"A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial."

Fadiman, Clifton on memory   

"Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses."

Yeats, William Butler on words   

"Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice."

Thoreau, Henry David on morality   

"He was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say when!"

Wodehouse, Sir P(elham) G(renville) on dress   

"In the tumult of men and events, solitude was my temptation; now it is my friend. What other satisfaction can be sought once you have confronted History?"

Gaulle, Charles De on solitude   

"The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid."

Jung, Carl on youth   

"He seems determined to make a trumpet sound like a tin whistle."

Bevan, Aneurin on modesty   

"I pick my favorite quotation and store them in my mind as ready armor, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence."

Burns, Robert on quotations
6 fans of this quote   

"The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms."

Cooper, James F. on language   

"Quotations (such as have point and lack triteness) from the great old authors are an act of reverence on the part of the quoter, and a blessing to a public grown superficial and external."

Guiney, Louise Imogen on quotations   

"Worry is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained."

Rache, Arthur Somers on worry   

"Complaint is the largest tribute Heaven receives."

Swift, Jonathan on complaints and complaining   

"If sufficient number of management layers are superimposed on top of each other, it can be assured that disaster is not left to chance."

Augustine, Norman on management   

"They that are on their guard and appear ready to receive their adversaries, are in much less danger of being attacked than the supine, secure and negligent."

Franklin, Benjamin on vigilance
7 fans of this quote   

"All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions."

Shaw, George Bernard on progress   

"Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters."

Hugo, Victor on adversity
16 fans of this quote   

"Treaties are like roses and young girls -- they last while they last"

Gaulle, Charles De on treaties   

"Determine what specific goal you want to achieve. Then dedicate yourself to its attainment with unswerving singleness of purpose, the trenchant zeal of a crusader."

Meyer, Paul J. on focus
4 fans of this quote   

"Being at the center of a film is a burden one takes on with innocence -- the first time. Thereafter, you take it on with trepidation."

Lewis, Daniel Day on stardom   

"Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on education
19 fans of this quote   

"All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death."

Wilde, Oscar on trials
3 fans of this quote   

"Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil."

Schumpeter, Joseph A. on economy and economics   

"Wine is a turncoat; first a friend and then an enemy."

Fielding, Henry on alcohol and alcoholism
3 fans of this quote   

"Every woman is like a time-zone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night."

Baudrillard, Jean on women   

"In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, a lack! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit?"

Beardsley, Aubrey on literature   

"Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject."

Keats, John on poetry and poets   

"Nagging is the repetition of unpalatable truths."

Summerskill, Edith on nagging   

"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."

Galbraith, John Kenneth on politics   

"Happiness is unrepentant pleasure."

Socrates on happiness   

"Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love."

Brown, Charlie on love
14 fans of this quote   

"Man's chief enemy is his own unruly nature and the dark forces put up within him."

Jones, Ernest on enemies
5 fans of this quote   

"There is an unseemly exposure of the mind, as well as of the body."

Hazlitt, William on candor   

"Honor is unstable and seldom the same; for she feeds upon opinion, and is as fickle as her food."

Colton, Charles Caleb on honor   

"Those graceful acts, those thousand decencies, that daily flow from all her words and actions, mixed with love and sweet compliance, which declare unfeigned union of mind, or in us both one soul."

Milton, John on wives   

"Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish."

Ionesco, Eugene on death   

"The presence of a long-term, conscious goal has helped me maintain stability through the ubiquitous changes of over half a century."

Craig Mary on purpose   

"I must have women -- there is nothing unbends the mind like them."

Gay, John on women
3 fans of this quote   

"The uncommitted life isn't worth living."

Fishwick, Marshall on commitment
3 fans of this quote   

"The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity."

Woolf, Virginia on women
4 fans of this quote   

"Too much truth is uncouth."

Adams, Franklin P. on truth
5 fans of this quote