Favorite Quotations

I combed through the forums and couldn't find a thread for posting random quotes.
We all have favorites be they from writers, politicians, rock stars or porn stars.

I'm partial to:

Dorothy Parker

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

Oscar Wilde

"Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood."

Harlan Ellison

"In my ugly, elitist opinion we are not all entitled to voice our opinions, we are entitled to pass along our informed opinions."

What are some of your favorites?

 

I have a collection of snippets. Here are a few.

"Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom."
Leonardo da Vinci

“The great religions are the ships. 
Poets the life boats.
 Every sane person I know 
has jumped overboard.”
Hafiz

“No permanence is ours, we are a wave that flows to fit whatever form it finds.”
Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

“The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.”
Carlos Castaneda

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
W.B. Yeats

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, 
everything would appear to man as it is, 
infinite.”
William Blake

 

"If you're going through hell, keep going."

Winston Churchill

 

"You know there ain't no Devil, there's just God when he's drunk."
-Tom Waits

 

From Desdireta. Now attributed to Max Ehrmann, which has been disputed.

"You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here."

Edit--Not exactly a quotation, but I'm leaving it.

 

I'm still the angel to a girl who hates to sin. —Tori Amos

I see by Walter Winchell that J.S. Bach put on black gloves to compose a requiem mass. —Saul Bellow

There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want. —Calvin & Hobbes

You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. —John Ciardi

Life is a paragraph and death, I think, is no parenthesis. —e.e. cummings

Age does not diminish the extreme disappointment of having a scoop of ice cream fall from the cone. —Jim Fiebig

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. —Robert Heinlein

Wild nights are my glory. —Madeline L'Engle

Be obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant; be pompous, obese, and eat cactus. Criticize things you don't know about; be oblong and have your knees removed. —Steve Martin

I am of the order whose purpose is not to teach the world a lesson but to explain that school is over. —Henry Miller

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. —Friedrich Nietzsche

After death, human thought lives on by momentum. —Vladimir Nabokov

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows. —George Orwell

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink—greetings! —George Orwell

She is the heart that strikes a whole octave. After her all songs are possible. —Rainer Maria Rilke

Sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears. —Paul Simon

Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief. —U2

If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. —Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The gravity is so light today, that I feel as though I might scamper to the top of the Empire State Building with a manhole cover, and fling it into New Jersey. That would surely be an improvement on George Washington's sailing a silver dollar across the Rappahannock. And yet some people insist that there is no such thing as progress. — Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time. —Steven Wright

 

In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods;
they have not forgotten this.

Terry Pratchett

 

A few more of my favorites.


“Remember to always be yourself. Unless you suck.”
― Joss Whedon



A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it is by no means the most interesting.
The Third Doctor


“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”
― Dorothy Parker

 

I kept a quote book in high school...I think I still have it around somewhere. There's somewhere between 800-1000 quotes in there, I think.

One that has stuck with me since I read it ~15 years ago...

...from Summer Sisters, by Judy Blume.

 

A few thoughts about learning.

“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.”
Albert Einstein

“The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you.”
B. B. King

“It has been a long trip," said Milo, climbing onto the couch where the princesses sat; "but we would have been here much sooner if I hadn't made so many mistakes. I'm afraid it's all my fault."
"You must never feel badly about making mistakes," explained Reason quietly, "as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons."
From "The Phantom TollBooth by Norton Juster (Jadzia's favorite book)

 

"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." - Albert Einstein

"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Issac Newton

"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose." - Bill Gates

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - Edgar Dijkstra

"There is no teaching, only learning." - Warren Buffet (?)

 

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
Blaise Pascal

"You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away".
Antoine de Saint-Exupery 1900-1944

Evil is easy, and has infinite forms.
Blaise Pascal

 

"Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night." - Woody Allen

"Woody, does that include seducing your stepchildren?" - Chris Noyb

 

Here's a sappy one, 'cause I'm in the mood.

"When I saw you, I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew." –William Shakespeare

 

I'll chip this in as an extra:

The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars,
As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand!
O, that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!

 

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M A R A T H O N: I N F I N I T Y​

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"When You have eliminated all which is​

impossible, then whatever remains,​

however improbable, must be the truth "​

-Sherlock Holmes​