A Quorum of Quotes

I doubt this section needs much of an introduction - it seems that most people on the net collect their favorite quotes over the years...here's a selection of mine. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have. Some have made me laugh, some have been my consolation and my hope, and some are just worth thinking over. And some undoubtedly aren't. :-)

Those with short attention spans can click here to read some buttons, or click here to read a very funny selection of Expert Quotes.
The longer favorite poems of mine are collected in a separate section. Click here to read them.

And a special new section, click here to read the opinions of writers on writing.

All of these are reprinted without permission, but with no intent to make a profit thereby. May the authors forgive me. Most are dead in any case.

The first one is one without an author, to my knowledge. I only know what period it comes from. If anyone does know the author, I'd appreciate the information.

The autumn leaves are falling like rain.
Although my neighbors are all barbarians,
And you, you are a thousand miles away,
There are always two cups at my table.

- T'ang Dynasty

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin -- it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring.

- S. J. Perelman

"Are you, sir knight, perchance, in love?" inquired the Knight of the Wood.
"To my woe, I am," answered Don Quixote, "though the sorrows arising from well-placed affections should be accounted blessings rather than calamities."

- Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part 2, Chap. XII

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

- Woody Allen (playwright, director, actor)

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers form not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love, or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness. Are you getting this down?

- Ibid.

Here, write it, or it will be erased by the wind.

- Isabel Allende

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. They are but trifles, to be sure; but, scattered along life's pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.

- Joseph Addison

If all the world were just, there would be no need for valor.

- Agesilaus

Hate has a reason for everything.
But love is unreasonable.

- V. Raiuhes Ahaefvthe

The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is "Look under foot." You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.

- John Burroughs

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

- Cicero

When words fail, music speaks.

- Hans Christian Andersen

I do not believe that sex has an inherent power to transform the world. I do not believe that pleasure is always an anarchic force for good. I do not believe that we can fuck our way to freedom. But this is not what the discourse of sexual repression tells us. In that discourse, unleashed sex has enormous disruptive potential. Minority forms of sex have to be repressed or the social contract will hang in tatters. People will look to their friends and lovers for warmth instead of to their biological families. Women and children will have no protection from male violence. Work for the sake of work will cease to be valued. The nine-to-five, five-days-a-week wage labor that is the foundation of commerce will be disrupted by bored and frustrated workers who use any excuse to come in late, get high as often as possible to alleviate their tedium, rip off their employers, and spend their evenings trying to pick somebody up in a bar or going to political meetings organized by antisocial elements. Nobody will go to church. Children will be thoughtlessly conceived and carelessly reared, and venereal diseases will flourish.

This is, of course, in wild opposition to our present system.

- Pat Califia, from the introduction to _Macho Sluts_

Friendship is a single soul, dwelling in two bodies.

- Aristotle

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.

- Ibid.

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

- Thomas Hardy

Hold on to what is good,
even if it's a handful of earth.

Hold on to what you believe,
Even if it's a tree that stands by itself.

Hold on to what you must do,
Even if it's a long way from here.

Hold on to your life,
Even if it's easier to let go.

Hold on to my hand,
Even if I've gone away from you.

- Pueblo poem

Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos.

- I Ching

I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.

- Solomon Short

Dear Lord, give me chastity and self-restraint...but not yet O Lord, not yet!

- St. Augustine (before he reformed)

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you cam in.

- James Baldwin

When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.

- Alexander Graham Bell

Government wants to control your language because that's how you control thought. Which is basically the game they're in.

- George Carlin

As long as the multitude does not err, I want to be on the side of the many. Therefore, I take great pains to explain to as many people as possible.

- Johannes Kepler

Life IS pain. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

- Wesley, The Princess Bride

Life begets life. Energy creates energy.
It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.

- Sarah Bernhardt

Being instated as an archangel, Satan made himself multifariously objectionable and was finally expelled from Heaven. Halfway in his descent he paused, bent his head in thought a moment and at last went back. "There is one favor that I should like to ask," said he.
"Name it."
"Man, I understand, is about to be created. He will need laws."
"What, wretch! You, his appointed adversary, charged from the dawn of eternity with hatred of his soul - you ask for the right to make his laws?"
"Pardon; what I have to ask is that he be permitted to make them himself."
It was so ordered.

