QUOTATIONS FROM THE FAMOUS

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882

A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished.

Zsa Zsa Gabor

A man is about as happy as he makes up his mind to be.

Abraham Lincoln 1809-1865

A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.

William Blake 1757-1827

All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900

Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.

John Stuart Mill 1806-1873

Asked by a waitress whether he would like his pizza cut into four or eight slices: "Better make it four. I don't think I can eat eight."

Yogi Berra

Blindness, old age, sickness -- you have to think of them as gifts, as a blessing in disguise. You have to turn them into beauty.

Jorge Luis Borges 1900-1986

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way --and the fools know it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes 1809-1894
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

Failure is an orphan, but victory has a thousand fathers.

President John F. Kennedy at the time of the Bay of Pigs tragedy in 1961

Fame is a vapor, popularity is an accident, and money takes wings. The only thing that endures is character.

O. J. Simpson, quoting in 1980 something he had heard on Canadian television

For nothing worthy proving can be proven
Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt.

Lord Tennyson 1809-1892

For things far off we toil, while many a good
Not sought because too near, is never gained.

William Wordsworth 1770-1850
"Sonnet to the River Eden"

For when the One Great Scorer
Comes to write against your name
He marks -- not that you won or lost --
But how you played the game.

Grantland Rice 1800-1954

He gives twice that gives quickly

Anonymous 100 B.C.

He that gives quickly gives twice because he will be called upon to give again.

Benjamin Franklin 1706-1790

He who has a thousand friends
Has not a friend to spare,
And he who has one enemy
Will meet him everywhere.

Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882

I don't ask for your pity, but just for your understanding -- not even that -- no. Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.

Tennessee Williams 1918-1983
Sweet Bird of Youth

I keep six honest serving men (They taught me all I knew):
Their names are What and Why and When.
And How and Where and Who.

Rudyard Kipling 1865-1936

"I know what you're thinking about," said Tweedledum; "but it isn't so, nohow."

"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it were so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."

Lewis Carroll 1832-1892
Through the Looking Glass

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

Willa Cather 1873-1947

I wish he would explain his explanation.

Lord Byron 1788-1824

If Mr. Gladstone fell in the Thames, that would be a misfortune.
If someone fished him out, that would be a calamity.

Benjamin Disraeli 1804-1881

In the kingdom of the birds, the parrot is the best talker and the worst flier.

Orville Wright 1871-1948

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

Abraham Maslow

It is absurd to divide people into good or bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Oscar Wilde 1854-1900

It takes two to speak the truth -- one to speak and another to hear.

Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862

In his meropsian flights into the Yon, he never lost sight of the hither. "Do not quite leave this world behind," he said to himself in his diary in 1905. "Imagine you are dead; after many years of exile you are permitted to cast a single glance earthward. You see a lamppost and an old dog lifting his leg against it. You are so moved that you cannot help sobbing."

Regarding Paul Klee 1879-1940. From Robert Wernick, "A Riddle within a mystery inside an enigma: Klee," Smithsonian, January 1987, p. 70.

Life is like an onion: you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

Carl Sandburg 1878-1967

Macho does not mean mucho.

Zsa Zsa Gabor

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has courage to lose sight of the shore.

André Gide 1869-1951

Music heard so deeply that it isn't heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts.

T. S. Eliot 1888-1965

Napoleon gained glory, power, riches and yet he said, "I have never known six happy days."

Napoléon Bonaparte 1769-1821

Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.

G. B. Shaw 1856-1950

No man can tether time nor tide.

Robert Burns 1759-1796

No one thinks of winter when the grass is green.

Rudyard Kipling 1865-1936

Nobody ever listened t' reason on an empty stomach.

Kin Hubbard 1868-1930
Short Furrows

Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine,
In another's being mingle.

Percy Shelley 1792-1822

Oh body swayed to music
Oh brightening glance
How can we know the dancer
From the dance?

William Butler Yates 1865-1939

On describing metaphysicians on his imaginary planet Tion: "They seek neither truth nor likelihood. They seek astonishment."

Jorge Luis Borges 1900-1986

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

George Eliot 1819-1880

People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

Abraham Lincoln 1809-1865

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.

Emily Dickenson 1830-1886

The abstract kills,
The concrete saves.

Sylvia Plath 1932-1963
Journal entry for January 7, 1959

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings;
The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Winston Churchill 1874-1965

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882

The love we give away is the only love we keep.

Elbert Hubbard 1856-1919

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye: the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.

Oliver Wendell Holmes 1841-1935

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is incomprehensible.

Albert Einstein 1879-1955

The past is a bucket of ashes.

Carl Sandburg 1878-1967
"Prairie," Cornhuskers

The Pig and the Cow

There is a tale about a pig and a cow arguing about who was the most valuable to mankind. The pig said it was obviously he:

"They use my hide for the football known as the pigskin and they love my ham and bacon, whereas for you, cow, all you're good for is milk."

The cow replied:

"True, but at least I give while I'm alive."

Tale recalled by Arthur Murray at a fund-raiser

The world is moving so fast these days, that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

Elbert Hubbard 1856-1915

The years teach what the days never know.

Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882

Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die.

Lord Alfred Tennyson 1809-1892

There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Napoleon I 1769-1821

To be nobody -- but yourself -- in a world that is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.

e e cummings 1894-1962

To search is nothing in painting. To find is everything.

Pablo Picasso 1881-1973

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower:
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

William Blake 1757-1827

We may well go to the Moon, but that's not very far. The greatest distance we have to cover still lies within us.

Charles de Gaulle 1890-1970

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and to know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot 1888-1965

What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns?

Lord Alfred Tennyson 1809-1892

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

Crowfoot 1821-1890

What lies behind us and
What lies before us are
Small matters compared to
What lies within us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882

Whatever you have, you must either use or lose.

Henry Ford 1863-1947

You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

Robespierre 1758-1794