About Me Quotes

I want a person to come into my life by accident, but stays on purpose. 
 
I don’t hate my haters, but I won’t ever surround myself with such negativity. I’m better than that.
 
Dear Music, I will never be able to thank you enough for always being there for me.
 
I’m a simple person who hides a thousand feelings behind the happiest smile.
 
I’m not the girl that got away, but the one you failed to keep.
 
When I was younger, I wanted to be older. Now that im older, I want to be a kid again.
 
I’m mistaken for a flirt when I’m friendly, a bitch when I’m blunt, shy when I’m quiet. You just can’t please everyone.
 
The biggest mistake I have made in my life is letting people stay in my life far longer than they deserve.
 
When I say that I won’t tell anybody, my bestfriend doesn’t count.
 
Don’t judge the path I choose to take if you haven’t walked the journey I had to make.
 
I don’t regret my past. I just regret the time I’ve wasted with the wrong people.
 
Bottled up inside are the words I never said, the feelings that I hide, the lines you’ve never read.
 
Got a problem with me? Solve it. Think I’m trippin? Tie my shoes. Can’t stand me? Sit back down. Can’t face me? Turn around.
 
Sometimes, I push you away because I need you to pull me closer.
 
Like an apple on a tree. Hiding out behind the leaves. I was difficult to reach, but you picked me.
 
I’m not someone’s spare time. I’m their undivided attention.
 
I’m not shy, I’m holding back my awesomeness, so I don’t intimidate you.
 
I’m an artist, I paint on a smile. I’m an actress, I hold back the tears. I’m a doctor, trying to fix a broken heart.
 
I don’t follow the rules, I don’t follow the crowd, I don’t follow instructions, I don’t follow advice. I like to play fair I just don’t always play nice.
 
It’s not that I don’t believe in love, I am just terrified that it doesn’t believe in me.
 
I love those random memories that make me smile no matter what’s going on in my life right now.
 
Just because I don’t talk to you, or text you first, doesn’t mean I don’t miss you. I’m just waiting for you to miss me.
 
I’d rather be known for being a bitch while being real, then known for being the sweetest girl while being fake.
 
The more I know the less I understand. All the things I thought I figured out I have to learn again.
 
Don’t judge me for my choices when you don’t understand my reasons.
 
I’ll never be perfect, you just have to accept the fact that I am who I am.
 
Don’t put me on a pedestal, for I am sure to fall. Just love me as I am, flaws and all.
 
I see myself as a crayon, I may not be your favorite color, but I know someday, you will need me to complete your picture.
 
I don’t have a short temper, I just have a quick reaction to bullshit.
 
I’m not sure how to impress you so I hope being myself is good enough.
 
Boys think of girls like books; if the cover doesn’t catch their eyes, they won’t even bother to read what’s inside.
 
I don’t exercise. If God had wanted me to bend over, he would have put diamonds on the floor.
 
I’m not random, you just can’t think as fast as me.
 
If i liked your status on facebook that means u have entertained me.
 
I’m the oposite of a slut because I’ll never give a fuck.
 
That awkward moment when you’re scuba diving and see Adele rolling in the deep.
 
I had enough of “not good enough” so I decided to do better.
 
Don’t do something permanently stupid just because you are temporarily upset.
 
If you don’t like my words, don’t listen. If you don’t like my appearance, don’t look. If you don’t like my actions, turn your head; It’s as simple as that.
 

Men and Women Quotes

Women are sensitive, they overthink every little thing and they care way more than they should, but that’s what makes their love so strong.
 
Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea
 
Note To Females: Some men just don’t understand how much women are worth. They only see what they had when she’s gone.
 
A girl just wants to find that guy who will prove to her that they’re not all the same.
 
The best kind of guy is the one that can make his girl smile, even when she’s mad at him.
 
A boy can make you believe that he loves you when he doesn’t. A girl can make you believe that she doesn’t love you when she really does.
 
From a girl’s point of view, the guy always chooses the slut. From a guy’s point of view, the girl always chooses the jerk.
 
Real girls stay. Hoes come and go. Little boys play around. Real men settle down.
 
A relationship without trust is like having a phone with no service. And what do you do with a phone with no service? You play games.
 
When a man talks dirty to a woman, it’s sexual harassment. When a woman talks dirty to a man, it’s $3.95 a minute.
 
Women are like remote controls. It gives a man pleasure, he’d be lost without it, and while he doesn’t always know the right buttons to push, he keeps trying!
 
Women are like apples. The best ones are at the top of the tree. Most men don’t want to reach for them as they’re afraid of falling and getting hurt.
 
