.quotations [m-z].
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[A-L]
memory
Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad. {Christina Rossetti}
I never forget a face, but I'll make an exception in your case. {Groucho Marx}
I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old. {Charles Baudelaire}
When I meet a man whose name I can't remember, I give myself two minutes; then, if it is a hopeless case, I always say, And how is the old complaint? {Benjamin Disraeli}
As a perfume doth remain
In the folds where it hath lain,
So the thought of you, remaining
Deeply folded in my brain,
Will not leave me: all things leave me:
You remain. {Arthur Symons}
(the) mind
Brain, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think. {Ambrose Bierce}
We know the human brain is a device to keep the ears from grating on one another. {Peter De Vries}
The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. {Carl Gustav Jung}
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. {John Milton}When people will not weed their own minds, they are apt to be overrun with nettles. {Horace Walpole}
mistakes
Two wrongs do not make a right. {Proverb}
The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything. {Edward Phelps}
To err is human, to forgive, divine. {Alexander Pope}
A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser to-day than he was yesterday. {Alexander Pope}
We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery. {Samuel Smiles}
Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone? {James Thurber}
nature
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more. {Lord Byron}Is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun. {G.K. Chesterton}
Nature is but a name for an effect
Whose cause is God. {William Cowper}
novels
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. {G.K. Chesteron}
When I want to read a novel I'll write one. {Benjamin Disraeli}
Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present. {Edmond de Goncourt}
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting. {Henry James}
Far too many relied on the classic formula of a beginning, a muddle, and an end. {Philip Larkin}
occupations
A priest sees people at their best, a lawyer at their worst, but a doctor sees them as they really are. {Proverb}
Every man to his trade. {Proverb}
Jack of all trades, master of none. {Proverb}
If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens. {Grandma Moses (Anna Mary Robertson Moses)}
A doctor who doesn't say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured, just as a critic is a poet who has stopped writing verse and a policeman a burglar who has retired from practice. {Marcel Proust}
The best careers advice to give to the young is `Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it.' {Katherine Whitehorn}
opportunity
Every dog has his day. {Proverb}
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. {Proverb}
Opportunity seldom knocks twice. {Proverb}
A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds. {Francis Bacon}
Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don't recognise them. {Ann Landers}
Grab a chance and you won't be sorry for a might have been. {Arthur Ransome}
originality
An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate. {Vicomte de Chateaubriand}
A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. {Oliver Wendell Holmes}
All good things which exist are the fruits of originality. {John Stuart Mill}
The notion of doing something impossibly new usually turns out to be an illusion. {Twyla Tharp}
poetry
Nothing so difficult as a beginning
In poesy, unless perhaps the end. {Lord Byron}I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry. {John Cage}
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. {T.S. Eliot}
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words. {John Fowles}
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. {Robert Frost}
quotations
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. {Winston Churchill}
When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it. {Anatole France}
I might repeat to myself a list of quotations from minds profound if I can remember any of the damn things. {Dorothy Parker}
reading
Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought. {Arthur Helps}
ELPHINSTON: What, have you not read it through?
JOHNSON: No, Sir, do you read books through? {Samuel Johnson}A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good. {Samuel Johnson}
I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me. {Charles Lamb}
There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it, the other that you can boast about it. {Bertrand Russell}
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. {Logan Pearsall Smith}
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. {Richard Steele}
self
Every man is his own worst enemy. {Proverb}
God helps them that help themselves. {Proverb}
He travels fastest who travels alone. {Proverb}
Lord, deliver me from myself. {Thomas Browne}
Whenever I look inside myself I am afraid. {Cyril Joad}
One should examine oneself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others. {Moliere}
I am always with myself, and it is I who am my tormentor. {Leo Tolstoy}
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes). {Walt Whitman}
silence
A still tongue makes a wise head. {Proverb}
Speech is silver, silence is golden. {Proverb}
When you have nothing to say, say nothing. {Charles Caleb Colton}
That man's silence is wonderful to listen to. {Thomas Hardy}
television
Television is more interesting than people. If it were not, we should have people standing in the corners of our rooms. {Alan Coren}
Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home. {David Frost}
Television? No good will come of this device. The word is half Greek and half Latin. {C.P. Scott}
thoughts & thinking
Mirrors should think longer before they reflect. {Jean Cocteau}
Cogito, ergo sum.
