Miscellaneous Quotations

The quotations found in this category do not quite fall into any other.

Showing 217 through 252 of 499 quotations in this category.

"It is no longer a question of where civilization began, but if it ever did!"

-Alfred E. Newman

"I think; therefore I am."

-Rene Descartes

"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world."

-Mary Shafer

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

-Leo Tolstoy, opening line of Anna Karenina

"Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."

-Albert Camus

"Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons."

-Bertrand Russell

"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death....Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man."

-Bertrand Russell

"In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up."

-Martin Niemoeller

"People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say."

-Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

"I think you should defend to the death their right to march, and then go down and meet them with baseball bats."

-Woody Allen, on the KKK

"I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was."

-William Shakespeare

"We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows."

-Robert Frost

"Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail."

-Henry David Thoreau

"An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail."

-Edwin Land

"Only the shallow know themselves."

-Oscar Wilde

"We know what we are, but know not what we may be."

-William Shakespeare

"You are like a porcupine. When the animal has its spines erect, it cannot eat. If you do not eat, you will starve. And your prickles will die with the rest of your body."

-John Fowles

"We must overact our part in some measure, in order to produce any effect at all."

-William Hazlitt

"Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood."

-Loren Eiseley

"A man should not play the coward to his deeds. He should not repudiate them once he has performed them. Pangs of conscience are indecent."

-Friedrich Nietzsche

"He who knows not how to plant his will in things at least endows them with some meaning: that is to say, he believes that a will is already present in them (A principle of faith.)"

-Friedrich Nietzsche

"'How often conscience had to bite in times gone by! What good teeth it must have had! And today, what is amiss?' -a dentist's question."

-Friedrich Nietzsche

"As an artist grows older, he has to fight disillusionment and learn to establish the same relation to nature as an adult as he had when a child."

-Charles Burchfield

"The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person."

-Frank Barron

"Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day."

-D. H. Lawrence

"Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs."

-Edgard Varese

"Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself."

-Henri Bergson

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."

-H. P. Lovecraft

"The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent."

-John Hughes Holmes

"Adam and Eve entered the world naked and unashamed - naked and pure-minded. And no descendant of theirs has ever entered it otherwise. All have entered it naked, unashamed, and clean in mind. They entered it modest. They had to acquire immodesty in the soiled mind, there was no other way to get it. ... The convention mis-called "modesty" has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anyone's whim - anyone's diseased caprice."

-Mark Twain

"One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only nine lives."

-Mark Twain

"Nothing is as terrible to see as ignorance in action."

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"All perfect republics are perfect nonsense. The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?"

-John Fowles

"Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform."

-Mark Twain

"Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things."

-Miyamoto Musashi

"Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have."

-Ronald Reagan