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Quote for Monday Jul 1

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.

-- Edith Sitwell


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Previous Quotes

Tuesday, January 6, 2004

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

-- Gertrude Stein

Thursday, January 8, 2004

He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.

-- Chinese Proverb

If you like, consider the ramifcations of the following, contrary, thought
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

-- Mark Twain

Saturday, January 10, 2004

Making resolutions is a cleansing ritual of self-assessment and repentance that demands personal honesty and, ultimately, reinforces humility. Breaking them is part of the cycle.

-- Erie Zorn

Tuesday, January 13, 2004

It is hard to begin to move when you don't know where you are moving, how to move, or if you are going to get there.

-- Peter Novio Zarlenga

Thursday, January 15, 2004

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.

-- Tom Robbins

Saturday, January 17, 2004

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

Tuesday, January 20, 2004

The real character of a man is found out by his amusements.

-- Joshua Reynolds

Thursday, January 22, 2004

Count Hermann Keyserling once said truly that the greatest American superstition was belief in facts.

-- John Gunther

Saturday, January 24, 2004

It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.

-- Aeschylus

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished.
That will be the beginning.

-- Louis L'Amour

Thursday, January 29, 2004

You don't stop laughing because you grow old.
You grow old because you stop laughing.

-- Michael Pritchard

Saturday, January 31, 2004

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

-- Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness (1930) ch. 14

Tuesday, February 3, 2004

Problems arise in that one has to find a balance between what people need from you and what you need for yourself.

-- Jessye Norman

Thursday, Feb 5, 2004

It is always the best policy to speak the truth--unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.

-- Jerome K. Jerome

Saturday, Feb 7, 2004

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

-- G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History (1942)

Tuesday, Feb 10, 2004

Love thy neighbour as yourself, but choose your neighbourhood.

-- Louise Beal

Thursday, Feb 12, 2004

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

-- Iris Murdoch (1919 - 1999)

Saturday, Feb 14, 2004

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or perhaps, loved in spite of ourselves.

-- - Victor Hugo

Tuesday, Feb 17, 2004

If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.

-- Edith Wharton

Thursday, Feb 19, 2004

I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them.

-- E. V. Lucas

Saturday, Feb 21, 2004

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

-- Scott Adams

Tuesday, Feb 24, 2004

I loathe the expression "What makes him tick." It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.

-- James Thurber

Thursday, Feb 26, 2004

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

-- Aristotle

Saturday, Feb 28, 2004

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.

-- Francis H. Bradley

Tuesday, Mar 2, 2004

Love is a blazing, crackling, green-wood flame, as much smoke as flame; friendship, married friendship particularly, is a steady, intense, comfortable fire. Love, in courtship, is friendship in hope; in matrimony, friendship upon proof.

-- Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), British novelist.

Saturday, Mar 6, 2004

Love must be as much a light as a flame.

-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist.

Tuesday, Mar 9, 2004

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.

-- Christopher Morley

Saturday, Mar 13, 2004

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.

-- Bertrand Russell, 1947

Tuesday, Mar 16, 2004

I have learned to use the word 'impossible' with the greatest caution.

-- Wernher von Braun

Saturday, Mar 20, 2004

It is a curious truth that many cats enjoy warmer, more convivial, even affectionate relationships with humans than they could ever do with fellow felines.

-- Bruce Fogle, DVM, "The Cat's Mind", 1991

Tuesday, Mar 23, 2004

The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not, and never persist in trying to set people right.

-- Hannah Whitall Smith

Saturday, Mar 27, 2004

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

-- Edgar Allan Poe, "Eleonora"

Tuesday, Mar 30, 2004

It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.

-- Alfred Adler

Saturday, Apr 3, 2004

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

-- Edward R Murrow

Tuesday, Apr 6, 2004

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

-- Karl Marx

Saturday, Apr 10, 2004

All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.

-- James Thurber

Tuesday, Apr 13, 2004

I'm not concerned about all hell breaking loose, but that a PART of hell will break loose... it'll be much harder to detect.

-- George Carlin

Saturday, Apr 17, 2004

Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be.

