It’s just as easy to be happy with a lot of money as with a little.
—Marvin Traub (American Businessman)
We are only vulnerable and ridiculous through our pretensions.
—Delphine de Girardin (French Novelist)
Collect impressions. Don’t be in a hurry to write them down. Because that’s something music can do better than painting: it can centralise variations of colour and light within a single picture—a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is.
—Claude Debussy (French Composer)
If heaven had granted me five more years, I could have become a real painter.
—Hokusai (Japanese Artist, Wood Engraver)
A fault confessed is half redressed.
—African Proverb
One ought to go too far, in order to know how far one can go.
—Heinrich Boll (German Writer)
You gotta play the hand that’s dealt you. There may be pain in that hand, but you play it.
—James Brady (American Government Official)
An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid.
—Ernest Rutherford (New Zealand-born Physicist)
It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
—Eugene Ionesco (French Dramatist)
The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
—Lionel Trilling (American Critic)
Except that right side up is best, there is not much to learn about holding a baby. There are one hundred and fifty-two distinctly different ways—and all are right! At least all will do.
—Heywood Broun (American Journalist)
You will never know a man till you do business with him.
—Scottish Proverb
We find it hard to believe that other people’s thoughts are as silly as our own, but they probably are.
—James Harvey Robinson (American Historian)
The formula for success is simple: practice and concentration then more practice and more concentration.
—Babe Didrikson Zaharias (American Athlete)
By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.
—Friedrich Engels (German Socialist Political Philosopher)