- Ambrose Bierce, (The Devil's Dictionary)

Life does not give itself to one who tries to keep all its advantages at once. I have often thought that morality may perhaps consist solely in the courage of making a choice.

- Leon Blum

If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.

- Hal Borland

Sometimes, I think that the surest sign that there's intelligent life on other planets is that none of it has tried to contact us.

- Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes

The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.

- Lorraine Hansberry

The world has achieved brilliance without conscience...
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

- Omar Bradley

When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist.

- Dom Helder Camara, Brazilian Bishop, Nobel Peace Prize nominee

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it - even if I have said it - unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

- Buddha

When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either.

- Leo Burnett

The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng.
Their eyes are fixed on the eternities.

- Cardozo

The penalty of success is to be bored by the people who used to snub you.

- Lady Astor

Ignorance is the night of the mind, a night without moon or star.

- Confucius

Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.

- Roger Zelazny

What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner.

- Colette

And a strange music went with him,
Loud and yet strangely far;
The wild pipes of the western land,
Too keen for the ear to understand...

- G.K. Chesterton

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

- Sir Winston Churchill

This is the first age that's paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.

- Arthur C. Clarke

There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.

- Ibid.

They do best who, if they cannot but admit love, yet make it keep quarter, and sever it wholly from their serious affairs and actions of life; for if it check once with business it troubleth men's fortunes, and maketh men that they can no ways be true to their own ends.

- Francis Bacon

Friends are those rare people who ask how we are and then wait to hear the answer.

- Ed Cunningham

Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls;
For, thus friends absent speak.

- John Donne

I'm a little wounded, but I am not slain;
I will lay me down for to bleed a while,
Then I'll rise and fight with you again.

- John Dryden

I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.

- Anne Frank

...there are two ways to meet life; you may refuse to care until indifference becomes a habit, a defensive armor, and you are safe--but bored. Or you can care greatly, and live greatly--till life breaks you on its wheel.

- Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.

- Albert Einstein

Dave Barry is a columnist for the Miami Herald

The big problem with pornography is defining it. You can't just say it's pictures of people naked. For example, you have these primitive African tribes that exist by chasing the wildebeest on foot, and they have to go around largely naked, because, as the old tribal saying goes: "N'wam k'honi soit qui mali," which means, "If you think you can catch a wildebeest in this climate and wear clothes at the same time, then I have some beach front property in the desert region of Northern Mali that you may be interested in."

So it's not considered pornographic when National Geographic publishes color photographs of these people hunting the wildebeest naked, or pounding one rock onto another rock for some primitive reason naked, or whatever. But if National Geographic were to publish an article entitled "The Girls of the California Junior College System Hunt the Wildebeest Naked," some people would call it pornography. But others would not. And still others, such as the Spectacularly Rev. Jerry Falwell, would get upset about seeing the wildebeest naked.

- Dave Barry, "Pornography"

Let no one think that the expenditure of vast sums for weapons and systems of defense can guarantee absolute safety for the cities and citizens of any nation. The awful arithmetic of the atomic bomb does not permit of any such easy solution.

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King, and of a King of England, too.

- Elizabeth I

For the first time we have a weapon that nobody has used for thirty [forty-five] years. This gives me great hope for the human race.

- Harlan Ellison

Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much the heart can hold.

- Zelda Fitzgerald

43

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints - I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! - and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

- Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "Sonnets from the Portuguese"

I wrote the story myself. It's all about a girl who lost her reputation but never missed it.

- Mae West

To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one's self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived - this is to have succeeded.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Of all the things wisdom provides to make life entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.

- Epicurus

Do we, holding that the gods exist, deceive ourselves with insubstantial dreams and lies, while random careless chance and change alone control the world?

- Euripides (Hecuba)

The last refuge and a surest remedy, to be put in practice in the utmost place, when no other means will take effect, is, to let them go together and enjoy one another....Aesculapius himself, to this malady, cannot invent a better remedy....than that a Lover have his desire.

- Robert Burton

Father's birthday. He would have been 96 years old today; and could have been 96, like other people one has known; mercifully was not. His life would have utterly ended mine.

- Virginia Woolf

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

- Benjamin Franklin

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather
scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to
mean--neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you CAN make
words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be
master -- that's all."

- Lewis Carroll

If blood be shed let it be our blood. Cultivate the quiet courage of dying without killing. For man lives freely only by his readiness to die, if need be, at the hands of his brother, never by killing him.