-- Jim Horning

Tuesday, Apr 20, 2004

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, "The Intellectual Life"

Saturday, Apr 24, 2004

The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.

-- Albert Einstein

Tuesday, Apr 27, 2004

We rarely quote nowadays to appeal to authority ... though we quote sometimes to display our sapience and erudition. Some authors we quote against. Some we quote not at all, offering them our scrupulous avoidance, and so make them part of our white mythology. Other authors we constantly invoke, chanting their names in cerebral rituals of propitiation or ancestor worship.

-- Ihab Hassan, U.S. critic. repr. In The Right Promethean Fire (1980).

Saturday, May 1, 2004

The superfluous is very necessary.

-- Voltaire

Tuesday, May 4, 2004

I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light.

-- Isaac Newton

Saturday, May 8, 2004

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

-- Ursula K. LeGuin

Tuesday, May 11, 2004

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.

-- W. Somerset Maugham

Saturday, May 15, 2004

I quote another mans saying; unluckily, that other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher.

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

When I quote others I do so in order to express my own ideas more clearly.

-- Michel de Montaigne, French essayist.

Saturday, May 22, 2004

Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting.

-- John Russell

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well.

-- A. Bronson Alcott, U.S. educator, social reformer.

Saturday, May 29, 2004

The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: "I don;t intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God." "Don't you think God knows the facts?" Bethe asked. "Yes," said Szilard. "He knows the facts, but He does not know _this version of the facts."

- Hans Christian von Baeyer, "Taming the Atom"

Tuesday, Jun 1, 2004

Ask how to live? Write, write, write, anything; the world's a fine believing world, write news.

- Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Wit without Money (act II)

Saturday, Jun 5, 2004

Great is journalism. Is not every able editor a ruler of the world, being the persuader of it?

- Thomas Carlyle

Tuesday, Jun 8, 2004

"We see what we believe rather than believe what we see.

-- Alan Watts

Saturday, Jun 12, 2004

Miscellanists are the most popular writers among every people; for it is they who form a communication between the learned and the unlearned, and, as it were, throw a bridge between those two great divisions of the public.

- Isaac D'Israeli, Literary Character of Men of Genius--Miscellanists

Tuesday, Jun 15, 2004

"I don't want to control everything, I just want people and events to mold to my desires!"

-- Tino Tonitini

Saturday, Jun 19, 2004

True merit, like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes.

-- Edward F. Halifax

Tuesday, Jun 22, 2004

To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.

-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Saturday, Jun 26, 2004

When you're curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.

-- Walt Disney

Tuesday, Jun 29, 2004

My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.

- Edith Newbold Wharton (nee Jones), A Backward Glance

Saturday, Jul 3, 2004

It is a great ability to be able to conceal one's ability.

-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Tuesday, Jul 6, 2004

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

-- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

Saturday, Jul 10, 2004

That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong.

-- William J. H. Boetcker

Tuesday, Jul 13, 2004

First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again - and, moreover, give reasons why we believe.

-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Saturday, Jul 17, 2004

What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.

-- Benjamin Disraeli

Tuesday, Jul 20, 2004

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

-- Sir Winston Churchill

Saturday, Jul 24, 2004

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.

-- Walter Lippmann

Tuesday, Jul 27, 2004

What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.

-- Vilhjalmur Stefansson, "Discovery", 1964

Saturday, Jul 31, 2004

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.

-- Leo Buscaglia

Tuesday, Aug 3, 2004

First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again - and, moreover, give reasons why we believe.

-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Saturday, Aug 7, 2004

An error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.

-- Orlando A. Battista

Tuesday, Aug 10, 2004

The cure for writer's cramp is writer's block.

-- Inigo DeLeon

Saturday, Aug 14, 2004

We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.

-- Frank Tibolt

Saturday, Aug 21, 2004

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'

-- Isaac Asimov

Tuesday, Aug 24, 2004

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

-- Voltaire

Saturday, Aug 28, 2004

Education is what you get from reading the fine print. Experience is what you get from not reading it.

-- Source Unknown

Tuesday, Aug 31, 2004

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.

