Life

I really believe I should have been born a highwayman.  -Laura Kinsale

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.  - John Steinbeck, In Art/Photography

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after a committee of sleep has worked on it.  -John Steinbeck, In Communication

The highest reward for a man's toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it.   -John Ruskin

[T]he young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.            -William Faulkner

Find meaning in runaway shopping carts and flaming marshmallows. Seek silk and cashmere interventions in the midst of a secret test. Drum up feral breakfast conundrums with wicked, lickable angels. Welcome violins and snakes at the heart of the cool mistake. Scribble treasure maps on naked promises. Search for messages from the future in the warm glow of yesterday's shock.  –Rob Brezny

You see sir; death is an intellectual matter, but dying is pure pain.  -John Steinbeck, In Death

Plato is a bore. - Nietzsche
 

Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal. – Tolstoy

Would I knew a little more, Or very much less! -Dorothy Parker

One of the nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating. - Luciano Pavarotti

We live in a time when nearly everything can be summed up in ones and zeroes, right? And that causes a certain amount of despair. - Dolph Lundgren

Our own painful struggle for existence destroys our feeling for the misery of those who have remained behind. - Adolf Hitler (from MEIN KAMPF)

Killing a man is murder, unless done to the sound of trumpets – Voltaire

Tell the truth and run. - Yugoslavian proverb

Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. - Samuel Beckett

How many readings can you go to and hear the same lament: I am deep and I am in pain. It is raining outside. - Greg Gatenby

It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

We have to be continually jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down. - Kurt Vonnegut

Many men fancy that what they experience they also understand. - Goethe

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world. - Arthur Schopenhauer

Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music. - Ezra Pound

To tell you the truth, I'm not all that interested in religion, and between you and me, I don't think God is either. - Michael McCarthy

She shoved her hair back, took a sip of wine and went on to talk about the life force, mayflies, the great chain of being and the nesting habits of birds. She was philosophical and she was nude. Somehow, everything she said made perfect sense. -  T.C. Boyle

A committee is a group of the unprepared, appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary. - Fred Allen

”You had to smile to keep from throwing up.” - Billie Holiday

An Irishman is never drunk as long as he can hold onto a blade of grass and not fall off the earth. -Irish Proverb

He who doesn't risk never gets to drink champagne.  -Russian Proverb

Girlhood ... is the intellectual phase of a woman's life, that time when, unencumbered by societal expectations or hormonal rages, one may pursue any curiosity from the mysteries of a yo-yo to the meaning of infinity. These two particular pursuits were where I left off in the fifth grade when I discovered a hair growing in the wrong place and all hell broke loose.  -Alice Kahn

Ideas are clean, they soar in the serene supernal.  I can take them out and look at them, they fit in books, they lead me down that narrow way.  And in the morning they are there.  Ideas are straight – But the world is round, and a messy mortal is my friend.  Come walk with me in the mud.  Hugh Prather

“If you venture to think in America, you also feel an obligation to provide a historical sketch to go with it, to authenticate or legitimize your thoughts.  So it’s one moment of flashing insight and then a quarter of an hour of pedantry and tiresome elaboration - academic gabble.  Locke to Freud with stops at local stations like Bentham and Kiekegaard.  One has to feel sorry for people in such a bind.  Or else (a better alternative) one can develop an eye for the comical side of this.” – Saul Bellow

“As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn’t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting - the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began.” Saul Bellow

“These proliferating thoughts have more affinity to insomnia that to mental progress.  Oscillations of the mental substance is what they are, ever-increasing jitters.” Saul Bellow

“That was part of your inside satin.  Or the susceptibility of a mind subject to trances.  The objects you looked at had more colors and dimensions than the others were ever aware of.” Saul Bellow

“When you get an outside view of your behavior, it looks horrible.  Is it you that’s horrible, or the viewers?  Your torment is left out.” Saul Bellow

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.- Mark Twain

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.  - Mark Twain

Life is not an easy matter.... You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.  - Leon Trotsky

Truly great madness can not be achieved without significant intelligence. - Henrik Tikkanen

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is. - Thomas Szasz

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.  - George Bernard Shaw

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.                         - George Santayana

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.                         - Isaac Newton

My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.  - Christopher Morley

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.          - Aldous Huxley

The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing heart. - Robert G. Ingersoll

I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.                          - Harry Emerson Fosdick

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.   - William Faulkner

Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule.  - Samuel Butler

There are trivial truths, and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.                      - Neils Bohr

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.  - Johann Sebastian Bach

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.  - Howard Aiken

We are not rich by what we possess but rather by what we can do without. - Immanuel Kant

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. - Anais Nin

Heartily know, when half -gods go, the gods arrive - Emerson

Life is not measured by the breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away - (author unknown)

I get great joy out of life - always have - but I think being happy impllies a kind of idiocy.   -John Malkovich