Men are like wine. It begins as grapes, and it’s up to women to stomp the crap out of it until it turns into something acceptable to have dinner with.
 
It’s amazing how guys take care of their Jordan’s, but can’t take care of a woman.
 
When a man goes on a date he wonders if he is going to get lucky. A woman already knows.
 
Fine: This is the word women use to end an argument when they are right and you need to shut up.
 
A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to want to take it off you.
 
If diamonds are a girl’s best friend and a dog is man’s best friend, who really is the dumber sex?
 
It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.
 
Girlfriends are like credit cards, you can’t get one unless you already have one.

Heart Break Quotes

She comes off as strong, but maybe she fell asleep crying. She acts like nothing is wrong, but maybe she’s just really good at lying.
 
The worst way to miss somebody is when they are right beside you and yet you know you can never have them.
 
Staying with someone who doesn’t appreciate you is like standing in quick sand, slowly sinking in sadness.
 
Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the biggest fool of all? Is it the girl who cant stop crying, or maybe the girl who kept on trying?
 
Don’t break a girl’s heart because she’ll probably write a bestselling album about you.
 
One of the saddest thing that can happen is when one falls in love while the other wants nothing more than friendship.
 
The greater your capacity to love, the greater your capacity to feel the pain.
 
Love is river crossing and every broken heart is a stepping stone to the other side, true love. Trust that there is someone to catch you when you fall; because there is, you just haven’t found them yet.
 
Once you have really hurt someone, it will always be in the back of their mind even if they still have a smile on their face.
 
If tears could build a stairway and memories were a lane, I would walk right up to heaven and bring you back again.
 
Pain makes you stronger. Fear makes you braver. Heartbreak makes you wiser.
 
Some people come into your life and you just know you will never be able to replace them if they left.
 
Everytime you lie, it brings me a little closer to goodbye.
 
It’s the things that you least expect that hit you the hardest.
 
When I don’t see you, I’m perfectly fine and I can move on. But the second I see your face, I’m back to wishing you were mine again.
 
Days pass and feelings fade, I’m wondering if you regret that decision you made.
 
“I still wanna be friends” is the same as saying “pretend none of this ever happened”.
 
To fall in love is awfully simple, but to fall out of love is simply awful.
 
Just because she’s smiling all day, doesn’t mean she’s not crying herself to sleep every night.
 
The worst way to miss someone is to be sitting right beside them knowing things will never be the same.

Quotations about Time

Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.  ~William Faulkner


Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.  ~John Archibald Wheeler


As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.  ~Henry David Thoreau, "Economy," Walden, 1854


Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror.  It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving.  ~Martin Amis, Money


The clock talked loud.  I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.  ~Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle


Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.  ~Dion Boucicault


In reality, killing time is only the name for another of the multifarious ways by which Time kills us.  ~Osbert Sitwell


For disappearing acts, it's hard to beat what happens to the eight hours supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work.  ~Doug Larson


But what minutes!  Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.  ~Benjamin Disraeli


Time goes, you say?  Ah no!
Alas, Time stays, we go.
~Henry Austin Dobson


Old Time, that greatest and longest established spinner of all!.... his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his hands are mutes.  ~Charles Dickens


Time wastes our bodies and our wits, but we waste time, so we are quits.  ~Author Unknown


Time is the fire in which we burn.  ~Delmore Schwartz, "Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day," 1937  (Thanks, George)


Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
~William Shakespeare


You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.  ~James Matthew Barrie


A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.  ~John B. Priestly


It strikes! one, two,
Three, four, five, six. Enough, enough, dear watch,
Thy pulse hath beat enough. Now sleep and rest;
Would thou could'st make the time to do so too;
I'll wind thee up no more.
~Ben Jonson


The flower that you hold in your hands was born today and already it is as old as you are.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


It's a strange thing, but when you are dreading something, and would give anything to slow down time, it has a disobliging habit of speeding up.  ~J.K. Rowling, "The Hungarian Horntail," Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 2000


Who forces time is pushed back by time; who yields to time finds time on his side.  ~The Talmud


Old Time, in whose banks we deposit our notes
Is a miser who always wants guineas for groats;
He keeps all his customers still in arrears
By lending them minutes and charging them years.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes


Time is like the wind, it lifts the light and leaves the heavy.  ~Doménico Cieri Estrada


Time is making fools of us again.  ~J.K. Rowling


El tiempo da buen consejo.  ~Proverb


There is one kind of robber whom the law does not strike at, and who steals what is most precious to men:  time.  ~Napoleon I, Maxims, 1815


Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.  ~Faith Baldwin


When told the reason for Daylight Saving time the old Indian said, "Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom of a blanket and have a longer blanket."  ~Author Unknown



Why won't they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can't they use birth control on time?  I want an interregnum.  The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping - rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year's and Easter and Christmas - But, goodness, why need they do it?  ~John Dos Passos, 1917


How long a minute is, depends on which side of the bathroom door you're on.  ~Zall's Second Law


The years like great black oxen tread the world
And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind.
~William Butler Yeats, The Countess Cathleen


Time! the corrector when our judgments err.  ~Lord Byron


The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not.... ~Thomas Carlyle


Time is the coin of your life.  It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent.  Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.  ~Carl Sandburg


Time is a figure eight, at its center the city of Deja Vu.  ~Robert Brault,


Time heals what reason cannot.  ~Seneca


I am tired of the imposed rhythms of men,
Tethered time, restrained and trained
To a monotonous beat
Digital time blinking exactness
Unliving.
~Phillip Pulfrey, "Conjecture," Beyond Me, www.originals.net


If you want work well done, select a busy man - the other kind has no time.  ~Elbert Hubbard


Darn the wheel of the world!  Why must it continually turn over?  Where is the reverse gear?  ~Jack London


Time flies on restless pinions - constant never.  ~Friedrich Schiller


The Future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.  ~C.S. Lewis


Time is a brisk wind, for each hour it brings something new... but who can understand and measure its sharp breath, its mystery and its design?  ~Paracelsus


What then is time?  If no one asks me, I know what it is.  If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.  ~Saint Augustine


Time is a very healing place, one in which you can grow.  ~Denise Tanner


Each moment has its sickle, emulous
Of Time's enormous scythe, whose ample sweep
Strikes empires from the root.
~Edward Young


The inertia hardest to overcome is that of perfectly good seconds.  ~Martin H. Fischer


Time is the wisest counsellor of all.  ~Pericles


A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.  ~Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried


There are whole years for which I hope I'll never be cross-examined, for I could not give an alibi.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


The clocks are all turned forward from Funny Time to Right Time.  I always remember, "Spring back or Fall in."  ~Dave Beard (@Raqhun)


Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past even while we attempt to define it, and, like the flash of lightning, at once exists and expires.  ~Charles Caleb Colton


Time is neither friend nor enemy it's just a measurement.  ~Mike Dolan,


Time is what we want most, but... what we use worst.  ~Willaim Penn


Time is the longest distance between two places.  ~Tennessee Williams


Among life's regrets is all the time wasted being early for everything.  ~Robert Brault,


Pick my left pocket of its silver dime, but spare the right - it holds my golden time!  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes


Man goes nowhere.  Everything comes to man, like tomorrow.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


Whether we wake or we sleep,
Whether we carol or weep,
The Sun with his Planets in chime,
Marketh the going of Time.
~Edward Fitzgerald


For centuries, man believed that the sun revolves around the earth.  Centuries later, he still thinks that time moves clockwise.  ~Robert Brault,


Time, the cradle of hope.... Wisdom walks before it, opportunity with it, and repentance behind it:  he that has made it his friend will have little to fear from his enemies, but he that has made it his enemy will have little to hope from his friends.  ~Charles Caleb Colton


Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.  ~Henry David Thoreau


The Present is a Point just passed.  ~David Russell


Methinks I see the wanton hours flee,
And as they pass, turn back and laugh at me.
~George Villiers


Time is an equal opportunity employer.  Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day.  Rich people can't buy more hours.  Scientists can't invent new minutes.  And you can't save time to spend it on another day.  Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving.  No matter how much time you've wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.  ~Denis Waitely


Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.  ~Charles Caleb Colton


One must learn a different... sense of time, one that depends more on small amounts than big ones.  ~Sister Mary Paul


Day, n.  A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.  ~Ambrose Bierce


Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.  ~Louis Hector Berlioz


Let not the sands of time get in your lunch.  ~Tony Hendra, "Deteriorata" (Thanks Tom)

Quotations about Thinking

No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.  ~Voltaire


Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.  ~Edmund Burke


Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.  ~Carl G. Jung


Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.  ~Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun


No matter where you go or what you do, you live your entire life within the confines of your head.  ~Terry Josephson


You and I are not what we eat; we are what we think.  ~Walter Anderson, The Confidence Course, 1997


Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?  ~Winnie the Pooh


People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.  ~Soren Kierkegaard


Too often we... enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.  ~John F. Kennedy


The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.  ~Will Durant


Begin challenging your own assumptions.  Your assumptions are your windows on the world.  Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won't come in.  ~Alan Alda


I like to think of thoughts as living blossoms borne by the human tree.  ~James Douglas