-- Abraham Lincoln

Saturday, Sep 4, 2004

We can't all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.

-- Will Rogers

Tuesday, Sep 7, 2004

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

-- Robert Anton Wilson

Saturday, Sep 11, 2004

You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty.

-- Sacha Guitry

Tuesday, Sep 14, 2004

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

-- Dorothy Nevill

Saturday, Sep 18, 2004

In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.

-- Paul Harvey

Tuesday, Sep 21, 2004

What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or what's worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?

-- Woody Allen, "Without Feathers"

Saturday, Sep 25, 2004

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

-- Paul Valery, 1895

Tuesday, Sep 28, 2004

Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything.

-- Floyd Dell

Saturday, Oct 2, 2004

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Tuesday, Oct 5, 2004

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt, 'This Is My Story,' 1937

Saturday, Oct 9, 2004

What on earth would a man do with himself if something did not stand in his way?

-- H.G. Wells

Tuesday, Oct 12, 2004

I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.

-- Carl Sagan

Saturday, Oct 16, 2004

The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.

-- Herbert Agar

Tuesday, Oct 19, 2004

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

-- Laurence J. Peter

Saturday, Oct 23, 2004

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.---

-- (unknown)

Tuesday, Oct 26, 2004

A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures.

-- Daniel Webster

Saturday, Oct 30, 2004

The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.

-- Robertson Davies, "A Voice from the Attic", 1960

Tuesday, Nov 2, 2004

If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day.

-- John A. Wheeler

Saturday, Nov 6, 2004

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

-- A. A. Milne

Tuesday, Nov 9, 2004

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

-- Thomas H. Huxley

Saturday, Nov 13, 2004

All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.

-- Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938)

Tuesday, Nov 16, 2004

Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel.

-- William Hazlitt

Saturday, Nov 20, 2004

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

Tuesday, Nov 23, 2004

An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions.

-- Robert A. Humphrey

Saturday, Nov 27, 2004

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Tuesday, Nov 30, 2004

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.

-- Robertson Davies

Saturday, Dec 4, 2004

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.

-- Anatole France

Tuesday, Dec 7, 2004

Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control.

-- Don Marquis

Saturday, Dec 11, 2004

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

-- P. D. James

Tuesday, Dec 14, 2004

Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.

-- Al Franken, "Oh, the Things I Know", 2002

Tuesday, Dec 21, 2004

Seek simplicity, and distrust it.

-- Alfred North Whitehead

Tuesday, Dec 28, 2004

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.

-- David Friedman

Tuesday, Jan 4, 2005

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

Tuesday, Jan 11, 2005

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Tuesday, Jan 18, 2005

A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.

-- Edward R. Murrow

Tuesday, Jan 25, 2005

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

-- Samuel Johnson

Tuesday, Feb 1, 2005

Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.

-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Tuesday, Feb 8, 2005

I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.

-- Franklin P. Adams

Tuesday, Feb 15, 2005

Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.

-- Aristotle

Tuesday, Feb 22, 2005

There are two kinds of light--the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.

-- James Thurber

Tuesday, Mar 1, 2005

The educator must above all understand how to wait - to reckon the effects in the light of the future, not of the present.

-- Ellen Key

Tuesday, Mar 8, 2005

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

-- Paul Valery

Tuesday, Mar 15, 2005

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

-- Henry Adams

Tuesday, Mar 22, 2005

When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.

-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Tuesday, Mar 29, 2005

The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.

-- Nicholas Butler

Tuesday, Apr 5, 2005

For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.

-- Clifton Fadiman

Tuesday, Apr 12, 2005

Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.

-- Robert Frost

Tuesday, Apr 19, 2005

A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.

-- George Iles

Tuesday, Apr 26, 2005

The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.

-- Don Marquis

Tuesday, May 3, 2005

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.

-- James M. Barrie

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

-- Voltaire

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

-- H. L. Mencken

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.

-- Tom Stoppard

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess, than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.

-- Mark Twain, Mark Twain's Autobiography

Tuesday, Jun 7, 2005

Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.

-- Jules de Gaultier

Tuesday, Jun 14, 2005

Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't the fine line between sanity and madness gotten finer?