- Mahatma Gandhi

Divine Love, unutterable and perfect, flows into a pure soul the way that light rushes into a transparent object.
The more love that it finds, the more that it gives itself; so that, as we grow clear and open, the more complete the joy of loving is.
And the more souls who resonate together, the greater the intensity of their love, for, mirror-like, each soul reflects the others.

- Dante, The Divine Comedy

Yes, there is a Nirvana; it is in leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.

- Kahlil Gibran

I regret to say that we of the F.B.I. are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.

- J. Edgar Hoover

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone who thinks and feels with us, and who, though distant is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.

- Goethe

If you feel you have both feet planted on level ground, then the university has failed you.

- Robert F. Goheen

From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover that you have wings.

- Helen Hayes

If a boy gives a girl a rose a day for twelve days rather than a dozen roses all at once it would surely have a greater impact.

- Frances Hamerstrom, Harrier, Hawk of the Marshes

I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat threadbare, the water passed through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.

- Victor Hugo

ALL THE WORDS

All the words have leaped into air like the cards
in Alice, like birds flying, forming, re-
forming, swerving and rising, and each word
says it is love. The cat says it is love.
It says, 'I am and I love.' And the fawn
in the forest who lost his name, he eats
from your hand. He tells you, 'My name is love.'
And all the White Knight's baggage rattles, and cries
it is love. And even the tiger-lily, even the rose
say only that they are themselves. And they say
they are love. All the little words say
they are love, the space in between, the link
and logic of love. And I can make no headway
in this heady grammar, and suddenly
and here, you are, I am, and we love.

- Gillian Hanscombe & Suniti Namjoshi

From noise of Scare-fires rest ye free,
From Murders Benedicite.
From all mischances, they may fright
Your pleasing slumbers in the night:
Mercie secure ye all, and keep
The Goblins from ye, while ye sleep.

- Robert Herrick

I'm beginning to think it's not just how much you love someone - maybe what matters is who you are when you're with them.

- Macon Leary (The Accidental Tourist)

It may be prudent in me to act sometimes by other mens reason, but I can think only by my own.

- Jonathan Swift

"Surely there is no harm in taking care of the universe, for parts of it certainly seem to need it...if (as it appears) it delights in diversity, we should cast out fear and help it to be diverse, and learn to do so ourselves....

It is no guarantee of preferential treatment....

But we will at least know we acted with magnanimity and honor, and if the universe sometimes seems insensible to this, let us keep acting that way until it notices."

- S'task

I do not care what comes after;
I have seen the dragons on the winds of morning...

- Ursula K. LeGuin (A Wizard of Earthsea)

Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

- Lewis Carroll

When I was ten, I red fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly.

- C.S. Lewis

When I have fears that I may cease to be,
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charactry,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the fairy power
Of unreflecting love; - then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

- John Keats

Murphy was an optimist.

- O'Toole

Let others praise the ancient times;
I am glad I was born in these.

- Ovid (43BC-18AD)

By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying ---
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

- Dorothy Parker

"Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, to discover what is already there."

- Henry Miller, Sexus

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade.
It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

- Rabrindranath Tagore

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless in facing them.
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain but for the heart to conquer it.
Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved but hope for the patience to win my freedom.
Grant that I may not be a coward,
But let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.

- Ibid.

Guinevere at Her Fireside

A nobler king had never breath--
I say it now, and said it then.
Who weds with such is wed till death
And wedded stays in Heaven. Amen.

(And oh, the shirts of linen-lawn,
And all the armor, tagged and tied,
And church on Sundays, dusk and dawn.
And bed a thing to kneel beside!)

The bravest one stood tall above
The rest, and watched me as a light.
I heard and heard them talk of love;
I'd naught to do but think, at night.

The bravest man has littlest brains;
That chalky fool from Astolat
With all her dying and her pains!--
Thank God, I helped him over that.

I found him not unfair to see--
I like a man with peppered hair!
And thus it came about. Ah, me,
Tristram was busied otherwhere....

A nobler king had never breath--
I say it now, and said it then.
Who weds with such is wed till death
And wedded stays in Heaven. Amen.

- Dorothy Parker

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

- Elie Wiesel (author of Night, holocaust survivor)

Sometimes I think if there was a third sex men wouldn't get so much as a glance from me.