The forceps of our minds are clumsy things and crush the truth a little in the course of taking hold of it.  ~H.G. Wells


Our minds are lazier than our bodies.  ~François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1678


Invest a few moments in thinking.  It will pay good interest.  ~Author Unknown


Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar territory.  ~G. Behn


Thinking is like loving and dying.  Each of us must do it for himself.  ~Josiah Royce


It is well for people who think, to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean.  ~Luther Burbank


Physiological response to thinking and to pain is the same; and man is not given to hurting himself.  ~Martin H. Fischer


We spend our days in deliberating, and we end them without coming to any resolve.  ~L'Estrange


Our job is not to make up anybody's mind, but to open minds and to make the agony of the decision-making so intense you can escape only by thinking.  ~Author Unknown


Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.  ~Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923


The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life.  The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.  ~H.L. Mencken, Prejudices, 1925


Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once a week.  ~George Bernard Shaw


...the thoughtful excitement of lonely rambles, of gardening, and of other like occupations, where the mind has leisure to must during the healthful activity of the body, with the fresh and wakeful breezes blowing round it...  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Belief is when someone else does the thinking.  ~Buckminster Fuller, 1972



Irons rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.  ~Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks, 1508


A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man.  But they don't bite everybody.  ~Stanislaw Lec, Unkempt Thoughts, 1962


Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.  ~G.C. Lichtenberg


The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking.  ~Albert Einstein


Brain, n.  An apparatus with which we think that we think.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


At a certain age some people's minds close up; they live on their intellectual fat.  ~William Lyon Phelps


It's crazy how you can get yourself in a mess sometimes and not even be able to think about it with any sense and yet not be able to think about anything else.  ~Stanley Kubrick


We are dying from overthinking.  We are slowly killing ourselves by thinking about everything.  Think.  Think.  Think.  You can never trust the human mind anyway.  It's a death trap.  ~Anthony Hopkins


One cannot think crooked and walk straight.  ~Author Unknown


Thought is the wind, knowledge the sail, and mankind the vessel.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


No amount of energy will take the place of thought.  A strenuous life with its eyes shut is a kind of wild insanity.  ~Henry Van Dyke


Tell your friends not to think aloud
Until they swallow.
~Nickelback, "Leader of Men," The State


Believing is easier than thinking.  Hence so many more believers than thinkers.  ~Bruce Calvert


A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought.  There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor  ~Victor Hugo


Sometimes I think and other times I am.  ~Paul Valéry, Variété: Cantiques spirituels, 1924


Few minds wear out; more rust out.  ~Christian N. Bovee


From restless thoughts, that, like a deadly swarm
Of hornets arm'd, no sooner found alone,
But rush upon me thronging.
~John Milton


What a blessing it is to be alone with your thoughts when so many are alone with their inability to think.  ~Robert Brault,

We use 10% of our brains.  Imagine how much we could accomplish if we used the other 60%.  ~Ellen Degeneres


Opinion is that exercise of the human will which helps us to make a decision without information.  ~John Erskine


Some people do not become thinkers simply because their memories are too good.  ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche


If a man's stomach has been filled by eating greens and other vegetables, although the most precious dainties with exquisite tastes should be given him, he cannot swallow them, he must first get rid of a few portions of the greens; so in reading, the same is true of the mixed thoughts which distract the mind, which are about the dusty affairs of a vulgar world.  ~Robert Morrison, quoted in The Middle Kingdom by Samuel Wells Williams


Men can live without air a few minutes, without water for about two weeks, without food for about two months - and without a new thought for years on end.  ~Kent Ruth


The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have.  ~John Locke, 16 May 1699


Men who borrow their opinions can never repay their debts.  ~George Savile, Marquess de Halifax, Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections


A lawyer's brief will be brief, before a freethinker thinks freely.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Chi Wen Tzu always thought three times before taking action.  Twice would have been quite enough.  ~Confucius, Analects


Impartial observers from other planets would consider ours an utterly bizarre enclave if it were populated by birds, defined as flying animals, that nevertheless rarely or never actually flew.  They would also be perplexed if they encountered in our seas, lakes, rivers, and ponds, creatures defined as swimmers that never did any swimming.  But they would be even more surprised to encounter a species defined as a thinking animal if, in fact, the creature very rarely indulged in actual thinking.  ~Steve Allen


What luck for rulers, that men do not think.  ~Adolph Hitler


Doubt is not a pleasant state of mind, but certainty is absurd.  ~Voltaire, 1767


Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death.  Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit.  Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid.  Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.  ~Bertrand Russell


[Thinking is] what a great many people think they are doing when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.  ~William James