-- George Price

Tuesday, Jun 21, 2005

Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast.

-- Douglas Adams 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

Tuesday, Jun 28, 2005

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

-- Bertrand Russell

Tuesday, Jul 5, 2005

Men are generally idle, and ready to satisfy themselves, and intimidate the industry of others, by calling that impossible which is only difficult.

-- Samuel Johnson, Life of Boerhaave

Tuesday, Jul 12, 2005

Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves.

-- Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Blues for a Red Planet)

Tuesday, Jul 19, 2005

We all have at least two sides. The world we live in is a world of opposites. And the trick is to reconcile those opposing things. I've always liked both sides. In order to appreciate one you have to know the other. The more darkness you can gather up, the more light you can see too.

-- David Lynch

Tuesday, Jul 26, 2005

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

Tuesday, Aug 2, 2005

In great affairs men show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small things they show themselves as they are.

-- Nicholas Chamfort

Tuesday, Aug 9, 2005

The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential...these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.

-- Eddie Robinson

Tuesday, Aug 16, 2005

First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again - and, moreover, give reasons why we believe.

-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Tuesday, Aug 23, 2005

No matter how dark things seem to be or actually are, raise your sights and see the possibilities - always see them, for they're always there.

-- Dr. Norman Vincent Peale

Tuesday, Aug 30, 2005

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so

-- Shakespeare, Hamlet

Tuesday, Sep 6, 2005

We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.

-- Eric Hoffer

Tuesday, Sep 13, 2005

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

-- G. K. Chesterton

Tuesday, Sep 20, 2005

All human situations have their inconveniences. We feel those of the present but neither see nor feel those of the future; and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse.

-- Benjamin Franklin

Tuesday, Sep 27, 2005

We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.

-- R. D. Laing

Tuesday, Oct 4, 2005

Sane and intelligent human beings are like all other human beings, and carefully and cautiously and diligently conceal their private real opinions from the world and give out fictitious ones in their stead for general consumption.

-- Mark Twain, Mark Twain In Eruption

Tuesday, Oct 11, 2005

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

-- Voltaire

Tuesday, Oct 18, 2005

The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.

-- Bertrand Russell

Tuesday, Oct 25, 2005

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer

Tuesday, Nov 1, 2005

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

-- Albert Einstein, (attributed)

Tuesday, Nov 8, 2005

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

-- Henry Adams

Tuesday, Nov 15, 2005

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.

-- G. K. Chesterton

Tuesday, Nov 22, 2005

He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.

-- Chinese Proverb

Tuesday, Nov 29, 2005

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.

-- Leonard Bernstein

Tuesday, Dec 6, 2005

Nothing is more common than unfulfilled potential.

-- Howard Hendricks

Tuesday, Dec 20, 2005

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

--- John Cage

Tuesday, Dec 13, 2005

Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go much further than people with vastly superior talent.

-- Sophia Loren

Tuesday, Dec 27, 2005

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

-- Dalton Camp

Tuesday, Jan 3, 2006

The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.

-- Sir William Osler

Tuesday, Jan 10, 2006

Success is living up to your potential. That's all. Wake up with a smile and go after life...Live it, enjoy it, taste it, smell it, feel it.

-- Joe Kapp

Tuesday, Jan 17, 2006

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.

-- Erica Jong

Tuesday, Jan 24, 2006

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.

-- Thomas Sowell

Tuesday, Jan 31, 2006

You're never too old to become younger.

-- Mae West

Tuesday, Feb 7, 2006

It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.

-- Walter Bagehot, "Biographical Studies", 1863

Tuesday, Feb 14, 2006

A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.

-- P. J. O'Rourke

Tuesday, Feb 21, 2006

If you don't know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else.

-- Laurence J. Peter

Tuesday, Feb 28, 2006

Honesty may be the best policy, but it's important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.

-- George Carlin

Tuesday, Mar 7, 2006

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

-- Peter De Vries

Tuesday, Mar 14, 2006

Nobody believes the official spokesman... but everybody trusts an unidentified source.

-- Ron Nesen

Tuesday, Mar 21, 2006

Personality can open doors, but only character can keep them open.

