"The most exciting happiness is the happiness generated by forces beyond your control."

Nash, Ogden on happiness
4 fans of this quote   

"Man is a victim of dope in the incurable form of hope."

Nash, Ogden on hope
4 fans of this quote   

"To keep your marriage brimming, with love in the wedding cup, whenever you're wrong, admit it; whenever you're right, shut up."

Nash, Ogden on marriage
9 fans of this quote   

"I do not like to get the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons."

Nash, Ogden on news   

"How easy for those who do not bulge to not overindulge!"

Nash, Ogden on obesity   

"Here is a pen and here is a pencil, here's a typewriter, here's a stencil, here's a list of today's appointments, and all the flies in all the ointments, the daily woes that a man endures -- take them, George, they're yours!"

Nash, Ogden on office   

"The only people who should really sin are the people who can sin and grin."

Nash, Ogden on sin
4 fans of this quote   

"Your hair may be brushed, but your mind's untidy. You've had about seven hours of sleep since Friday. No wonder you feel that lost sensation. You're sunk from a riot of relaxation."

Nash, Ogden on weekends
5 fans of this quote   

"If you are really Master of your Fate, it shouldn't make any difference to you whether Cleopatra or the Bearded Lady is your mate."

Nash, Ogden on wives   

"The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal."

Miller, Henry on dream
5 fans of this quote   

"The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again. No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one's pocket for another meal."

Miller, Henry on disasters
5 fans of this quote   

"No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance."

Miller, Henry on destiny
13 fans of this quote   

"I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth."

Miller, Henry on decay
3 fans of this quote   

"Respectable men and women content with good and easy living are missing some of the most important things in life. Unless you give ;yourself to some great cause you haven't even begun to live."

Merrill, William P. on causes   

"The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego."

Frye, Northrop on beauty
4 fans of this quote   

"Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of quaint, and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive."

Frye, Northrop on popular culture   

"A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas."

Frye, Northrop on criticism   

"The real enemy can always be met and conquered, or won over. Real antagonism is based on love, a love which has not recognized itself."

Miller, Henry on enemies
7 fans of this quote   

"What have we achieved in mowing down mountain ranges, harnessing the energy of mighty rivers, or moving whole populations about like chess pieces, if we ourselves remain the same restless, miserable, frustrated creatures we were before? To call such activity progress is utter delusion. We may succeed in altering the face of the earth until it is unrecognizable even to the Creator, but if we are unaffected wherein lies the meaning?"

Miller, Henry on environment
4 fans of this quote   

"I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen."

Miller, Henry on america
7 fans of this quote   

"I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots."

Miller, Henry on america
6 fans of this quote   

"If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms."

Miller, Henry on ambition
4 fans of this quote   

"There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him."

Miller, Henry on fear
6 fans of this quote   

"Back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith. Enthusiasm is nothing: it comes and goes. But if one believes, then miracles occur."

Miller, Henry on faith
6 fans of this quote   

"The world itself is pregnant with failure, is the perfect manifestation of imperfection, of the consciousness of failure."

Miller, Henry on failure
4 fans of this quote   

"Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil."

Miller, Henry on example   

"Fame is an illusive thing -- here today, gone tomorrow. The fickle, shallow mob raises its heroes to the pinnacle of approval today and hurls them into oblivion tomorrow at the slightest whim; cheers today, hisses tomorrow; utter forgetfulness in a few months."

Miller, Henry on fame   

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on achievement
191 fans of this quote   

"He whom God has touched will always be a being apart: he is, whatever he may do, a stranger among men; he is marked by a sign."

Renan, Ernest on spirituality
4 fans of this quote   

"You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience."

Chardin, Pierre Teilhard De on spirituality
10 fans of this quote   

"Who with a little cannot be content, endures an everlasting punishment."

Herrick, Robert on discontent   

"Only man is not content to leave things as they are but must always be changing them, and when he has done so, is seldom satisfied with the result."

Huxley, Elspeth on change   

"Perhaps catastrophe is the natural human environment, and even though we spend a good deal of energy trying to get away from it, we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe."

Greer, Germaine on disasters   

"Let age, not envy, draw wrinkles on thy cheeks."

Browne, Sir Thomas on envy
5 fans of this quote   

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"Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen."

Marshall, Peter on action
6 fans of this quote   

"Trust yourself, then you will know how to live."

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von on self-esteem
12 fans of this quote   

"The will to do, the soul to dare."

Scott, Sir Walter on courage
6 fans of this quote   

"All of life is a foreign country."

Kerouac, Jack on life
7 fans of this quote   

"Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such."

Miller, Henry on acceptance
43 fans of this quote   

"Adam was the luckiest man; he had no mother-in-law."

Twain, Mark on family
21 fans of this quote