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Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge. ~George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, 1921



Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans a fire. ~Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld, translated from French



There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. ~Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith



There is not a more pleasing exercise of the mind than gratitude. It is accompanied with such an inward satisfaction that the duty is sufficiently rewarded by the performance. ~Joseph Addison



Golf is a game where white men can dress up as black pimps and get away with it. ~Robin Williams, 1986



Spending that many hours in the saddle gave a man plenty of time to think. That's why so many cowboys fancied themselves Philosophers. ~Charles M. Russell



There is something about the presence of a cat... that seems to take the bite out of being alone. ~Louis J. Camuti



My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it. ~Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant, 1968



If you came and you found a strange man... teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of the house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don't think twice about it. ~Jerome Singer



It's a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy. ~Lucille Ball



The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease. ~Voltaire



The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. ~Bertrand Russell



Today we know with certainty that segregation is dead. The only question remaining is how costly will be the funeral. ~Martin Luther King, Jr.



Walks. The body advances, while the mind flutters around it like a bird. ~Jules Renard



I had removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on the silver log, pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass, after I was dead. ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Chapter 12



And so we shall have to do more than register and more than vote; we shall have to create leaders who embody virtues we can respect, who have moral and ethical principles we can applaud with enthusiasm. ~Martin Luther King, Jr.



Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals. ~Agnes Repplier, Points of View



All the world is a laboratory to the inquiring mind. ~Martin H. Fischer



We receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our schoolmasters, and one from the world. The third contradicts all that the first two teach us. ~Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu



Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem. ~John Galsworthy