-- Elmer G. Letterman

Tuesday, Mar 28, 2006

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.

-- Albert Camus

Tuesday, Apr 4, 2006

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

-- Peter Ustinov

Tuesday, Apr 11, 2006

It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.

-- Enrico Fermi

Tuesday, Apr 18, 2006

Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.

-- George Santayana

Tuesday, Apr 25, 2006

When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.

-- William Hazlitt

Tuesday, May 2, 2006

Only by opening the door of possibility can a vision be given enough room to grow into a reality.

-- Lauren Zimmerman (www.enlightpress.com)

Tuesday, May 9, 2006

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.

-- Peter Drucker

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.

-- William G. McAdoo

Quote for May 23, 2006

The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.

-- Bertrand Russell

Quote for , May 30

When it is not necessary to make a decision, it is necessary not to make a decision.

-- Lord Falkland

Quote for , Jun 6

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.

-- Thomas Berger

Quote for , Jun 13

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Quote for , Jun 20

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.

-- Upton Sinclair

Quote for , Jun 27

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.

-- William Dement

Quote for , Jul 4

Wisdom is what's left after we've run out of personal opinions.

-- Cullen Hightower

Quote for , Jul 11

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well.

-- Horace Walpole

Quote for , Jul 18

When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.

-- William Hazlitt

Quote for , Jul 25

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

-- W. H. Auden

Quote for , Aug 1

Tradition is what you resort to when you don't have the time or the money to do it right.

-- Kurt Herbert Alder

Quote for , Aug 8

The intelligent man is one who has successfully fulfilled many accomplishments, and is yet willing to learn more.

-- Ed Parker

Quote for , Aug 15

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

-- Samuel Butler

Quote for , Aug 22

A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

-- Oscar Wilde

Quote for , Aug 29

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

-- Thomas Carlyle

Quote for , Sep 5

A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.

-- Thomas Szasz

Quote for , Sep 12

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Quote for , Sep 19

Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves.

-- Carl Sagan

Quote for , Sep 26

The abyss is nothing more than a blank screen, an opportunity on which to paint the future.

-- Lauren Zimmerman (www.enlightpress.com)

Quote for , Oct 3

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

-- Sir Francis Bacon

Quote for , Oct 10

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

-- Bertrand Russell

Quote for , Oct 17

The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.

-- Horace Walpole

Quote for , Oct 24

People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.

-- A. J. Liebling

Quote for , Oct 31

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

-- Walter Scott

Quote for , Nov 7

The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.

-- Bret Harte

Quote for , Nov 14

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it. -- Bret Harte -- Michel de Montaigne

Quote for , Nov 21

In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.

-- Peter Ustinov

Quote for , Nov 28

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

-- Aldous Huxley

Quote for , Dec 5

College isn't the place to go for ideas.

-- Helen Keller

Quote for , Jan 2

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

-- Mark Twain

Quote for , Jan 9

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.

-- W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

Quote for , Jan 16

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

-- Jack London

Quote for Jan 23

Impatience is your mind’s resistance to the process of your soul.

-- Lauren Zimmerman (www.enlightpress.com)

Quote for Jan 30

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

-- Henry David Thoreau

Quote for Saturday Feb 6

Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.

-- Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love

Quote for Feb 13

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer

Quote for Feb 20

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Quote for Feb 27

Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there.

-- Clare Booth Luce

Quote for Saturday Mar 6

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.

-- E. F. Schumacher

Quote for Mar 13

Sanity is a madness put to good use.

-- George Santayana

Quote for Mar 20

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

-- E. M. Forster

Quote for Mar 27

Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.

-- Edward De Bono

Quote for Wednesday Apr 3

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

-- Thomas H. Huxley

Quote for Apr 10

The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught.

-- Marquis de Vauvenargues

Quote for Apr 17

You cannot change anything but yourself, but in changing yourself, you change your reality.

-- Lauren Zimmerman (www.enlightpress.com)

Quote for Apr 24

All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.

-- James Thurber

Quote for Monday May 1

We do what we must, and call it by the best names.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quote for May 8

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.