For those who do not think, it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while.  ~Luther Burbank


How wonderful that we have met with a paradox.  Now we have some hope of making progress.  ~Niels Bohr


You cannot plough a field by turning it over in your mind.  ~Author Unknown


He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.  ~William Drummond, Academical Questions


Ours is the age which is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.  ~Howard Mumford Jones

Quotations about the Soul


Until you know that life is interesting - and find it so - you haven't found your soul.  ~Geoffrey Fisher


The windows of my soul I throw
Wide open to the sun.
~John Greenleaf Whittier, My Psalm


You don't have a soul.  You are a Soul.  You have a body.  ~C.S. Lewis


The soul may sleep and the body still be happy, but only in youth.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


I simply believe that some part of the human Self or Soul is not subject to the laws of space and time.  ~Carl Jung


Confession is good for the conscience, but it usually bypasses the soul.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other.  ~Henry David Thoreau


A sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways - by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light; and he will recognize that the same thing happens to the soul.  ~Plato


We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Quotation and Originality," Letters and Social Aims, 1876


What he had yearned to embrace was not the flesh but a downy spirit, a spark, the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, translated from French by Lewis Galantière


Care I for the limb, the thews, the stature, bulk, and big assemblance of a man!  Give me the spirit.  ~William Shakespeare


I believe that the soul consists of its sufferings.  For the soul that cures its own sufferings dies.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.  ~Anne Sexton


One certainly has a soul; but how it came to allow itself to be enclosed in a body is more than I can imagine.  I only know if once mine gets out, I'll have a bit of a tussle before I let it get in again to that of any other.  ~Lord Byron


Why do you hasten to remove anything which hurts your eye, while if something affects your soul you postpone the cure until next year?  ~Horace


Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.  ~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations


When one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people's souls give off such a pungent smell of decay.  ~Octave Mirbeau


How strange a thing this is!  The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.  ~Oscar Wilde


Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.  ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Following the Equator, 1897


You are a beautiful soul hidden by the trench coat of the ego.  ~Mike Dolan,


When you do things from your soul you feel a river moving in you, a joy.  When action come from another section, the feeling disappears.  ~Rumi


Upturned toward the sun, eyes closed.  That color and warmth I see and feel is the soul on fire.  If only it remained when again my eyes opened.  ~Jeb Dickerson,


With all your science - can you tell how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?  ~Henry David Thoreau


Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth."  Say not, "I have found the path of the soul."  Say rather, "I have met the soul walking upon my path."  For the soul walks upon all paths.  The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.  The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.  ~Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, 1923


One thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


What is soul?  It's like electricity - we don't really know what it is, but it's a force that can light a room.  ~Ray Charles


Diseases of the soul are more dangerous and more numerous than those of the body.  ~Cicero


Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time.  ~Timothy Leary


The soul, like the body, lives by what it feeds on.  ~Josiah Gilbert Holland


It would be idle to say that life is a steady progression in happiness. But it is most certain that in the natural course of things a healthy soul grows continually richer until its latest day on earth. ~George S. Merriam


Living is being born slowly.  It would be a little too easy if we could borrow ready-made souls.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942


The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.  ~Ferdinand Foch


One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever come to sit by it.  Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on the way.  ~Vincent Van Gogh


You see, when weaving a blanket, an Indian woman leaves a flaw in the weaving of that blanket to let the soul out.  ~Martha Graham


I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of another boy.  ~Woody Allen

Quotations about Smiles

Today, give a stranger one of your smiles.  It might be the only sunshine he sees all day.  ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.


A smile confuses an approaching frown.  ~Author Unknown


People seldom notice old clothes if you wear a big smile.  ~Lee Mildon


A smile is a curve that sets everything straight.  ~Phyllis Diller


Smile.  Have you ever noticed how easily puppies make human friends?  Yet all they do is wag their tails and fall over.  ~Walter Anderson, The Confidence Course, 1997


The world always looks brighter from behind a smile.  ~Author Unknown


Start every day with a smile and get it over with.  ~W.C. Fields


Before you put on a frown, make absolutely sure there are no smiles available.  ~Jim Beggs


A smile is an inexpensive way to change your looks.  ~Charles Gordy


Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.  ~Mark Twain, Following the Equator


The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.  ~William Shakespeare, Othello


A smile is the light in the window of your face that tells people you're at home.  ~Author Unknown


If you smile when no one else is around, you really mean it.  ~Andy Rooney


If you smile at someone, they might smile back.  ~Author Unknown


Life is like a mirror, we get the best results when we smile at it.  ~Author Unknown


