Writing on the Wall
My favorite quotes.
Don't just do something, sit there.
- Zen admoniton
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
The feeling that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
- Geroge Orwell, “On Writing”
When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
- Yogi Berra
The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more
ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race, or holy
cause.
- Eric Hoffer
The border is you.
- author unknown
The real world accomplishes its seductions not by offering you opportunities to
be wicked, but by offering opportunities to be good, to be active and effective,
to be admired and central and apparently loved.
- James Baldwin
The very existence of flamethrowers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, “You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.”
- George Carlin
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes
may not be the same.
- George Bernard Shaw
Whatever you do is evil for somebody.
- Joseph Campbell
eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.
- Mark Twain
Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand.
- Homer Simpson
I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial, for neither life
nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not.
- Patricia Highsmith
He who knows the why of his life can make do with almost any how.
- Freidrich Nietzsche
A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life
when viewed from inside is simply a series of defeats.
- George Orwell
Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.
- Mark Twain
To separate what we like from what we dislike is the disease of mind.
- Sosan Ganchi Zenji
It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that
force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own
recompense.
- Albert Camus
I seem to be a verb.
- Buckminster Fuller
The term ‘capitalism’ is rarely used in economics. Naming the system, after
all, might imply that there are other ones.
- Jim Stafford, economist
Seeing the world in a realistic way is also to put blinders on preventing us
from seeing it in other ways.
- Linda Williams
Sexual desire and good citizenship don’t play by the same rules.
- Esther Perel
life is a business that does not cover its expenses.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
This is not simply a matter of trying to put a square peg into a round hole; it’s
a matter of having no place to put someone who refuses to think like a peg.
- Garrett Keizer
Good taste may be nothing but a fear of life and of the beautiful.
- Jules Renard
Perhaps there is something to be said for assimilation after all.
- Seven of Nine on dating problems, Star Trek: Voyager
The fashion wears out more apparel than the man.
- Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
- Oscar Wilde
No one’s taller than the last man standing.
- tagline for the video game I-Ninja
Fashion is a thing so intolerably ugly that we have to change it every six
months.
- Oscar Wilde
anywhere in the infinite is its center.
- “Inside Out,” Jack Myers
[The body] is not something we get to choose, and thus proves disquieting to
those for whom life is all about options.
- Terry Eagleton
Marriage is a disagreement machine.
- Diane Sollee
Every fear is a desire. Every desire is fear.
- “A Staffordshire Murderer,” James Fenton
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.
- Mark Twain
Man will only become better when you show him what he is like.
- Anton Chekhov
The idea of truth is a fence that keeps out others who have a different truth…
truth is a sentry keeping life out.
- Thomas Moore
The sweeping broom retains some of what it sweeps.
- Robert B. Pula
exercise flirts with a will to annihilate the body rather than to preserve its
longevity.
- Mark Greif
The quickest way to stop noticing something, may be to buy it - just as the
quickest way to stop appreciating someone may be to marry him or her.
- Alain de Botton
Cultured people are merely the glittering scum which floats upon the deep river
of production.
- Winston Churchill
If you don't watch the violence, you'll never get de-sensitized to it.
- Bart Simpson
Where they make a desert, they call it peace.
- Tacitus
To punish me for my contempt for authority, Fate made me an authority
myself.
- Albert Einstein
If at first you don't succeed, hide all the evidence that you ever tried.
- Henry Taylor
In the end, only personality counts.
- Goethe
our scorn of rebels and reformers is so great that we have ceased to persecute
them.
- Will Durant
Culture follows money.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom
every soil is as his native one is already strong, but he is perfect to whom the
entire world is a foreign land.
- Hugo of St. Victor
It's isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe.
- Muhammad Ali (his version of an old saying)
Fate leads the willing, and drags along the reluctant.
- Seneca
adventures happen only to people who know how to tell them.
- Henry James
We are the conspirators, so to speak. We have repressed the most creative part
of ourselves and now it is escaping in terrifying forms.
- Robert Anton Wilson
our talk about morality is just a matter of attaching high-sounding terms such
as 'right,' 'wrong,' 'duty,' and obligation,' to the practices we like or dislike, in
order to give our preferences more persuasive force.
- Bob Harrison
All of us know, too well, that no place is more foreign than the face asleep by
your side.
- Pico Iyer
One can be hated just as much for good deeds as for evil ones
- Niccolo Machiavelli
I am truly a 'lone traveller' and have never belonged to my country, my home,
my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart. In the face of
all this, I have never lost a sense of distance and the need for solitude.
- Albert Einstein
Do you know how to increase your synchronicity? Increase your awareness.
- boxcar grafitti artist
Lightness has to come from someplace very deep.
- Alicia Silverstone on Clueless
Happiness writes white. It does not show up on the page.
- Henri de Montherlant
Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certianty
that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
- Vaclav Havel
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
- Alan Watts
Live as if you were already dead.
- Zen admonition
Every person has a right to live their lives as a surprise to themselves.
- Hans Jonas
The truth is just an excuse for a lack of imagination.
- Garak, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
The Superman is a premature idea presupposing man.
- Karl Kraus
The difference between a hero and a coward is one step sideways.
- Gene Hackman
Money is what God used to be.
- George Orwell
When you look in your mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza?
Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be hero
or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the
advantages of staying alive with a whole skin.
- George Orwell
how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same
language?
- Russell Hoban
In some ways, the pursuit of perfect health can be read as an indicator of inner
moral decay: It demonstrates self-absorption and vanity more than moral
righteousness.
- Christine Arthurs
We are weird amphibians, simultaneously inhabiting solid knowledge and
liquid illusion.
- Sam Keen
what you resist ultimately conquers you.
- Krishnamurti
The deeper sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
- Kahlil Gibran
Conspiracies aren't the only things
shrouded in silence.
- "No Title Required," Wislawa Szymborska
Government is the shadow cast by business over society.
- John Dewey
Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do on a rainy Sunday
afternoon.
- Susan Ertz
There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding
each other.
- Eric Hoffer
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
- Eric Hoffer
the essence of postmodernism is an adolescent fear of getting taken in, an
adolescent conviciton that all systems are phony.
- Jonathan Franzen
we can never have enough of that which we really do not want.
- Eric Hoffer
I'm doing everything I can so I don't have to do something else.
- my mother
It's such a lie to do what's in our hearts because if we all did what was in our
hearts the world would grind to a halt.
- Angela in My So-Called Life
immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous.
- Bertrand Russell
It is remarkably easy to come to believe what it is convenient to believe.
- Noam Chomsky
The reasonable man adapts hoimself to the world; the unreasonable one persists
in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the
unreasonable man.
- George Bernard Shaw
The berry thinks it’s different
from the thorns it grows among but the seed
knows better.
- Dean Young, “The Hour Light Streams Through the House”
When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.
- Stephen Wright
In our world, the very idea of making a personal, public, ethical choice is
treated as unprofessional.
- John Ralston Saul
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
- George Bernard Shaw
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because
you were born in it.
- George Bernard Shaw
Virtue is insufficient temptation.
- George Bernard Shaw