-- Edwin Schlossberg

Quote for May 15

Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

-- Voltaire

Quote for May 22

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

-- Will Durant

Quote for May 29

An executive is a person who always decides; sometimes he decides correctly, but he always decides.

-- John H. Patterson

Quote for Friday Jun 5

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

-- Kurt Vonnegut

Quote for Jun 12

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

-- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 1953

Quote for Jun 19

I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light.

-- Isaac Newton

Quote for Jun 26

In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be.

-- Hubert H. Humphrey

Quote for Wednesday Jul 3

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.

-- Thomas H. Huxley

Quote for Jul 10

He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.

-- M. C. Escher

Quote for Jul 17

The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase; if you pursue happiness you'll never find it.

-- C. P. Snow

Quote for Jul 24

The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.

-- Robertson Davies, "A Voice from the Attic", 1960

Quote for Jul 31

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

-- Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism

Quote for Aug 7

The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool.

-- Jane Wagner

Quote for Aug 14

People make choices based upon how much they believe in themselves.

-- Lauren Zimmerman (www.enlightpress.com)

Quote for Aug 21

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

-- Bertrand Russell

Quote for Aug 28

An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly.

-- Edwin P. Whipple

Quote for Thursday Sep 4

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.

-- Stephen Jay Gould

Quote for Sep 11

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well.

-- Horace Walpole

Quote for Sep 18

It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously.

-- Peter Ustinov

Quote for Sep 25

A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.

-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Quote for Tuesday Oct 2

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.

-- Albert Camus

Quote for Oct 9

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

-- Alan Kay

Quote for Oct 16

A fellow who is always declaring he's no fool usually has his suspicions.

-- Wilson Mizner

Quote for Oct 23

No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar.

-- Donald Foster

Quote for Oct 30

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.

-- Anatole France

Quote for Saturday Nov 6

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

-- Samuel Johnson, (attributed)

Quote for Nov 13

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

-- Robert Frost

Quote for Nov 20

It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.

-- Alec Bourne

Quote for Nov 27

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

-- Robert Benchley

Quote for Thursday Dec 4

You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?"

-- George Bernard Shaw, "Back to Methuselah" (1921), part 1, act 1

Quote for Dec 11

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

-- Thomas H. Huxley

Quote for Dec 18

There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.

-- Denis Diderot

Quote for Dec 25

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.

-- Aleister Crowley

Quote for Monday Jan 1

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.

-- Gail Godwin

Quote for Jan 8

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

-- G. K. Chesterton

Quote for Jan 15

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.

-- Herbert Spencer

Quote for Jan 22

The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium.

--Norbet Platt

Quote for Feb 12

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

-- H. L. Mencken

Quote for Feb 19

The conception of two people living together for twenty-five years without having a cross word suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep.

-- Alan Patrick Herbert

Quote for Feb 26

It's all right letting yourself go as long as you can let yourself back.

-- Mick Jagger

Quote for Thursday Mar 4

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?

-- Harry Shearer

Quote for Mar 11

Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.

-- Bertrand Russell

Quote for Mar 25

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

-- H. G. Wells, The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914)

Quote for Monday Apr 1

The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.

-- Frank Herbert

Quote for Apr 8

Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

-- Mark Twain, Notebooks (1935)

Quote for Apr 15

Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be.

-- Jim Horning

Quote for Apr 22

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.

-- Vita Sackville-West

Quote for Apr 29

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

-- Charles Baudelaire

Quote for Saturday May 6

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.

-- Eugene McCarthy, Time magazine, Feb. 12, 1979

Quote for May 13

I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light.

-- Isaac Newton

Quote for May 20

Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control. -- Don Marquis

Quote for May 27

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

-- George Santayana, Life of Reason (1905) vol. 1, Introduction

Quote for Wednesday Jun 3

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

-- Adlai E. Stevenson Jr., Speech in Detroit, 7 Oct. 1952

Quote for Jun 10

If a man will begin in certainties he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties.

-- Sir Francis Bacon

Quote for Jun 17

The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.

-- Elbert Hubbard

Quote for Jun 24

We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.

-- H. L. Mencken