April 2013 Quotations

"If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."
~~ Robert Frost [1874-1963]

"Art is not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is the desire to tell it and [to] hide it at the same time."
~~ Thornton Wilder [1897-1975]

"Why can't I say 'What needs doing?' and then go do it?"
~~ filmmaker Sara Lamm

"I may be dumb but I'm not stupid."
~~ wrongly attributed to football player & announcer Terry Bradshaw, but predates him by fifty-odd years

"Ninety percent of [baseball] is half mental."
~~ Jim Wohlford

"Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something [that] you don't believe is right."
~~ Dame Jane Goodall

"If you retain nothing else, always remember the most important rule of beauty, which is: Who cares?"
~~ Tina Fey

"Intellectual labor tears a man out of society. A craft, on the other hand, leads him toward men."
~~ Franz Kafka [1883-1924]

"If you don't have confidence, you'll alway find a way not to win."
~~ Olympic champion Carl Lewis

"Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but to see quickly how to make them good."
~~ Bertolt Brecht [1898-1956]

"Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is."
~~ writer Maxim Gorky [1868-1936]

“Peace is something that you only get by war or the threat of war, however tacit the threat.”
~~ Robert Frost [1874-1963]

"Everything comes to those who wait . . . except a cat."
~~ racecar driver Mario Andretti

"Travel offers the opportunity to find out who else one is."
~~ author Rebecca Solnit

"The function of man is to live, not to exist."
~~ Jack London [1876-1916]

"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails."
~~ author William Arthur Ward [1921-94]

"Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket."
~~ French author Victor Hugo [1802-85]

"If you want the present and the future to be different from the past, Spinoza tells us, study the past. Find out the causes that made it what it was and bring different causes to bear."
~~ Will and Ariel Durant

"Tempus sure does fugit."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy."
~~ John Dewey [1859-1952]

“If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.”
~~ Benjamin Franklin [1706-90]

“A child of five could understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.”
~~ Groucho Marx [1890-1977]

"Class is very simple in America. You're in the upper class if your name is on the building; you're in the middle class if your name is on your desk; and you're in the working class if your name is on your shirt."
~~ syndicated comedian Argus Hamilton

"Public virtue is a kind of ghost town into which anyone can move and declare himself sheriff."
~~ Saul Bellow [1915-2005]

"If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else."
~~ Douglas Adams [1952-2001]

"Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you won't do anything."
~~ author M. Scott Peck [1936-2005]

"Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us."
~~ historian Van Wyck Brooks [1886-1963]

"Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness."
~~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky [1821-81]

"Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy [that] justice can have."
~~ James Baldwin [1924-87]

"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking [that] they can't lose."
~~ Bill Gates

"The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook."
~~ Julia Child [1912-2004]

"Any compulsion tries to justify itself."
~~ Joan Didion

"Time is really the only capital that any human being has and the thing that he can least afford to waste or lose."
~~ Thomas Alva Edison [1847-1931]

"Never marry a man [that] you wouldn't want to be divorced from."
~~ Nora Ephron [1941-2012]
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"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."
~~ Marcel Proust [1871-1922]

"He who is too eager to preserve his originality is already losing it."
~~ German composer Robert Schumann [1810-56]

"Tragedy is when I get a paper cut on my finger. Comedy is when you fall into a sewer and die."
~~ Mel Brooks

"Stories happen to those who tell them."
~~ Greek historian Thucydides [c.460–c.395 BCE]

"Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible."
~~ Colin Powell

"Morality is a form of acting and not a particular repertoire of choices."
~~ Susan Sontag [1933-2004]

"For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence."
~~ Philip Roth

"If you want to annoy your neighbors, tell the truth about them."
~~ Italian satirist Pietro Aretino [1492-1556]

"We are put on this planet only once, and to limit ourselves to the familiar is a crime against our minds."
~~ Roger Ebert [1942-2013]

"If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time and you would achieve nothing."
~~ Margaret Thatcher [1925-2013]

"Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously."
~~ Hunter S. Thompson [1937-2005]

"Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect."
~~ Marcel Proust [1871-1922]

"For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower from the cliffs of despair."
~~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh [1906-2001]

"Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it."
~~ Anthony Trollope [1815-82]

“The trouble with fiction . . . is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”
~~ Aldous Huxley [1894-1963]

“For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.”
~~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn [1918-2008]

“All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.”
~~ Anthony Burgess [1917-93]

“I don’t care what anybody says about me as long as it isn’t true.”
~~ Truman Capote [1924-84]

"Every great film should seem new every time [that] you see it."
~~ Roger Ebert [1942-2013]

“Life calls the tune, we dance.”
~~ John Galsworthy [1867-1933]

"Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have."
~~ Jean-Paul Sartre [1905-80]

"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."
~~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”
~~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007]

“Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.”
~~ Joseph Heller [1923-99]

“I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.”
~~ Jack Kerouac [1922-69]

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