"If we do not find anything very pleasant, at least we shall find something new."

Voltaire on adventure
11 fans of this quote   

"You can never correct your work well until you have forgotten it."

Voltaire on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise."

Voltaire on wisdom
6 fans of this quote   

"It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge."

Voltaire on virginity
7 fans of this quote   

"Truth is a fruit which should not be plucked until it is ripe."

Voltaire on truth
3 fans of this quote   

"To announce truths is an infallible receipt for being persecuted."

Voltaire on truth   

"Every abuse ought to be reformed, unless the reform is more dangerous than the abuse itself."

Voltaire on reform   

"Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause."

Voltaire on fate
7 fans of this quote   

"Joys are our wings, sorrows our spurs."

Paul, Jean on joy   

"A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down."

Benchley, Robert on dogs
5 fans of this quote   

"Except for an occasional heart attack I feel as young as I ever did."

Benchley, Robert on youth
5 fans of this quote   

"The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon."

Benchley, Robert on writers and writing
5 fans of this quote   

"Drawing on my fine command of the language, I said nothing."

Benchley, Robert on language
3 fans of this quote   

"Not all who wander are lost"

Tolkien, J. R. on
5 fans of this quote   

"To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event."

Delillo, Don on travel   

"I have been a stranger in a strange land."

Bible on travel   

"Travelling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station."

Teran, Lisa St. Aubin De on travel   

"Girls who put out are tramps. Girls who don't are ladies. This is, however, a rather archaic usage of the word. Should one of you boys happen upon a girl who doesn't put out, do not jump to the conclusion that you have found a lady. What you have probably found is a lesbian."

Lebowitz, Fran on women
3 fans of this quote   

"You can't go around hoping that most people have sterling moral characters. The most you can hope for is that people will pretend that they do."

Lebowitz, Fran on character
8 fans of this quote   

"Contrary to popular opinion, the hustle is not a new dance step -- it is an old business procedure."

Lebowitz, Fran on opinions
5 fans of this quote   

"The future destiny of the child is always the work of the mother."

Bonaparte, Napoleon on the future
8 fans of this quote   

"Wars are won oin winter"

Bonaparte, Napoleon on   

"But you think that it is time for me to have done with the world, and so I would if I could get into a better before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole."

Swift, Jonathan on self-improvement   

"Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as in books it is generally the worst sort of reading."

Swift, Jonathan on argument   

"Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it."

Swift, Jonathan on sarcasm
3 fans of this quote   

"I refused to attend his funeral. But I wrote a very nice letter explaining that I approved of it."

Twain, Mark on sarcasm
5 fans of this quote   

"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."

Twain, Mark on deception
33 fans of this quote   

"When I was fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have him around. When I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years."

Twain, Mark on ignorance
14 fans of this quote   

"A solitary traveler can sleep from state to state, from day to night, from day to day, in the long womb of its controlled interior. It is the cradle that never stops rocking after the lullaby is over. It is the biggest sleeping tablet in the world, and no one need ever swallow the pill, for it swallows them."

Teran, Lisa St. Aubin De on travel
4 fans of this quote   

"I am going to build the kind of nation that President Roosevelt hoped for, President Truman worked for, and President Kennedy died for."

Johnson, Lyndon B. on vision
5 fans of this quote   

"Boys, I may not know much, but I know chicken shit from chicken salad."

Johnson, Lyndon B. on knowledge
13 fans of this quote   

"The world has become uglier since it began to look into a mirror every day; so let us settle for the mirror image and do without an inspection of the original."

Kraus, Karl on self-image   

"A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world."

Benn, Tony on doctrine   

"It's the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you."

Benn, Tony on progress   

"I did not enter the labor Party forty-seven years ago to have our manifesto written by Dr. Mori, Dr. Gallup and Mr. Harris."

Benn, Tony on polls   

"What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts of living might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been employed in works of public utility; what an extension of agriculture even to the tops of our mountains; what rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges, aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices, and improvements might not have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good, which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief."

Franklin, Benjamin on war
3 fans of this quote   

"He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else."

Franklin, Benjamin on excuses
16 fans of this quote   

"The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible -- and achieve it, generation after generation."

Buck, Pearl S. on youth
49 fans of this quote   

"Broken friendships can be soldered, but never sound."

Proverb on friends and friendship
11 fans of this quote   

"If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies."

Kraus, Karl on journalism and journalists
6 fans of this quote