Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage, they are giving evidence at an
inquest.
-- H. L. Mencken If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
- Carl Sagan Teach a parrot the terms "supply and demand" and you've got an economist.
-- Thomas Carlyle Bachelor: the only man who has never told his wife a lie. A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing
nothing.
-- George Benard Shaw Translation "I always thought a dog-lover was a dog who loved another dog." (James Thurber) Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door
and just visit now and then.
-- Katharine Hepburn If a relationship is to evolve, it must go through a series of endings.
-- Lisa Moriyama Translation
"Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one." (Theodore Roosevelt) .. I am indebted to the cat for a particular kind of honorable deceit, for a greater control over
myself, for a characteristic aversion to brutal sounds, and for the need to keep silent for long
per Ah Mozart! He was happily married - but his wife wasn't.
-- Victor Borge History repeats itself; that's one of the things that's wrong with history.
-- Clarence Darrow In a novel, the hero can lay ten girls and marry a virgin for the finish. In a movie, that is not
allowed. The villain can lay anybody he wants, have as much fun and as he wants cheating,
stealing, Translation "For others do I wait ... for higher ones, stronger ones, more triumphant ones, merrier ones, for such as are built squarely in body and soul: laughing lions must come." (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche) "The concerned investment banker is the one who blows the horn on his Mercedes as he drives through a red light." (Anonymous) Be willing to make decisions. That's the most important quality in a good leader. Don't fall victim
to what I call the 'ready-aim-aim-aim-aim syndrome.' You must be willing to fire.
-- Gen. George Translation
The course of true love never did run smooth.
-- William Shakespeare If you want to sing out, sing out, and if you want to be free, be free, 'cause there's a million ways
to be, you know that there are...
-- Cat Stevens, from a song lyric Honorable, adj. Afflicted with an impediment in one's reach. In legislative bodies, it is customary
to mention all members as honorable; as, ``the honorable gentleman is a scurvy cur.'
-- Bierce, A Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.
-- Thomas Jones "I would rather die standing than live on my knees!" (Emiliano Zapata) Translation The world has suffered more from the ravages of ill-advised marriages than from virginity.
-- Ambrose Bierce "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." (Albert Einstein) Wise men make proverbs, but fools repeat them.
- Samuel Palmer Translation
"True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it is lost." (Charles Caleb Colton) I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with
typewriters.
- Frank Lloyd Wright The real questions are the ones that obtrude upon your consciousness whether you like it or not,
the ones that make your mind start vibrating like a jackhammer, the ones that you 'come to terms
with "To be great is to be misunderstood." (Ralph Waldo Emerson) How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create
it herself.
- Anais Nin Translation Whenever I date a guy, I think, is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?
-- Rita Rudner I criticize by creation - not by finding fault.
- Cicero It is a known fact that men are practical, hardheaded realists, in contrast to women, who are
romantic dreamers and actually believe that estrogenic skin cream must do something or they
couldn't cha Translation
Establishing yourself, furnishing a house, building up a comfortable existence, and having that menace hanging over your head all the time - no, I prefer to live in hotels, cafés, just passing through "Be the change that you want to see in the world." (Mohandas Gandhi) Guys are lucky because they get to grow mustaches. I wish I could. It's like having a little pet for
your face.
-- Anita Wise "When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory." (Friedrich Wilhelm Ni Love is temporary insanity curable by marriage.
-- Ambrose Bierce Translation blah "Each friend represents a world in us; a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only in meeting them that a new world is born." (Anais Nin) Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and
retaliation. the foundation of such a method is love.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr. "Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers (six if one went to Harvard)." (Edgar R. Fiedler) Translation
Research is the act of going up alleys to see if they are blind.
-- Plutarch We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.
-- G. K. Chesterton To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.
- Georg Lichtenberg "We're all proud of making little mistakes. It gives us the feeling we don't make any big ones." (Andrew A. Rooney) Translation The gods too are fond of a joke.
-- Aristotle Politics have no relation to morals.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli The optimist sees opportunity in every danger; the pessimist sees danger in every opportunity.
-- Winston Churchill Translation
Bachelor: the only man who has never told his wife a lie. To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being.
-- Tom Robbins Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
-- William Hazlitt It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
-- Pierre Augustin de Beaumarchais We need a president who's fluent in at least one language.
-- Buck Henry Translation Of the seven dwarves, only Dopey had a shaven face. This should tell us something about the
custom of shaving.
-- Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
Sir Arthur Eddington (1882 - 1944) Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
-- Sun Tzu Translation
"It ends not with a bang, but a whimper." (Thomas Stearns Eliot, aka T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Man) If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all." (John Cage) The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing.
Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.
-- Oscar Wilde The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when
we created them.
- Albert Einstein The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.
-- Robert Benchley Translation Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.
-- George E. Woodberry It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four, besides being very amusing. An ideal wife is one who remains faithful to you but tries to be just as charming as if she weren't.
-- Sacha Guitry Translation
"To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die." (Thomas Campbell) There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him asleep.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson "The most beautiful things in the world are the most useless, peacocks and lilies, for instance." (John Ruskin) Every flower must grow through dirt.
-- Anonymous You can pay attention to the fact, in which case you'll probably become a mathematician, or you
can ignore it, in which case you'll probably become a physicist.
-- Len Evans, professor, Northwestern Translation I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.
-- Mae West Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of
genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
-- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart "Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is like expecting a bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian." (Dennis Wholey) Translation
In the past decade or so, the women's magazines have taken to running home-handyperson
articles suggesting that women can learn to fix things just as well as men. These articles are
apparently based When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her. -- Guitry "The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none." (Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881) Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
-- B.F. Skinner What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make other peoples'
decisions for them?
-- Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All Translation "The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason." (John Cage) Parents often talk about the younger generations as if they didn't have anything to do with it. Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
-- Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle Translation
Food, one assumes, provides nourishment; but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of
poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction.
-- John Cage My wife has a split personality, and I hate both of them. "Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ine Why did Nature create man? Was it to show that she is big enough to make mistakes, or was it
pure ignorance?
-- Holbrook Jackson "The face is the soul of the body." (Ludwig Wittgenstein) Translation "A man is only as faithful as his opportunity." (Chris Rock) In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been
widely regarded as a bad move.
-- Douglas Adams People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.
-- Otto von Bismarck Translation