Always remember to be happy because you never know who's falling in love with your smile.  ~Author Unknown


Hey, I've got nothing to do today but smile.  ~Paul Simon, "Only Living Boy in New York"


Everyone smiles in the same language.  ~Author Unknown


If you don't have a smile, I'll give you one of mine.  ~Author Unknown


I've never seen a smiling face that was not beautiful.  ~Author Unknown


Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.  ~George Eliot


She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.  ~Raymond Chandler


Smiling is infectious,
You can catch it like the flu.
Someone smiled at me today,
And I started smiling too.
~Author Unknown


A smile appeared upon her face as if she'd taken it directly from her handbag and pinned it there.  ~Loma Chandler


A laugh is a smile that bursts.  ~Mary H. Waldrip


Smile — sunshine is good for your teeth. ~Author Unknown


The shortest distance between two people is a smile. ~Author unknown, modification of Victor Borge's "Laughter is the shortest distance between two people."


Every scowling face also contains the shapes of engaging smiles, just waiting to be released. ~Dr. SunWolf,



 
 
If you don't start out the day with a smile, it's not too late to start practicing for tomorrow. ~Author Unknown


Is a smile a question? Or is it the answer? ~Lee Smith


Smiling is my favorite exercise. ~Author Unknown


The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to blame it on. ~Robert Bloch


I have a tickle in my brain. And it keeps making the corners of my mouth point toward the heavens. ~Jeb Dickerson,


Every smile makes you a day younger. ~Chinese Proverb


Wear a smile - one size fits all. ~Author Unknown


People are not perfect (except when they smile). ~Author Unknown


No matter how grouchy you're feeling,
You'll find the smile more or less healing.
It grows in a wreath
All around the front teeth—
Thus preserving the face from congealing.
~Anthony Euwer


Every day you spend without a smile, is a lost day.  ~Author Unknown


Sometimes it's just enough to smile sincerely.  ~Mike Dolan,


Everytime you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.  ~Mother Teresa


A smile is like tight underwear - it makes your cheeks go up.  ~Author Unknown


A friendly look, a kindly smile, one good act, and life's worthwhile.  ~Author Unknown


What a snapshot is to your life, your life is to eternity, so wouldn't it be nice if eternity captured you smiling?  ~Robert Brault,


A kind heart is a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity freshen into smiles.  ~Washington Irving


Beauty is power; a smile is its sword.  ~Charles Reade


A smile is the universal welcome.  ~Max Eastman


Keep smiling - it makes people wonder what you've been up to.  ~Author Unknown


You're never fully dressed without a smile.  ~Martin Charnin


A smile can brighten the darkest day.  ~Author Unknown


Smile, it lets your teeth breathe.  ~Author Unknown


It takes seventeen muscles to smile and forty-three to frown.  ~Author Unknown


Of all the things you wear, your expression is the most important.  ~Janet Lane


The teeth are smiling, but is the heart? ~African Proverb


All the statistics in the world can't measure the warmth of a smile.  ~Chris Hart


If you would like to spoil the day for a grouch, give him a smile.  ~Author Unknown


Smile!  It increases your face value.  ~Robert Harling, Steel Magnolias


Peace begins with a smile.  ~Mother Teresa


A smile is a powerful weapon; you can even break ice with it.  ~Author Unknown


Most smiles are started by another smile.  ~Author Unknown


A smile is something you can't give away; it always comes back to you.  ~Author Unknown


A smile costs nothing but gives much.  It enriches those who receive without making poorer those who give.  It takes but a moment, but the memory of it sometimes lasts forever.  None is so rich or mighty that he cannot get along without it and none is so poor that he cannot be made rich by it.  Yet a smile cannot be bought, begged, borrowed, or stolen, for it is something that is of no value to anyone until it is given away.  Some people are too tired to give you a smile.  Give them one of yours, as none needs a smile so much as he who has no more to give.  ~Author Unknown


It takes a lot of work from the face to let out a smile, but just think what good smiling can bring to the most important muscle of the body... the heart.  ~Author Unknown

Quotations about Risk

Don't refuse to go on an occasional wild goose chase - that's what wild geese are for.  ~Author Unknown


To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily.  To not dare is to lose oneself.  ~Soren Kierkegaard


I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.  ~Pablo Picasso


When in doubt, make a fool of yourself.  There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth.  So what the hell, leap.  ~Cynthia Heimel, "Lower Manhattan Survival Tactics"


I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I'm not afraid of falling into my inkpot.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Progress always involves risks.  You can't steal second base and keep your foot on first.  ~Frederick B. Wilcox


