Quotes

Following are some of the quotes I’ve collected from different sources (and one joke). Some have a personal resonance, some contain good advice, some offer a new way of looking at everyday things, and all are interesting. Here they are organised into categories: Personal Advice, Perception, Learning, People and Society. I invite comments, questions and discussion of these or anything else on this website.

Personal Advice

“If you’re happy, you’re successful.”
– Unknown

“Lift with your mind, not with your back.”
– Unknown

“The best measure of your personal ethos and integrity is what you do when you think nobody is watching.”
– Unknown

“Never argue with an idiot... they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience every time.”
– Unknown

“If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.”
– Unknown

“Do or do not. There is no try.”
– Yoda

“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.”
— Henri Bergson

“Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”
– John Wooden

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t—you are right.”
– Henry Ford

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
– Albert Einstein

“First ask yourself: What is the worst that can happen? Then prepare to accept it. Then proceed to improve on the worst.”
– Dale Carnegie

“I always remember an epitaph which is in the cemetery at Tombstone, Arizona. It says: ‘Here lies Jack Williams. He done his damnedest.’ I think that is the greatest epitaph a man can have.”
– Harry S. Truman

“Well done is better than well said.”
– Benjamin Franklin

“Plans are useless, but planning is indispensible.”
– Dwight D. Eisenhower

“In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”
– Theodore Roosevelt

“If A equals success, then the formua is A=X+Y+Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut”
– Albert Einstein

“When anger rises, think of the consequences.”
– Confucius

“Removing the straw that broke the camel’s back does not necessarily allow the camel to walk again.”
– Unknown

“You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.”
– Margaret Thatcher

“Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!”
– Unknown

“Don’t look at the sun.”
– Unknown

Perception

“All that glitters has a high refractive index.”
– Unknown

“Somebody has said of the boldest figure in rhetoric, the hyperbole, that it lies without deceiving.”
– Macaulay

“Some are on the outside occasionally looking in, most are on the inside thinking it is everything”
– Annisette

“No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.”
– Winston Churchill

“A deep, unwavering belief is a sure sign you’re missing something.”
– Unknown

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
– Carl Sagan

“Fashion is mistaken for good design.”
– Unknown

“Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good.”
– Paul Graham

“You don’t need a parachute to skydive. You only need a parachute to skydive twice.”
– Unknown

“186282.4 is the loneliest number.”
– Unknown

“I am not Spock, and it is highly illogical of humans to assume so.”
– Leonard Nimoy

“Why is a puck called a puck? Because ‘dirty little bastard’ was taken.”
– Martin Brodeur

“We are all worms. But I do believe I am a glowworm.”
– Winston Churchill

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
– Gandhi

“The future is always scary to those who cling to the past.”
– Tim O’Reilly

“The future is here, it’s just not widely distributed yet.”
– William Gibson

“Some men see things as they are and say, ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’”
– Robert Kennedy

“Managers’ claims that they didn’t hear the engineers’ concerns were due in part to their not asking or listening.”
– Columbia Accident Investigation Board

“We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.”
– Wernher von Braun

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
– Albert Einstein

“When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail.”
– Abraham Maslow

“The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.”
– Lester Bangs

“Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.”
– Laurie Anderson

“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”
– Mark Twain

“The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.”
– Emerson

“The journey is the reward.”
– Zen saying

Learning

“Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom.”
– Thomas Jefferson

“The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces.”
– Aldo Leopold

“Imagination is more important than knowledge”
– Albert Einstein

“The belief that you know a thing is a most perfect way to prevent learning.”
– Unknown

“Best be the idiot that has learnt, than the genius who won’t.”
– Unknown

“The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.”
– Winston Churchill

“The difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is unknown.”
– Albert Einstein

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
– Carl Sagan

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
– Derek Bok

“Innovation is a wildflower; you cannot choose where it will blossom, you can only choose where it will not.”
– Unknown

“The Americans will always do the right thing... after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.”
– Winston Churchill

“Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”
– Henry Ford

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”
– Albert Einstein

People

“Hell is other people.”
– Jean-Paul Sartre

“A lie has speed, but truth has endurance.”
– Edgar J. Mohn

“I, Lucius Titus, have written this, my testament, without any lawyer, following my own natural reason rather than excessive and miserable diligence.”
– The Will of a Citizen of Rome

“I used to be a lawyer, but now I am a reformed character.”
– Woodrow Wilson

Diogenes went to look for an honest lawyer. “How’s it going?” he was asked. “Not too bad,” he replied. “I still have my lantern.”

“Critics search for ages for the wrong word, which, to give them credit, they eventually find.”
– Peter Ustinov

“I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.”
– Clarence Darrow

“To be great is to be misunderstood.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
– Carl Sagan

“Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.”
– Unknown

“You are the end product of millions of years of evolution. Billions of organisms have died to make your existence possible. At least try to act intelligent.”
– Unknown

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe.”
– Albert Einstein

“The only difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.”
– Albert Einstein

“The stupidity of a stupid man is mercifully intimate and reticent, while the stupidity of an intellectual is cried from the rooftops.”
– Peter Ustinov

“Oh dear. She’s stuck in an infinite loop, and he’s an idiot. Well, that’s love for you.”
– Professor Farnsworth

“A career is wonderful, but you can’t curl up with it on a cold night.”
– Marilyn Monroe

Society

“You cannot wash away blood with blood”
– Unknown

“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest”
– Diderot

“Freedom cannot be given, it can only be taken away.”
– David Allan Coe

“Freedom is one thing. You have it all or you are not free.”
– Martin Luther King

“The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.”
– Henry David Thoreau

“If your law requires a police state to enforce, your law is wrong.”
– Unknown

“It is dangerous to be right on a subject on which the established authorities are wrong.”
– Voltaire

“Whenever men and women straighten their backs up they are going somewhere, because a man can’t ride your back unless it is bent.”
– Martin Luther King

“The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.”
– Unknown

“Advertising is the rattling of a stick in a swill bucket.”
– George Orwell

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. It is simply too painful to acknowledge even to ourselves that we’ve been so credulous.”
– Carl Sagan

“Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.”
– Unknown

“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”
– Albert Einstein

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
– Henry David Thoreau

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
– Martin Luther King

Conclusion

“A witty saying proves nothing.”
– Voltaire