Archives for December 2023

If one sticks too rigidly to one’s principles, one would hardly see anybody.
—Agatha Christie (British Novelist)

The world isn’t going backward, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young.
—A. J. Liebling (American Journalist)

Praise the bridge that carried you over.
—George Colman the Younger (English Playwright)

The greatest truth is the most simple one.
—Leo Tolstoy (Russian Novelist)

If you rest, you rust.
—Helen Hayes (American Actress)

Hunger will make a monkey eat pepper.
—Haitian Proverb

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.
—Lillian Hellman (American Playwright)

Principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.
—Christopher Hitchens (Anglo-American Social Critic)

There comes a time when soft power or talking with evil will not work where, unfortunately, hard power is the only thing that works.
—Colin Powell (American Military Leader)

One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.
—Luciano Pavarotti (Italian Tenor)

A man who tries to please all men by weakening his position or compromising his beliefs, in the end has neither position nor beliefs. A man must say what he believes clearly, without dogma, and without guile.
—Pierre Trudeau (Canadian Statesman)

Life has no meaning in itself but it is itself an opportunity to make it meaningful.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho) (Indian Spiritual Teacher)

The difficult thing isn’t living with other people, it’s understanding them.
—Jose Saramago (Portuguese Novelist)

It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.
—Joseph Conrad (Polish-born British Novelist)

To show pity is felt as a sign of contempt because one has clearly ceased to be an object of fear as soon as one is pitied.
—Friedrich Nietzsche (German Philosopher, Scholar)

Though a superior is rather to be loved, yet by the insolent he ought to be feared.
—Bonaventure (Italian Christian Scholar)

A day’s impact is better than a month of dead pull.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (American Jurist, Author)

There is no dealing with great sorrow as if it were under the control of our wills. It is a terrible phenomenon, whose laws we must study, and to whose conditions we must submit, if we would mitigate it.
—Sheridan Le Fanu (Irish Novelist)

Remember that in giving any reason at all for refusing, you lay some foundation for a future request.
—Arthur Helps (British Essayist, Historian)

Reason, sometimes, seems to me to be the faculty our soul possesses of understanding nothing about our body!
—Paul Valery (French Critic, Poet)

There are always people who will be better at something than you are. You have to learn to be a follower before you become a leader.
—Charlie Munger (American Investor, Philanthropist)

The theological systems of men and schools are always determined by the character of their ideal of Christ, the great central fact of the Christian system.
—Josiah Gilbert Holland (American Editor, Novelist)

Learn to use time, think of it as a friend, not an enemy. Don’t waste it in going after things you don’t want.
—Michael Korda (English-born Writer, Novelist)

What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honourable, than that of teaching?
—Harriet Martineau (English Sociologist)

Anybody who says they’re not afraid of war is either a liar, or they’re crazy.
—H. Norman Schwarzkopf (United States Army Officer)

The unjust distribution of goods persists, creating a situation of social sin that cries out to Heaven and limits the possibilities of a fuller life for so many of our brothers.
—Pope Francis (Argentinean Catholic Religious Leader)

All men wish to have truth on their side: but few to be on the side of truth.
—Richard Whately (English Philosopher, Theologian)

The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.
—Thomas S. Kuhn (American Philosopher)

Hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally without having to go outdoors.
—Norman Cousins (American Journalist)

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
—Oliver Sacks (British Neurologist, Writer)

Facts are stubborn things.
—Alain-Rene Lesage (French Novelist, Dramatist)

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Russian Novelist)

Our sweat and our blood have fallen on this land to make other men rich. The pilgrimage is a witness to the suffering we have seen for generations.
—Cesar Chavez (American Labor Leader)

That’s what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you’re through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.
—Frederik Pohl (American Author)

Boyhood is distracted for years with precepts of grammar that are infinitely prolix, perplexed and obscure.
—John Amos Comenius (Czech Educator)

The supreme crime of the church to-day is that everywhere and in all its operations and influences it is on the side of sloth of mind; that it banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it canonizes incompetence.
—Upton Sinclair (American Novelist, Social Reformer)

Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.
—Dee Hock (American Businessman)

No matter how cynical we become, it’s never enough to keep up.
—Lily Tomlin (American Comedy Actress)

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
—William Shakespeare (British Playwright)

Love is the silent conversation between two hearts.
—Paramahansa Yogananda (Indian Hindu Mystic)

The perfection of art is to conceal art.
—Quintilian (Roman Rhetorician, Literary Critic)

Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.
—Jonathan Swift (Irish Satirist)