Why not go out on a limb?  Isn't that where the fruit is?  ~Frank Scully


Yes, risk taking is inherently failure-prone.  Otherwise, it would be called sure-thing-taking.  ~Tim McMahon


Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.  ~Author Unknown


If you don't take risks, you'll have a wasted soul.  ~Drew Barrymore


The fear of being laughed at makes cowards of us all.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


You'll always miss 100% of the shots you don't take.  ~Wayne Gretzky


I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.  ~G.K. Chesterton


What is more mortifying than to feel you've missed the Plum for want of courage to shake the Tree?  ~Logan Pearsall Smith


A ship in harbor is safe - but that is not what ships are for.  ~John A. Shedd, Salt from My Attic


To eat an egg, you must break the shell.  ~Jamaican Proverb


To win you have to risk loss.  ~Jean-Claude Killy


The torment of precautions often exceeds the dangers to be avoided.  It is sometimes better to abandon one's self to destiny.  ~Napoleon Bonaparte


If you're never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances.  ~Julia Sorel (Rosalyn Drexler), See How She Runs, 1978


Take risks:  if you win, you will be happy; if you lose, you will be wise.  ~Author Unknown


Prudence keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.  ~Samuel Johnson


This nation was built by men who took risks - pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness, business men who were not afraid of failure, scientists who were not afraid of the truth, thinkers who were not afraid of progress, dreamers who were not afraid of action.  ~Brooks Atkinson


The more chance there is of stubbing your toe, the more chance you have of stepping into success.  ~Author Unknown


The healthy being craves an occasional wildness, a jolt from normality, a sharpening of the edge of appetite, his own little festival of the Saturnalia, a brief excursion from his way of life.  ~Robert MacIver


Of all the people I have ever known, those who have pursued their dreams and failed have lived a much more fulfilling life than those who have put their dreams on a shelf for fear of failure.  ~Author Unknown


Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.  ~Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, 1759


Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.  ~Robert F. Kennedy


It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.  ~Garrison Keillor


Adventure is what happens when you just did something stupid.  ~Professor Bernie


It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.  ~Seneca


What great thing would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?  ~Robert H. Schuller


You must lose a fly to catch a trout.  ~George Herbert


While forbidden fruit is said to taste sweeter, it usually spoils faster.  ~Abigail van Buren


The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.  ~Lord Chesterfield


Often we... expect and want every day to be just like today.  Even though we're not satisfied with today, we settle for security instead of discovery.  ~Stephen G. Scalese, The Whisper in Your Heart


Never be afraid to try something new.  Remember, amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic.  ~Author Unknown


If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?  ~Aleksander Solzhenitsyn


Dare to be naive.  ~Buckminster Fuller


It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves - in finding themselves.  ~André Gide


Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it.  Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?  ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau


There are those who are so scrupulously afraid of doing wrong that they seldom venture to do anything.  ~Vauvenargues


One cannot refuse to eat just because there is a chance of being choked.  ~Chinese Proverb


Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions.  All life is an experiment.  The more experiments you make the better.  What if they are a little course, and you may get your coat soiled or torn?  What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice.  Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.  ~André Gide


Behold the turtle.  He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.  ~James Bryant Conant


You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.  ~James Thurber


We fail more often by timidity than by over-daring.  ~David Grayson


Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.  ~Ray Bradbury

Quotations about Self-Respect

In my day, we didn't have self-esteem, we had self-respect, and no more of it than we had earned.  ~Jane Haddam


Self-respect is the fruit of discipline...  ~Abraham J. Heschel


He that respects himself is safe from others; he wears a coat of mail that none can pierce.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.  ~Cyril Connolly


The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.  ~Joan Didion


I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.  ~Frederick Douglass


A man can stand a lot as long as he can stand himself.  ~Axel Munthe


To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.  ~Joan Didion


Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.  ~Marcus Aurelius


Respect your efforts, respect yourself.  Self-respect leads to self-discipline.  When you have both firmly under your belt, that's real power.  ~Clint Eastwood


They cannot take away our self-respect if we do not give it to them.  ~Mahatma Gandhi


Self-respect cannot be hunted.  It cannot be purchased.  It is never for sale.  It cannot be fabricated out of public relations.  It comes to us when we are alone, in quiet moments, in quiet places, when e suddenly realize that, knowing the good, we have done it; knowing the beautiful, we have served it; knowing the truth we have spoken it.  ~Whitney Griswold


If I despised myself, it would be no compensation if everyone saluted me, and if I respect myself, it does not trouble me if others hold me lightly.  ~Max Nordau


