A good lawyer knows the law. A great lawyer knows the judge.
– Anon.
Cats are like Baptists. They raise hell but you can’t catch them at it.
– Anon.
Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first, and the lesson afterward.
– Anon.
Hate is not a family value.
– Anon.
I am not my brother’s keeper. I am my brother’s brother.
– Anon.
I can only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow is not looking good either.
– Anon.
Live your life in the moment.
– Anon.
May those that love us, love us. And those that don’t love us, may God turn their hearts. And if God doesn’t turn their hearts, may He turn their ankles, so that we will know them by their limping.
– Anon.
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.
– Basho
Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
– Ambrose Bierce
Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
– Ambrose Bierce
Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
– Ambrose Bierce
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
– William Blake
To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.
– William Blake
We who seek knowledge shall not be satisfied in life, for knowledge–truth–is limitless. Those who choose to cling to one point in the infinity of knowledge may be satisfied, but are so because they blind themselves to the remaining truth.
– The Book of the Living
Every day people are straying away from church and going back to God.
– Lenny Bruce
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
– Edmund Burke
Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
– Samuel Butler
An intellectual is a person whose mind watches itself.
– Albert Camus
Good people do not let others suffer needlessly.
– Orson Scott Card
The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them.
– Orson Scott Card
Everybody dies. What matters is what you do between now and when it happens to you.
– Orson Scott Card
I’ve lived too long with pain. I won’t know who I am without it.
– Orson Scott Card
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
– Winston Churchill
A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
– Arthur C. Clarke
America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.
– Georges Clemenceau
Agnostics are just atheists without balls.
– Stephen Colbert
Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
– The Dalai Lama
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
– The Dalai Lama
Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.
– The Dalai Lama
My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.
– The Dalai Lama
Nature is the art of God.
– Dante
A man who is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at sixty has no head.
– Benjamin Disraeli
He who isn’t busy being born, is busy dying.
– Easy Rider
No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.
– Albert Einstein
1. Out of clutter; find simplicity.
2. From discord, find harmony
3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
– Albert Einstein
And thou shalt have dominion over all the beasts…except, of course, for cats.
– Felines: 12-15
I always keep a supply of stimulant on hand in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy.
– W. C. Fields
A woman drove me to drink, and I never even had the courtesy to thank her.
– W. C. Fields
A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.
– Jean de La Fontaine
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
– Benjamin Franklin
Be the change you want to see in the world.
–Gandhi
One cannot step twice into the same river.
– Herakleitos
Idiopathic, from the Latin meaning we’re idiots cause we can’t figure out what’s causing it.
– Gregory House, MD
It is in the nature of medicine that you are gonna screw up. You are gonna kill someone. If you can’t handle that reality, pick another profession. Or finish medical school and teach.
– Gregory House, MD
It’s a basic truth of the human condition that everybody lies. The only variable is about what.
– Gregory House, MD
I’ve found that when you want to know the truth about someone that someone is probably the last person you should ask.
– Gregory House, MD
The only completely consistent people are the dead.
– Aldous Huxley
Wherever you are, it is your own friends who make your world. Properly speaking a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
– William James
The map is not the territory.
– Alfred Korzbyski
Unlike most of life, what you do really matters. Your actions have real consequences. You have to pay attention and focus, and that’s very satisfying. It forces you to pay great attention and you lose yourself in the task at hand. Without the risk, that wouldn’t happen, so the risk is an essential part of climbing, and that’s hard for some people to grasp. You can’t justify the risk when things go wrong and people die. The greater the risk, the greater the reward in most aspects of life, and in climbing that’s certainly true, too. It’s very physical, you use your mind and your body.
– Jon Krakauer
Funny thing about guilt. There’s nothing so bad that you can’t add a little guilt to it and make it worse; and there’s nothing so good you can’t add guilt to it and make it better. Guilt distracts us from a greater truth: we have an inherent ability to heal. We seem intent on living through even the worst heartbreak.
– Latter Days
So anyway, I got to watch as they opened this guy’s chest. And there it was, this human heart, you know? This human heart. You think about it beating and all, but it’s more of a dance. And I couldn’t get over that that’s all that tethers us to this planet – this one fragile muscle. And how it’s so tiny, really, in the big scheme of things. And when you think about all the things that can stop it… Well you just figure that there’s got to be something else, something miraculous that keeps that valiant little muscle dancing.
– Latter Days
Well, when I was a little kid, I used to put my nose right up to the Sunday comics. And I was just amazed because it looked like this mass of dots, and none of it made sense until I pulled back. Life looks like that mass of dots to me sometimes. None of it makes any sense, but I like to think that, from God’s perspective, life, everything – even this – make sense. It’s not just dots. Instead we’re all connected, and it’s beautiful and funny and good. This close we can’t expect it to make sense, not right now.
– Latter Days
Life is what happens while you are making other plans.
– John Lennon
No good deed goes unpunished.
– Clare Boothe Luce
The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
– W. Somerset Maugham
The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
– Bernard Melamud
Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
– H. L. Mencken
Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.
– Jawaharlal Nehru
Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you a car.
– Laurence J. Peter
Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.
– J. Danforth Quayle
Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.
– George Santayana
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Those who want the fewest things are nearest to the gods.
– Socrates
I drank what?
– Socrates
A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.
– Joseph Stalin
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
– Jonathan Swift
An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.
– Dylan Thomas
I did not attend his funeral, but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved of it.
– Mark Twain
If Christ were here now, there is one thing he would not be–a Christian.
– Mark Twain
The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.
– Mark Twain
Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.
– Mark Twain
When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
– Mark Twain
Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
– Mark Twain
If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated.
– Voltaire
Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.
– Mae West
There are two tragedies in life. One is not getting what one wants and the other is getting it.
– Oscar Wilde
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
– Marianne Williamson
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
– William Butler Yeats
When an ordinary man attains knowledge, he is a sage; when a sage attains understanding, he is an ordinary man.
– Zen saying