November Quotations

"You can never do a kindness too soon, because you will never know how soon it will be too late."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"Our best hope for change is a fusion of those concerned about environmental sustainability, social justice, and political democracy into one progressive force."
~~ James Gustave Speth

"Home is the place where, when you go there / They have to take you in"
~~ poet Robert Frost [1874-1963]

"Intellectual virtues are civic virtues; intellectual vices leave the citizens vulnerable to superstition and demagoguery."
~~ George Scialabba

"The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism."
~~ Gore Vidal

"All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts."
~~ Raymond Chandler [1888-1959]

"One immediately recognises a man of judgment by the use he makes of the semicolon."
~~ Henry de Montherlant [1896-1972]

"There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of life getting a living."
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]

"37 seconds well used is a lifetime!"
~~ Mr. Edward Magorium character, as written by Zach Helm

"Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.
~~ Edna Ferber [1885-1968]

"Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to
be relished."
~~ William Wordsworth [1750-1850]

"Writing a book is an adventure: It begins as an amusement, then it becomes a mistress, then a master, and finally a tyrant."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965]

"Somewhere in the world there is an epigram for every dilemma."
~~ Hendrik Willem van Loon [1882-1944]

"I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have had."
~~ Marlene Dietrich [1901-92]

"My father showed me his library, which was very large, and told me to read whatever I wanted, but that if something bored me, I should immediately put it down."
~~ Jorge Luis Borges [1899-1986]

"Morality is all right, but what about dividends?"
~~ Kaiser Wilhelm II [1859-1941]

"Have nothing ... that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."
~~ William Morris

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print;
A book's a book, although there's nothing in't.
~~ George Gordon, Lord Byron [1788-1824]

"Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse."
~~ Hannah Arendt [1906-75]

"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind."
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]

"Trust your editor, and you'll sleep on straw."
~~ John Cheever [1912-82]

"There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money."
~~ Robert Graves [1895-1985]

"Sexual intercourse has never done a man good, and he is lucky if it has not harmed him."
~~ Epicurus [341–270 B.C.E.)

"Henry [Kissinger] does not lie because it is in his interest. He lies because it is in his nature."
~~ Helmut Sonnenfeldt

"A large income is the best recipe for happiness."
~~ Jane Austen [1775-1817]

"The knowledge that the aristocrats take for granted, we must pay for with our youth."
~~ Anton Chekhov [1860-1904]

"Every gun that is made ... signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, and those who are cold and are not clothed."
~~ Dwight D. Eisenhower [1890-1969]

"That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great."
~~ Willa Cather [1873-1947]

"I am so tired of being told that I want mankind to go back to the condition of savages. As if modern city people weren't the crudest, rawest, most crassly savage monkeys that ever existed, when it comes to the relation of man and woman. All I see in our vaunted civilization is men and women smashing each other emotionally and physically to bits, and all I ask is that they should pause and consider."
~~ D.H. Lawrence [1885-1930]

"The sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"The domination of women by men has lasted for fifty thousand years. Why can't it last just fifty more?"
~~ grafitto in Berlin, Germany

"[Mankind is] a herd of beings that must be governed by fraud, effigy, and show."
~~ Edmund Burke [1729-97]

"Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise."
~~ Sigmund Freud [1856-1939]

"If it rained knowledge I'd hold out my hand, but I would not give myself the trouble to go in quest of it."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]

"[Poetry] is not so fine a thing as philosophy – for the same reason that an eagle is not so fine a thing as a truth."
~~ John Keats [1795-1821]

"Indignation is the soul's defense against the wound of doubt."
~~ Allan Bloom

"The superior man is distressed by his want of ability."
~~ Confucius [551-479 B.C.E.]

"Why not make the reader re-read a sentence now and then? It won't hurt him."
~~ Vladimir Nabokov [1899-1977]

"To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness – though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."
~~ Gustave Flaubert [1821-80]

"In the depths of my heart I can't help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless."
~~ Sigmund Freud [1856-1939]

"It is not true that suffering ennobles the character. Happiness does that sometimes; but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive."
~~ W. Somerset Maugham [1874-1965]

"You have to choose: live or tell stories."
~~ Jean-Paul Sartre [1905-80]

"Truisms are best."
~~ Noam Chomsky

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}