I think, therefore I am. {Rene Descartes}There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. {William Shakespeare}
understanding
You never understand everything. When one understands everything, one has gone crazy. {Philip W. Anderson}
She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind that reveres details and never quite understands them. {Sinclair Lewis}
I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me understand/ something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country. {Eleanor Roosevelt}
verbosity
There was a young man of Japan
Whose limericks never would scan;
When they said it was so,
He replied, `Yes, I know,
But I always try to get as many words into the last line as ever I possibly can.' {Anonymous}A sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity. {Benjamin Disraeli}
But far more numerous was the Herd of such,
Who think too little, and who talk too much. {John Dryden}Nothing is more despicable than a professional talker who uses his words as a quack uses his remedies. {Franaois Fenelon}
I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter. {Blaise Pascal}
Words are like leaves; and where they most abound,
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found. {Alexander Pope}
women
A man of straw is worth a woman of gold. {Proverb}
A woman's work is never done. {Proverb}
The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. {Proverb}
Girls are so queer you never know what they mean. They say No when they mean Yes, and drive a man out of his wits for the fun of it. {Louisa May Alcott}
A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can. {Jane Austen}
One is not born a woman, one becomes one. {Simone de Beauvoir}
The great question which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is `What does a woman want'? {Sigmund Freud}
Fighting is essentially a masculine idea; a woman's weapon is her tongue. {Hermione Gingold}
My mother said it was simple to keep a man, you must be a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom. I said I'd hire the other two and take care of the bedroom bit. {Jerry Hall}
When a woman becomes a scholar there is usually something wrong with her sexual organs. {Freidrich Wilhelm Nietzsche}
words
He said true things, but called them by wrong names. {Robert Browning}
You can stroke people with words. {F. Scott Fitzgerald}
It was in the barbarous, gothic times when words had a meaning; in those days, writers expressed thoughts. {Anatole France}
Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them. {Adlai Stevenson}
She shrank from words, thinking of the scars they leave, which she would be left to tend when he had gone. If he spoke the truth, she could not bear it; if he tried to muffle it with tenderness, she would look upon it as pity. {Elizabeth Taylor}
No, my dear, it is I who am surprised; you are merely astonished. {Noah Webster, responding to his wife's comment that she had been surprised to find him embracing their maid}
worry
A trouble shared is a trouble halved. {Proverb}
When I look back on all these worries I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened. {Winston Churchill}
Worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions. It is time to acknowledge this, perhaps even to learn to do it better. {Lewis Thomas}
writing & writers
Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders. {Walter Bagehot}
The idea that it is necessary to go to a university in order to become a successful writer, or even a man or woman of letters (which is by no means the same thing), is one of those phantasies that surround authorship. {Vera Brittain}
I believe the souls of five hundred Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton. {Samuel Taylor Coleridge}
A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out. {Cyril Connolly}
The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post. {Cyril Connolly}
One man is as good as another until he has written a book. {Benjamin Jowett}
Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel. {Vita Sackville-West}
More can be learnt from Miss Austen about the nature of the novel than from almost any other writer. {Walter Allen}
Miller is not really a writer but a non-stop talker to whom someone has given a typewriter. {Gerald Brenan}
That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful thing I ever met with. {Walter Scott}
I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her `a beautiful little knitter'. {Edith Sitwell, referring to Virginia Woolf}
No one has written worse English than Mr Hardy in some of his novels ñ cumbrous, stilted, ugly, and inexpressive ñ yes, but at the same time so strangely expressive of something attractive to us in Mr Hardy himself that we would not change it for the perfection of Sterne at his best. It becomes coloured by its surroundings; it becomes literature. {Virginia Woolf}
Every book must be chewed to get out its juice. {Chinese Proverb}
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than write for the public and have no self. {Cyril Connolly}
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. {Robert Frost}
A bad book is as much a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul. {Aldous Huxley}
A man will turn over half a library to make one book. {Samuel Johnson}
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure. {Samuel Johnson}
Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage/ which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. {Samuel Johnson}
Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing, and it becomes chronic in their sick minds. {Juvenal}
I put the words down and push them a bit. {Evelyn Waugh}
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