaced, it should be against vanity; none but direct villains are capable of willful ingratitude; but almost everybody is capable of thinking he hath done more that another deserves, while the other thinks he hath received less than he deserves.-- Alexander Pope
History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity.-- Cicero
To be deceived by our enemies or betrayed by our friends in insupportable; yet by ourselves we are often content to be so treated.-- Francois De La Rochefoucauld
Did I ever tell you about a nasty habit that flight attendants pick up on the job? We learn to always keep smiling, even when we're out of Bloody Mary Mix.-- Eric Wald
The spiritual meaning of love is measured by what it can do. Love is meant to heal. Love is meant to renew. Love is meant to bring us closer to God.-- Deepak Chopra
That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.-- Gustave Flaubert
Our heroes are those... who... act above and beyond the call of duty and in so doing give definition to patriotism and elevate all of us.... America is the land of the free because we are the home of the brave.-- David Mahoney
Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
During [these] periods of relaxation after concentrated intellectual activity, the intuitive mind seems to take over and can produce the sudden clarifying insights which give so much joy and delight.-- Fritjof Capra
I like coincidences. They make me wonder about destiny, and whether free will is an illusion or just a matter of perspective. They let me speculate on the idea of some master plan that, from time to time, we're allowed to see out of the corner of our eye.-- Chuck Sigars
In human life, art may arise from almost any activity, and once it does so, it is launched on a long road of exploration, invention, freedom to the limits of extravagance, interference to the point of frustration, finally discipline, controlling constant change and growth.-- Susanne Langer
As long as we respond predictably to what feels good and what feels bad, it is easy for others to exploit our preferences for their own ends.-- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.-- Isaac Newton
Evil is a point of view. God kills indiscriminately and so shall we. For no creatures under God are as we are, none so like him as ourselves.-- Anne Rice
NOTORIETY, n. The fame of one's competitor for public honors. The kind of renown most accessible and acceptable to mediocrity. A Jacob's-ladder leading to the vaudeville stage, with angels ascending and descending.-- Ambrose Bierce
Your world is made of your memories, and your memories are given to you by your world. The whispering voice of happenstance is always in our ears. 'This is the world. This is the way things are. Look. Pay attention. Remember.'-- Real Live Preacher
During [these] periods of relaxation after concentrated intellectual activity, the intuitive mind seems to take over and can produce the sudden clarifying insights which give so much joy and delight.-- Fritjof Capra
Si vous réunissez à table une douzaine de personnes, il y a toujours une femme "qui fait la gueule", un monsieur qui s'ennuie, un homme qui parle trop et quelqu'un de distrait qui fait gaffe sur gaffe. Lorsque vous avez un médecin à votre table, pensez à mettre auprès de lui un bloc de papier et un stylo, afin qu'il puisse, entre la poire et le fromage, faire autant d'ordonnances qu'il y aura de convives. De quels repas se souvient-on ? De ceux qui furent délectables - ou pour la bouche - ou pour l'esprit. Ce ne sont pas toujours les mêmes. Les plus exquis de tous n'ont ils pas été ceux que l'on improvisa ? On se souvient trente ans après, de deux ufs sur le plat - un peu trop cuits sans doute - mais la main qui tenait la poêle était si belle!-- Sacha Guitry
To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.-- Wallace Stevens
If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.-- Bertrand Russell
Everything I do has a purpose, all of God's beings have a purpose. Others may know pleasure, but pleasure is not happiness. It has no more importance than a shadow following a man.-- Muhammad Ali
Be what you would seem to be -- or, if you'd like it put more simply -- Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.-- Lewis Carroll
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny...'-- Isaac Asimov
Cleanliness and order are not matters of instinct; they are matters of education, and like most great things, you must cultivate a taste for them.-- Benjamin Disraeli
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
The seven deadly sins ... Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven milestones from man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the milestones are lifted.-- George Bernard Shaw
To know a man, observe how he wins his object, rather than how he loses it; for when we fail our pride supports us; when we succeed, it betrays us.-- Charles Caleb Colton
A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.-- John Stuart Mill
I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.-- Oscar Wilde
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.-- T. S. Eliot
Try to put your happiness before anyone else's, because you may never have done so in your entire life, if you really think about it, if you are really honest with yourself.-- Margaret Cho
I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience.-- Shelley Winters
PROOF, n. Evidence having a shade more of plausibility than of unlikelihood. The testimony of two credible witnesses as opposed to that of only one.-- Ambrose Bierce
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.-- Ernest Hemingway
There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.-- John Adams
There were always people like the pope. They serve a certain function, of course. They subsidize us. But, they don't create anything and they must never be allowed to stop the artist from creating.-- Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider
I came to the realization that there were certain public issues that were most usefully dealt with within some sort of framework of at least my private beliefs, if not my private life.-- Anna Quindlen
Eternity has nothing to do with the hereafter... This is it... If you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here's the place to have the experience.-- Joseph Campbell
The bars of West Hollywood and New York are awash with people throwing their lives away in the desperate hope of finding a shortcut, any shortcut. And a lot of them aren't even young anymore; their B-plans having been washed away by Vodka & Tonics years ago.-- Hugh_Macleod/"
TAIL, n. The part of an animal's spine that has transcended its natural limitations to set up an independent existence in a world of its own. Excepting in its foetal state, Man is without a tail, a privation of which he attests an hereditary and uneasy consciousness by the coat-skirt of the male and the train of the female, and by a marked tendency to ornament that part of his attire where the tail should be, and indubitably once was. This tendency is most observable in the female of the species, in whom the ancestral sense is strong and persistent. The tailed men described by Lord Monboddo are now generally regarded as a product of an imagination unusually susceptible to influences generated in the golden age of our pithecan past.-- Ambrose Bierce
