So difficult
it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we
have nothing else but words to do it with.
-John Locke, philosopher (1632-1704)
A living language
is like a man suffering incessantly from small haemorrhages, and what
it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other
tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
-H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)
[The American Language]
Writing is
like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights,
but you make the whole trip that way.
-E.L. Doctorow, writer (1931- )
There are
some things so serious you have to laugh at them.
-Niels Henrik David Bohr (1885-1962), Danish chemist,
physicist
The sun, with
all those planets revolving around it and dependent upon it, can still
ripen a bunch of grapes as it if had nothing else in the universe to
do.
-Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer (1564-1642)
Words are
chameleons, which reflect the colour of their environment.
-Learned Hand, jurist (1872-1961)
Wilkommen,
bienvenue, welcome, c'mon in...
-Madeleine Kahn as Lily Von Shtupp
in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles
The reverse
side also has a reverse side.
-Japanese
proverb
The only gift
is giving to the poor; / All else is exchange.
-Thiruvalluvar, poet (c. 30 BCE)
Easy reading
is damned hard writing.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne, writer (1804-1864)
Sometimes
I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not.
In either case, the idea is quite staggering.
-Arthur C Clarke, science fiction writer (1917-
)
We allow our
ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone,
alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
-Maya Angelou, poet (1928- )
Why should
I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why
should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?
-Epicurus, philosopher (c.341-270 BCE)
If the gods
listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly
perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.
-Epicurus, philosopher (c. 341-270 BCE)
A committee
is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
-Barnett
Cocks
Nature is
trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us.
We are not the only experiment.
-R.
Buckminster Fuller, engineer, designer, and architect (1895-1983)
The poet judges
not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a
helpless thing.
-Walt
Whitman, poet (1819-92)
The instinct
of a man is to pursue everything that flies from him, and to
fly from all that pursue him.
-Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)
There are
times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth,
just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in
broad daylight.
-Vaclav Havel, writer, Czech Republic president
(1936- )
I have suffered
from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot
more if I had been understood.
-Clarence Darrow, lawyer and author (1857-1938)
Nothing fixes
a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
-Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592)
What you are
thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
The decent
moderation of today will be the least of human things tomorrow. At the
time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the
good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a
number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded
that they should burn none at all.
-Maurice Maeterlinck, poet, dramatist, and Nobel
laureate (1862-1949)
Letter writing
is the only device for combining solitude with good company.
-George Gordon Byron, poet (1788-1824)
And the day
came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful
than the risk it took to blossom.
-Anais Nin, writer (1903-1977)
Art is a house
that tries to be haunted.
-Emily Dickinson, poet (1830-1886)
Writing is
the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something
else.
-Gloria Steinem
Nobody can
make you feel inferior without your permission.
-Eleanor Roosevelt, diplomat, author, and lecturer
(1884-1962)
Not that the
story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
-Henry David Thoreau
Do not write
merely to be understood, write so that you cannot possibly be misunderstood.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
No passion
in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.
-HG Wells
An author's
greatest fear is to appear, as a result of revision, less than brilliant.
The good editor convinces authors that without revision their genius
will be obscured.
-Arthur
Plotnick, novelist, reporter, reviewer, and editor.
The difference
between the right word and the nearly right word is the same as that
between lightning and the lightning bug.
-Mark Twain
I am sorry
for the length of my letter, but I had not the time to write a short
one.
-Blaise Pascal
When something
can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.
-Enrique Jardial Poncela
If everyone
who wrote would put himself in his reader's shoes, at least for a time,
then we'd all write a little better and walk a little easier. Becoming
the reader is the essence of becoming a writer.
-John O'Hayre
When I say
writing, O, believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
Don't worry
about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.
-Charles Schultz
There are
a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he
takes up a pen to write.
-William
Makepeace Thackeray, novelist(1811-1863)
"You'd
better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It's unpleasantly like
being drunk."
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"You ask a glass of water."
-Exchange
between Ford and Arthur,
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Anyone who
is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account
be allowed to do the job.
-Some wisdom from The Book, The Hitch Hiker's
Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
...Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins
because he had achieved so much... the wheel, New York, wars, and so
on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water
having a good time. But conversely the dolphins believed themselves
to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons.
-More wisdom from The Book. see above.
There is a
theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe
is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced
by something even more bizarrely inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
-Ditto
Paranoids
are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they're paranoid, but because
they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid
situations.
-One of the few things I took away from Gravity's
Rainbow before I jus simply quit reading it, Thomas Pynchon
Doctor how
can you diagnose someone with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and then
act like I had some choice about barging in here right now?
-Melvin, As
Good As It Gets
I object,
your honor! This trial is a travesty. It's a travesty of a mockery of
a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.
-Fielding Mellish, Woody Allan's Bananas
I wash born
here, an I wash raished here, and dad gum it, I am gonna die here, an
no sidewindin bushwackin, hornswaglin, cracker croaker is gonna rouin
me bishen cutter.
-Gabby Johnson, Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles
No Trespassing
- 4 / 17ths of a Haiku.
-Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America
The human
race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
-Mark Twain
By doing just
a little every day, I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm
me.
-Ashleigh Brilliant
The last thing
one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.
-Blaise Pascal
You can't
have everything... where would you put it?
-Steven Wright
When anyone
says "theoretically," they really mean "not really."
-David Parnas
I never let
my schooling get in the way of my education.
-Mark Twain
A word is
not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living
thought, and may vary greatly in color and content according to the
circumstances and the time in which it is used.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, opinion, Towne v. Eisner,
January 7, 1918
It was cold
out there, bitter, biting, cutting, piercing, hyperborean, marmoreal
cold, and there were all these Minnesotans running around outdoors,
happy as lambs in the spring.
