Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.
—Dan Quayle (American Head of State)
Nature, in her most dazzling aspects or stupendous parts, is but the background and theater of the tragedy of man.
—John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (British Political leader)
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 (Japanese Buddhist)
The aim of flattery is to soothe and encourage us by assuring us of the truth of an opinion we have already formed about ourselves.
—Edith Sitwell (British Poet)
Perhaps we should comprehend these things better were it not for the persistence of the superstition that human beings habitually think. There is no more persistent superstition than this. Linn
—Nicholas Murray Butler (American Philosopher)
If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum.
—Arthur Eddington (English Astrophysicist)
There is an art, or rather a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
—Douglas Adams
It’s not what you take but what you leave behind that defines greatness.
—Howard Gardner (American Psychologist)
I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.
—Harold Bloom (American Literary Critic)
Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.
—Nikolai Berdyaev (Russian Christian Philosopher)
He didn’t reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away.
—David Foster Wallace (American Novelist)
Books worth reading once are worth reading twice; and what is most important of all, the masterpieces of literature are worth reading a thousand times.
—John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (British Political leader)