"Our minds are like our stomachs; they are whetted by the change of their food, and variety supplies both with fresh appetites."

Quinton, John on mind   

"Life is made of ever so many partings welded together."

Dickens, Charles on life   

"Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax."

Schopenhauer, Arthur on politeness   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust."

Kraus, Karl on wisdom   

"Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk."

Setanti, Joaquin on action   

"Liberty consists in wholesome restraint."

Webster, Daniel on liberty
4 fans of this quote   

"Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers."

Weil, Simone on culture   

"Let the child's first lesson be obedience, and the second will be what thou wilt."

Franklin, Benjamin on children
4 fans of this quote   

"A fly may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still."

Johnson, Samuel on abuse
9 fans of this quote   

"Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight."

Ferber, Edna on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"An army without culture is a dull-witted army, and a dull-witted army cannot defeat the enemy."

Zedong, Mao on army and navy   

"There is always time to add a word, never to withdraw one."

Gracian, Baltasar on words   

"When it comes to finances, remember that there are no withholding taxes on the wages of sin."

West, Mae on finance
6 fans of this quote   

"Nuptial love makes mankind; friendly love perfects it; but wanton love corrupts and debases it."

Bacon, Francis on love
24 fans of this quote   

"As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold."

Swift, Jonathan on love
5 fans of this quote   

"In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows."

Burke, Edmund on repression   

"To be realistic today is to be visionary. To be realistic is to be starry-eyed."

Humphrey, Hubert H. on reality
3 fans of this quote   

"No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous."

Adams, Henry Brooks on words
13 fans of this quote   

"The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil."

Weil, Simone on skepticism   

"I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with. And, in the end, I distilled everything down to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die."

Hampton, Christopher on deception
3 fans of this quote   

"What is most beautiful in virile men is sometimes feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine."

Sontag, Susan on beauty   

"Integrity simple means not violating one's own identity."

Fromm, Erich on integrity
7 fans of this quote   

"Do not waste a minute -- not a second -- in trying to demonstrate to others the merits of your performance. If your work does not vindicate itself, you cannot vindicate it."

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth on performance   

"A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor."

Hoffer, Eric on heresy   

"Be vigilant; guard your mind against negative thoughts."

Buddha on vigilance
8 fans of this quote   

"Nothing contributes to the entertainment of the reader more, than the change of times and the vicissitudes of fortune."

Cicero, Marcus T. on writers and writing   

"Disease is a vital expression of the human organism."

Groddeck, Georg on disease   

"We derive our vitality from our store of madness."

Cioran, E. M. on vitality
5 fans of this quote   

"I'm totally going through a rebel period right now. It's sort of waning, but ... ach, I'm allowed, right? It's OK, right?"

Danes, Claire on rebellion   

"The fool wanders, a wise man travels."

Fuller, Thomas on travel
4 fans of this quote   

"America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair."

Toynbee, Arnold on america   

"Hate is ravening vulture beaks descending on a place of skulls."

Lowell, Amy on hatred   

"Think with the wise, but talk with the vulgar."

Proverb, Greek on vulgarity   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"So our Lord God commonly gave riches to those gross asses to whom he vouchsafed nothing else."

Luther, Martin on riches
3 fans of this quote   

"It was a thunderingly beautiful experience -- voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell."

Vonnegut Jr., Kurt on space
3 fans of this quote   

"I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of goodwill. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy, and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity. "

King Jr. Martin Luther on uncategorised   

"Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience."

Hoffer, Eric on glory
3 fans of this quote   

"The making of a picture ought surely to be a rather fascinating adventure. It is not; it is an endless contention of tawdry egos, some of them powerful, almost all of them vociferous, and almost none of them capable of anything much more creative than credit-stealing and self-promotion."

Chandler, Raymond on cinema   

"For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocence, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced."

Bacon, Francis on wisdom   

"A book should be luminous not voluminous."

Bovee, Christian Nevell on writers and writing
5 fans of this quote