-Charles Kuralt, Dateline America, 1979
We don't just
borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down
alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new
vocabulary.
-James D. Nicoll
No man means
all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery
and thought is viscous.
-Henry Brooks Adams "The Education of Henry
Adams"
For your born
writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon
the right word.
-Catherine Drinker Bowen
Words are,
of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
-Rudyard Kipling
Moses dragged
us through the desert to the one place in the Middle East where there
is no oil.
-Golda Meir
I think every
woman is entitled to a middle husband she can forget.
-Adela Rogers St. John
Pursuit and
seduction are the essence of sexuality. It's part of the sizzle.
-Camille Paglia
Do not blame
God for having created the tiger, but thank him for not having given
it wings.
-Indian Proverb
He who asks
is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.
-Chinese proverb
If you believe
everything you read, better not read.
-Japanese proverb
Praise the
young and they will blossom
-Irish Proverb
The church
is near but the road is icy; the bar is far away but I'll walk carefully.
-Russian proverb
I notice that
you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That
is the way to write English--it is the modern way and the best way.
Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When
you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill
most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they
are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An
adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon
a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.
-Mark Twain, Letter to D. W. Bowser, 3/20/1880
Wrinkles should
merely indicate where the smiles have been.
-Mark Twain, Following the Equator
Even Noah
got no salary for the first six months--partly on account of the weather
and partly because he was learning navigation.
-Mark Twain, Eruption
Experience
is an author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts
the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.
-Mark Twain, Is Shakespeare Dead
The time to
begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction.
By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is
that you really want to say.
-Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903
It is no use
to keep private information which you can't show off.
-Mark Twain, "An Author's Soldiering,"
1887
To get the
right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the
diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single
sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody
can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering
a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering
paragraph.
-Mark Twain, Letter to Emeline Beach, 2/10/1868
The covers of this book are too far apart.
-Ambrose Bierce
I wrote a
few children's books... Not on purpose.
-Steven Wright
I was going
70 miles an hour and got stopped by a cop who said, "Do you know
the speed limit is 55 miles per hour?" "Yes, officer, but
I wasn't going to be out that long..."
-Steven
Wright
When I was
a little kid we had a sand box. It was a quicksand box. I was an only
child... eventually.
-Steven Wright
Women might
be able to fake orgasms, but men can fake whole relationships.
-Sharon Stone
Women need
a reason to have sex.... Men just need a place.
-Billy Crystal
On the one
hand, we'll never experience childbirth. On the other hand, we can open
all our own jars.
-Bruce Willis
I put instant
coffee in a microwave oven and almost went back in time.
-Steven Wright
How beautiful
it is to do nothing, and then rest afterwards.
-Spanish Proverb
A mathematician
is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
-P. Erdos
We're going
to turn this team around 360 degrees.
-Jason Kidd
Christ died
for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing
them?
-Jules Feiffer
Some mornings,
it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.
-Emo Phillips
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 [ed. note: a palm reader once
looked an my hand and was moved to share this quote with me...]
Beware of
any enterprise that requires new clothing.
-Henry David Thoreau
When I got
to the top of Everest, I was tired.
-Aracelli Segarra
Let us endeavour
to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
-Mark Twain
Opportunity
is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks
like work.
-Thomas Edison
Of course
the people don't want war ...that is understood. But, after all, it
is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always
a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a
fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of
the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are
being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and
exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
-Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler's Deputy Chief
and Luftwaffe Commander, {at the Nuremberg trials, 1946}
You think
your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world,
but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that
tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people
who were alive, or who have ever been alive.
-James
Baldwin, writer (1924-1987)
I hate mankind,
for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know
how bad I am.
-Samuel Johnson
Every gun
that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are
not
fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president
(1890-1969)
It is not
only true that the language we use puts words in our mouths; it also
puts notions in our heads.
-Wendell Johnson
In all of
us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers
out in sleep.
-Socrates, philosopher (469?-399 BCE)
There are
10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only
a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call
them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
-Richard Feynman, physicist, Nobel laureate (1918-1988)
Works of imagination
should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative
they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet and philosopher
(1772-1834)
The gem cannot
be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.
-Chinese Proverb
Danger and
delight grow on one stalk.
-English Proverb
When one tugs
at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the
world.
-John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)
A man's ethical
behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social
ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor
way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward
after death.
-Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
You cannot
simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.
-Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Only two things
are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about
the former.
-Albert Einstein
I know not
with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will
be fought with sticks and stones.
-Albert Einstein
God doesn't
play dice.
-Albert Einstein
Imagination
is more important than knowledge.
-Albert Einstein
He who joyfully
marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He
has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord
would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away
with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country
stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable an ignorable war
is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action!
It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but
an act of murder.
-Albert Einstein
Washing one's
hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to
side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
-Paulo Freire, educator (1921-1997)
Him that I
love, I wish to be free -- even from me.
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh, writer (1906-2001)
An ounce of
mother is worth a pound of clergy.
-Spanish proverb
His mother
had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences
of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even
more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well
better take the action that would create it.
-Lois McMaster Bujold, writer (1949- )
Please subdue
the anguish of your soul. Nobody is destined only to happiness or to
pain. The wheel of life takes one up and down by turn.
-Kalidasa, dramatist (c. 4th century)
God, to me,
it seems, is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper.
-R. Buckminster Fuller, engineer, designer, and
architect (1895-1983)
You become
writer by writing. It is a yoga.
-R.K. Narayan, novelist (1906-2001)
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