- Amanda Vail

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare.

- Anon.

A friend sent me this when I was going through a rough time - if he ever reads this, maybe he'll know how much I appreciated it...

THE MARY ELLEN CARTER
(Stan Rogers)
She went down last October in a pouring driving rain.
The skipper, he'd been drinking and the Mate, he felt no pain.
Too close to Three Mile Rock, and she was dealt her mortal blow,
And the Mary Ellen Carter settled low.
There were five of us aboard her when she finally was awash.
We'd worked like hell to save her, all heedless of the cost.
And the groan she gave as she went down, it caused us to proclaim
That the Mary Ellen Carter would rise again.

Well, the owners wrote her off; not a nickel would they spend.
She gave twenty years of service, boys, then met her sorry end.
But insurance paid the loss to them, they let her rest below.
Then they laughed at us and said we had to go.
But we talked of her all winter, some days around the clock,
For she's worth a quarter million, afloat and at the dock.
And with every jar that hit the bar, we swore we would remain
And make the Mary Ellen Carter rise again.

Rise again, rise again, that her name not be lost
To the knowledge of men.
Those who loved her best and were with her till the end
Will make the Mary Ellen Carter rise again.

All spring, now, we've been with her on a barge lent by a friend.
Three dives a day in hard hat suit and twice I've had the bends.
Thank God it's only sixty feet and the currents here are slow
Or I'd never have the strength to go below.
But we've patched her rents, stopped her vents, dogged hatch and porthole down.
Put cables to her, 'fore and aft and girded her around.
Tomorrow, noon, we hit the air and then take up the strain.
And watch the Mary Ellen Carter rise again.

For we couldn't leave her there, you see, to crumble into scale.
She'd saved our lives so many times, living through the gale
And the laughing, drunken rats who left her to a sorry grave
They won't be laughing in another day.
And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

Rise again, rise again - though your heart it be broken
And life about to end
No matter what you've lost, be it a home, a love, a friend.
Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

- Written and recorded by Stan Rogers on Between the Breaks ....Live.
Copyright Fogarty's Cove Music, FCM 002

Why, but sometimes I have believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

- Lewis Carroll, White Queen, Alice through looking-glass

The kiss of the sun for pardon
The song of the birds for mirth
You are nearer God's heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.

- Dorothy Frances Gurney

We do not what we ought,
What we ought not we do,
And lean upon the thought
That Chance will bring us through.

- Matthew Arnold

The one thing I regret is that I will never have time to read all the books I want to read.

- Francoise Sagan

When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs. When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I am innocent. When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I don't own a gun. Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet.

- Lyle Myhr

Use the talents you possess -
if only the best birds sang,
the woods would be silent.

- Unknown

To go into the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark, go without sight,
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
And is travelled by dark feet and dark ways.

- Wendell Berry

Consider the six days of Genesis as a figure of speech for what has in fact been 4 billion years. On this scale, one day equals something like six hundred and sixty-six million years, and thus, all day Monday and until Tuesday noon, creation was busy getting the world going. Life began Tuesday noon, and the beautiful organic wholeness of it developed over the next four days. At 4 pm Saturday, the big reptiles came on. Five hours later, when the redwoods appeared, there were no more big reptiles. At three minutes before midnight on the last day, man appeared. At one-fourth of a second before midnight, Christ arrived. At one-fortieth of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution began. We are surrounded with people who think that what we have been doing for that one-fortieth of a second can go on indefinitely. They are considered normal, but they are stark raving mad.

- David Brower

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word.

- Mark Twain

Warm summer sun, shine kindly here;
Warm southern wind, blow softly here;
Green sod above, lie light, lie light -
Good-night, dear heart, good-night, good-night.

- Ibid., epitaph for his daughter

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything. From the Interstate, America is all steel guardrails and plastic signs, and every place looks and feels and sounds and smells like every other place. We stick to the back roads, where Kansas still looks like Kansas and Georgia still looks like Georgia, where there is room for diversity and for the occurrence of small miracles.

- Charles Kuralt, On the Road

"'Listen, three eyes,' he said, 'don't try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.'"

- Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

May you have warmth in your igloo, oil in your lamp, and peace in your heart.

- Eskimo blessing

That's all, folks! Go home. Or you can read some longer poems.