Quotes


  • I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.
    --Blaise Pascal

  • You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth
    without it.
    --Gilbert K. Chesterton

  • Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
    --William Somerset Maugham

  • Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.
    --Umberto Eco

  • Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.
    --Winston Churchill

  • Men have become the tools of their tools.
    --Henry David Thoreau

  • I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
    --Rabindranath Tagore

  • My art and profession is to live.
    --Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

  • The most beautiful thing we can experience is the misterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
    --Albert Einstein

  • Truth cannot afford to be tolerant where it faces positive evil.
    --Rabindranath Tagore

  • All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
    --Arthur Schopenhauer

  • It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.
    --Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.
    --Oliver W. Holmes

  • Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
    --Thomas Paine

  • Want of love is a degree of callousness; for love is the perfection of consciousness. We do not love because we do not comprehend, or rather we do not comprehend because we do not love. For love is the ultimate meaning of everything around us. It is not a mere sentiment; it is truth; it is the joy that is at the root of all creation.
    --Rabindranath Tagore

  • "What terrifies you most in purity," I asked? "Haste," William answered.
    --Umberto Eco

  • Only free men can negotiate; prisonners cannot enter into contracts.
    --Nelson Mandela

  • I do not think it is necessary to believe that the same God who has given us our senses, reason, and intelligence wished us to abandon their use, giving us by some other means the information that we could gain through them.
    --Galileo Galilei

  • In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.
    --Mark Twain

  • Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
    --Albert Einstein

  • Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
    --Henry David Thoreau

  • Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
    --Francis Bacon

  • The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
    --Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

  • We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.
    --François Duc De La Rochefoucald

  • This is the ultimate end of man, to find the One which is in him; which is his truth, which is his soul; the key with which he opens the gate of the spiritual life, the heavenly kingdom.
    --Rabindranath Tagore

  • Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those whom they have slain.
    --Fëdor Mikhailovich Dostoevski

  • Anybody who goes to see a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.
    --Samuel Goldwin

  • Whatever we treasure for ourselves separates us from others; our possessions are our limitations.
    --Rabindranath Tagore

  • This is the ultimate end of man, to find the One which is in him; which is his truth, which is his soul; the key with which he opens the gate of the spiritual life, the heavenly kingdom.
    --Rabindranath Tagore

  • When man tries to imagine Paradise on earth, the immediate result is a very respectable Hell.
    --Paul Claudel

  • O human race, born to fly upward, wherefore at a little wind dost thou so fall?
    --Dante Alighieri

  • The mass of men live a life of quiet desperation.
    --Henry David Thoreau

  • In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness.
    --Umberto Eco

  • He who lives not to others, lives little to himself.
    --Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

  • Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
    --Albert Einstein

  • As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
    --Henry David Thoreau

  • Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour.
    --Gioacchino Rossini

  • The progress of our soul is like a perfect poem. It has an infinite idea which once realised makes all movements full of meaning and joy. But if we detach its movements from that ultimate idea, if we do not see the infinite rest and only see the infinite motion, then existence appears to us a monstrous evil., impetuously rushing towards an unending aimlessness.
    --Rabindranath Tagore

  • When neither their property nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content.
    --Niccolò Machiavelli

  • Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.
    --Peter Ustinov

  • There never was in the world two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains. The most universal quality is diversity.
    --Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

  • Trees are the extreme endeavour of the earth to speak to the sky.
    --Rabindranath Tagore

  • The wise only possesses ideas; the greater part of mankind are possessed by them.
    --Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  • A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
    --George Bernard Shaw

  • You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
    --Mahatma Gandhi

  • There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.
    --Gilbert K. Chesterton

  • We do not inherit the land, we borrow it from our children.
    --Native American Proverb

  • Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire nation, or the entire human race.
    --Giambattista Vico

  • Common sense is not so common.
    --Voltaire

  • Why, Sir, Sherry [Thomas Sheridan] is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, Sir, is not in Nature.
    --Samuel Johnson

  • In analyzing history, do not be profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.
    --Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • Those who have everything but thee, my God, laugh at those who have nothing but thyself.
    --Rabindranath Tagore

  • Even on the most exalted throne in the world we are only sitting on our own bottom.
    --Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

  • Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
    --Confucius

  • Nature should have been pleased to have made this age miserable, without making it also ridiculous.
    --Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

  • Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
    --Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.
    --Albert Einstein

  • The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words which are clear; the great truth has great silence.
    --Rabindranath Tagore

  • One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
    --Bertrand Russell

  • The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked.
    --Umberto Eco

  • I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
    --Mark Twain

  • Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
    --Rudyard Kipling

  • There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.
    --Robert F. Kennedy

  • Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.
    --Gilbert K. Chesterton

  • More Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes at my Emerson web site.

  • More Umberto Eco quotes at Porta Ludovica.

  • More Rabindranath Tagore quotes