Pithy Quotes
(Collected from my QOTD feed, fortune program, etc.)
"Weather forecast for tonight: dark. Continued dark overnight, with widely scattered light by morning."
George Carlin
"There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot."
Steven Wright
"My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them."
Penn Jillette
"One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."
Andre Gide
"To achieve great things one must live as though we were never going to die."
Marquis de Vauvenargues
"Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist."
G K Chesterton
"A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward."
Jean Paul Richter
"Setting a good example for children takes all the fun out of middle age."
William Feather
"Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening."
Barbara Tober
"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it."
Henry David Thoreau
"Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired."
Jules Renard
"The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them."
Mark Twain
"Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it."
Soren Kierkegaard
"There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it."
Max Frisch
"Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this, that you are dreadfully like other people."
James Russell Lowell
"In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock."
Thomas Jefferson
"Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city."
George Burns
"It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper."
Rod Sterling
"If you believe everything you read, better not read."
Japanese Proverb
"Every increased possession loads us with new weariness."
John Ruskin
"If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us."
Hermann Hesse
"By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong."
Charles Wadsworth
"It is only possible to live happily ever after on a day-to-day basis."
Margaret Bonnano
"Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both."
John Andrew Holmes
"To be patriotic, hate all nations but your own; to be religious, all sects
but your own; to be moral, all pretenses but your own."
Lionel Strachey
"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful."
Samuel Johnson
"Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock."
Ben Hecht
"Accomplishing the impossible means only that the boss will add it to your regular duties."
Doug Larson
"The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."
James Baldwin
"Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it."
David Sedaris
"Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again."
Franklin Jones
"Invention is the mother of necessity."
Thorstein Veblen
"It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power."
David Brin
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
Aristotle
"Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings."
Evan Esar
"The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness, can be trained to do most things."
Jilly Cooper
"No matter how rich you become, how famous or powerful, when you die the size of your funeral will still pretty much depend on the weather."
Michael Pritchard
"Quit worrying about your health. It'll go away."
Robert Orben
"Anger is the feeling that makes your mouth work faster than your mind."
Evan Esar
"Those who flee temptation generally leave a forwarding address."
Lane Olinghouse
"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?"
Henry Ward Beecher
"Acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to."
Ambrose Bierce
"One has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience."
Alice James
"The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever."
Anatole France
"The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you."
Rita Mae Brown
"Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors."
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
"Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles."
George Jean Nathan
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house."
R A Heinlein
This file created: 22/Oct/2006