If human life were long enough to find the ultimate theory, everything would have been solved by previous generations. Nothing would be left to be discovered.-- Stephen Hawking
This is pretty much what journals are all about, at least to me. I knew as I wrote them that even though they provided an excellent place for brain (and heart, and psyche) dump, they were mainly a map of me.-- Colleen Wainwright
My love for you, Lord, is not an uncertain feeling, but a matter of concious certainty. With your word you pierced my heart, and I loved you. But heaven and earth and everything in them on all sides tell me to love you.-- Saint Augustine
Straight men need to be emasculated. I'm sorry. They all need to be slapped around. Women have been kept down for too long. Every straight guy should have a man's tongue in his mouth at least once.-- Madonna
Why 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
ABRUPT, adj. Sudden, without ceremony, like the arrival of a cannon- shot and the departure of the soldier whose interests are most affected by it. Dr. Samuel Johnson beautifully said of another author's ideas that they were "concatenated without abruption."-- Ambrose Bierce
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.-- Richard Feynman
I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crises. The great point is to bring them the real facts.-- Abraham Lincoln
If a `religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Godel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.-- John D. Barrow
GRAVITATION, n. The tendency of all bodies to approach one another with a strength proportion to the quantity of matter they contain -- the quantity of matter they contain being ascertained by the strength of their tendency to approach one another. This is a lovely and edifying illustration of how science, having made A the proof of B, makes B the proof of A.-- Ambrose Bierce
It had only been my repeated experience that when you said to life calmly and firmly... 'I trust you; do what you must,' life had an uncanny way of responding to your need.-- Olga Ilyin
In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.-- Stephen Jay Gould
Nothing in the entire universe ever perishes, believe me, but things vary, and adopt a new form. The phrase "being born" is used for beginning to be something different from what one was before, while "dying" means ceasing to be the same. Though this thing may pass into that, and that into this, yet the sums of things remains unchanged.-- Ovid
I do press junkets and people will tell me what I've supposedly said in articles and I always disagree with myself. 'Why in the world would I say that?'-- Meg Ryan
Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high- class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four.-- Katharine Hepburn
If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.-- Frank Herbert
Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted than when we read it in the original author?-- Philip G. Hamerton
Look to your health; and if you have it, praise God and value it next to a good conscience; for health is the second blessing that money cannot buy; therefore value it, and be thankful for it.-- Izaak Walton
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.-- Steven Weinberg
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he know that every day is Doomsday.-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are two types of people--those who come into a room and say, 'Well, here I am!' and those who come in and say, 'Ah, there you are.'-- Frederick L Collins
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.-- Rainer Maria Rilke
REPARTEE, n. Prudent insult in retort. Practiced by gentlemen with a constitutional aversion to violence, but a strong disposition to offend. In a war of words, the tactics of the North American Indian.-- Ambrose Bierce
Ronald Reagan and George Bush pushed through programs that raised taxes on the middle class. I think it's time to cut them. And in my administration I'll offer a middle-income tax cut that will cut rates on the middle class.-- Bill Clinton
GRAMMAR, n. A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet for the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.-- Ambrose Bierce
I believe in courtesy, in kindness, in generosity, in good cheer, in friendship and in honest competition. I believe there is something doing somewhere, for every man ready to do it. I believe I'm ready, RIGHT NOW.-- Elbert Hubbard
I think that it's important for scientists to explain their work, particularly in cosmology. This now answers many questions once asked of religion.-- Stephen Hawking
It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.-- Mahatma Gandhi
Politics [is] the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order.-- Barry Goldwater
There are people accusing me that I'm sick, that I'm a danger to morals, western civilization and basically everything under the sun. And they've got these wild stories about me, completely off the wall, completely untrue. They thought them up and it makes you wonder what goes on in their brain, but of course, they don't consider themselves sick. They think they're normal because they don't dress like I do.-- Marilyn Manson
But pain... seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?-- Lois McMaster Bujold
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most People are even incapable of forming such opinions.-- Albert Einstein
True humor is fun - it does not put down, kid, or mock. It makes people feel wonderful, not separate, different, and cut off. True humor has beneath it the understanding that we are all in this together.-- Hugh Prather
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.-- P. J. O'Rourke
We are taught to be ashamed of confusion, anger, fear and sadness, and to me they are of equal value as happiness excitement and inspiration.-- Alanis Morissette
If men saw that a term was set to their troubles, they would find strength in some way to withstand the hocus-pocus and intimidations of the prophets.-- Lucretius
We all carry around so much pain in our hearts. Love and pain and beauty. They all seem to go together like one little tidy confusing package. It's a messy business, life. It's hard to figure--full of surprises. Some good. Some bad.-- Henry Bromel
When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.-- Cicero
ART, n. This word has no definition. Its origin is related as follows by the ingenious Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J.-- And sell their garments to support the priests.
For this invention of yours will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn it, by causing them to neglect their memory, inasmuch as, from their confidence in writing, they will recollect by the external aid of foreign symbols, and not by the internal use of their own faculties. Your discovery, therefore, is a medicine not for memory, but for recollection-for recalling to, not for keeping in mind.-- Plato
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