Thoughts

All that is gold does not glitter; not all those that wander are lost. — J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973)

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. — James Thurber (1894-1961)

Funny how people despise platitudes, when they are usually the truest thing going. A thing has to be pretty true before it gets to be a platitude. — Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879-1944)

Integrity needs no rules. — Albert Camus (1913-1960)

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side. — James Baldwin (1924-1987)

Freedom breeds freedom. Nothing else does. — Anne Roe (1904-1991)

The people who think they are happy should rummage through their dreams. — Edward Dahlberg (1900-1977)

Le sens commun n'est pas si commun. (Common sense is not so common.) — François Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778)

Men tire themselves in pursuit of rest. — Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)

Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror. — Carlos Fuentes (1928- )

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. — Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)

Children are God's spies. — Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973)

One is easily fooled by that which one loves. — Jean Baptiste Poquelin Molière (1622-1673)

Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well-informed about the United States. — J. Bartlet Brebner (1895-1957)

One of the few men who became great while remaining good. — Karl Marx (1818-1883) on Abraham Lincoln

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. — William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. — Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Statesmen think they make history; but history makes itself and drags the statesmen along. — Will Rogers (1879-1935)

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence. — Robert Frost (1874-1963)

The willing contemplation of vice is vice. — Arabic proverb

My friends, there are no friends. — Coco Chanel (1883-1971)

The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making. — Lillian Smith, American writer and social critic (1897-1966)

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways. — Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction. One has to go abroad in order to find the home one has lost. — Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

I know of no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution. — Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885)

It wasn't until quite late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say "I don't know." — W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

History, n. An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools. — Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), The Cynic's Word Book

At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been. — Oscar Wilde (1856-1900)

The greatest right any nation can afford its people is the right to be left alone. — Larry Flynt (1942- )

That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves. — Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

A man who does not lose his reason over certain things has none to lose. — Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781)

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. — John Locke (1632-1704)

Only those ideas that are least truly ours can be adequately expressed in words. — Henri Bergson (1859-1941)

It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions they attack. — Voltaire

Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of the few; and number not voices, but weigh them.— Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

There are two kinds of people in one's life—people whom one keeps waiting—and the people for whom one waits. — Samuel Nathaniel Behrman (1893-1973)

How glorious it is—and also how painful—to be an exception. — Alfred de Musset, French author (1810-1857)

People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them. — Eric Hoffer (1902-1983)

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects: Is this not true of fear? — Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973)