Half the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need.
Richard E. Byrd

 

Q

 

U

 

O

 

T

 

E

 

S

 

A glorious sunset in a painting is not a beautiful sunset but a great painter's sunset.
André Malraux

Tyranny comes more naturally than art to mediocre men. Albert Camus

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them. Paul Valéry

Behind every great fortune stands the brooding presence of a great crime. Lewis Lapham

Will not a tiny speck close to our vision blot out the glory of the world? George Eliot

Character is not cut in marble . . . It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do. George Eliot

Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others. Bismark

The nature of art is to bind the general to the particular . . . the greatness of the absurd writer consists in being to find the exact point where they meet in their greatest disproportion. Albert Camus

Eternal nothingness is made up precisely of the sum of lives to come which will not be our own. Albert Camus

Culture is that which man has in his possession when he has forgotten everything that he has read. Ortega y Gasset

Only I can know for sure that what I am doing is a way of not doing something else. Mark Kingwell

All of us are in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Oscar Wilde

I was conceived on the circus trail by a traveller who owned a camel and a mother who swung from the ropes. Rawi Hage

We find our path by walking it. Maya Angelou

Every individual who make us suffer can be attached by us to a divinity. Marcel Proust

The demand for secrecy is scarcely more than the wish of a sick civilization not to learn the progress of its own disease. Norbert Wiener

Resentment is the poison we drink hoping it will hurt others. Nelson Mandela

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. Derek Bok

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal. Aristotle

It's easier to build strong children than repair broken men. Frederick Douglass

Many a person has gone to their sacophagus by what they put down their esophagus. Ponsy

What we look for in a good book, painting, music or conversation? A stretch of runway to take off, and return us to ourselves.Yahia Lababidi

We have two ears and only one tongue in order that we may hear more and speak less. Diogenes

If you think education is expensive try ignorance. Derek Bok

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. John Berger

We are all dying of miscellany. Emerson

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock. Freud

I suspect that one might acquire a pretty solid grasp of the concept of infinity by merely reflecting on the number of idiots in this world. David Solway

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last. Proust

Literature is a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us. Kafka

The habit of supplying our ideas from foreign sources enfeebles all internal strength of thought. William Hazlitt

There are so many who can figure costs and so few who can measure values. Oscar Wilde

We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Swinburne

Fame is the sum of misunderstandings that accrue around a name. Rainer Maria Rilke

If every man could read the hearts of others there would be more men anxious to descend than to rise in life. Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Almost everyman wastes part of his life in attempts to display qualities which he does not possess. Samuel Johnson.

Consumerism is not just relationship to objects, to the things we buy, but it's a way of life, with its assumption of gratification, of manageable pleasures, and its ultimate inability to equip us when we're confronted with real suffering. Jennifer Szalia

Like a bird on a wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to free. Leonard Cohen

Generosity is only estimable in those who know the cost of things.
Jean Paul Sartre

Statistics are human beings with tears wiped off. Paul Brodeur.

I don't know what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. Albert Einstein

The publicity image steals our love of ourselves as we are and offers it back to us for the price of the product.” John Berger

There is no smaller package in all the world than that of a man all wrapped up in himself. William Sloane Coffin

Faiths must not be allowed to hide their depradation behind our toleration. Leon Wieseltier.

First, they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Next, the government came after the socialists, the trade unionists, the Jews and, finally they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me. Martin Niemoeller.

Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child. Cicero.

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography. Ambroise Pierce.

God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers. Rudyard Kipling.

The essence of being human is that . . . one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. George Orwell.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. Proust.

The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power. Shakespeare.

Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied. Otto von Bismarck.

Speech is the surplus of our existence over natural being . . . . which like a wave gathers and poises itself to hurtle beyond its own limits. Merleau-Ponty

The intellectual is in search of a doctrine which shall make great demands on him and cure him of his subjctivity. Merleau-Ponty

What a child doesn't receive, he can seldom give later. P.D. James.

The corruption of reason is shown by the existence of so many different and extravagant customs. Pascal.

Sophistication is the ability to approach culture with the mininum amount of anxiety. Northrup Fry.

You win a while,
And then it's done,
Your little winning streak. Leonard Cohen.

The welfare of humanity is always the welfare of tyrants. Camus.

What constitues the Republic is the total destruction of what is opposed to it. Saint-Just

He looked to be filled with a terrible sadness. As if he harbored news of some horrendous loss that no one else had heard of. Some vast tragedy not of fact or incident or event but of the way the world was. Cormac McCarthy

The constellations . . .
worlds sprawled in their pale ignitions
upon the nameless night. Cormac McCarthy

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night
But ah my foes, and oh, my friends
It gives a lovely light. Edna St. Vincent Millay

Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awating the ultimate practitioner. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art. Oscar Wilde

A poem is momentary stay against confusion.Robert Frost.

Every generation
is equidistant from God. Leopold Von Ranke

To find the Western path
Right through the gates of wrath. Blake

A patriot must be willing to defend his country from his government. Voltaire.

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
Sir Winston Churchill

In nature there's no blemish but the mind. None can be called deformed but the unkind. Shakespeare.

Of great riches there is no real use, except it be in the distribution; the rest is but conceit. Francis Bacon.

After the last tree has been cut down, after the last river has been poisoned,
after the last fish has been caught, only then will you find
that money cannot be eaten. Cree prophecy

I am haunted by the possibility that out of our mammalian midst, a Plato,
a Gauss, a Mozart, justified, redeems the species which devised
and carried out Auchwitz. George Steiner.

Sometimes one starts to dream about what culture, literary life, and teaching could be if all those who participate, having for once rejected idols, would give themselves up to the happiness of reflecting together. Merleau-Ponty