Never violate the sacredness of your individual self-respect.  ~Theodore Parker


No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.  ~George Bernard Shaw


Self-respect is the cornerstone of all virtue.  ~John Herschel


That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong.  ~William J.H. Boetcker


I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself.  I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.  ~Michel de Montaigne


Self-respect permeates every aspect of your life.  ~Joe Clark


If you want to be respected by others the great thing is to respect yourself.  Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.  ~Fyodor Dostoyevsky


Some people have so much respect for their superiors they have none left for themselves.  ~Peter McArthur


I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes.  What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself.  To undermine a man's self-respect is a sin.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery


Respect for ourselves guides our morals; respect for others guides our manners.  ~Laurence Sterne


You do not need to be the designated driver of someone's intoxicated ego.  ~Dodinsky,


You punch me, I punch back.  I do not believe it's good for ones self-respect to be a punching bag.  ~Edward Koch


Would that there were an award for people who come to understand the concept of enough.  Good enough.  Successful enough.  Thin enough.  Rich enough.  Socially responsible enough.  When you have self-respect, you have enough.  ~Gail Sheehy


Be beautiful if you can, wise if you want to, but be respected - that is essential.  ~Anna Gould


Self-respect knows no considerations.  ~Mahatma Gandhi


In order to preserve your self-respect, it is sometimes necessary to lie and cheat.  ~Robert Byrne


The individual woman is required... a thousand times a day to choose either to accept her appointed role and thereby rescue her good disposition out of the wreckage of her self-respect, or else follow an independent line of behavior and rescue her self-respect out of the wreckage of her good disposition.  ~Jeannette Rankin


Respect yourself and others will respect you.  ~Confucius


A man who doesn't trust himself can never really trust anyone else.  ~Cardinal De Retz


Respecting yourself means listening to your body and emotions continuously.  Then acting beyond a linear logic to achieve ones goals.  ~Author Unknown


Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.  ~Author Unknown


If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.  ~Maya Angelou


It is the highest form of self-respect to admit our errors and mistakes and make amends for them.  To make a mistake is only an error in judgment, but to adhere to it when it is discovered shows infirmity of character.  ~Dale E. Turner

Quotations about Teamwork

Teamwork divides the task and multiplies the success.  ~Author Unknown


No one can whistle a symphony.  It takes a whole orchestra to play it.  ~H.E. Luccock


Teamwork is the ability to work as a group toward a common vision, even if that vision becomes extremely blurry.  ~Author Unknown


Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.  ~Vince Lombardi


The nice thing about teamwork is that you always have others on your side.  ~Margaret Carty


Many hands make light work.  ~John Heywood


One piece of log creates a small fire, adequate to warm you up, add just a few more pieces to blast an immense bonfire, large enough to warm up your entire circle of friends; needless to say that individuality counts but team work dynamites.  ~Jin Kwon


No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.  ~John Donne


Cooperation is the thorough conviction that nobody can get there unless everybody gets there.  ~Virginia Burden


Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable.  ~Kenyan Proverb


Coming together is a beginning.  Keeping together is progress.  Working together is success.  ~Henry Ford


None of us is as smart as all of us.  ~Ken Blanchard


A man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it.  ~Father Strickland, 1863 (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)


Team means Together Everyone Achieves More!  ~Author Unknown


Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision.  The ability to direct individual accomplishment toward organizational objectives.  It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.  ~Andrew Carnegie


Regardless of differences, we strive shoulder to shoulder... [T]eamwork can be summed up in five short words:  "We believe in each other."  ~Author Unknown


A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.  ~Author Unknown


Contrary to popular belief, there most certainly is an "I" in "team."  It is the same "I" that appears three times in "responsibility."  ~Amber Harding


We must all hang together or most assuredly we shall hang separately.  ~Benjamin Franklin


Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.  ~Margaret Meade


A single leaf working alone provides no shade.  ~Chuck Page


The way a team plays as a whole determines its success.  You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don't play together, the club won't be worth a dime.  ~Babe Ruth


If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.  ~Henry Ford


Teamwork is essential - it allows you to blame someone else.  ~Author Unknown


The ratio of We's to I's is the best indicator of the development of a team.  ~Lewis B. Ergen


Respect your fellow human being, treat them fairly, disagree with them honestly, enjoy their friendship, explore your thoughts about one another candidly, work together for a common goal and help one another achieve it.  ~Bill Bradley


I am a member of a team, and I rely on the team, I defer to it and sacrifice for it, because the team, not the individual, is the ultimate champion.  ~Mia Hamm


Teamwork is so important that it is virtually impossible for you to reach the heights of your capabilities or make the money that you want without becoming very good at it.  ~Brian Tracy


No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


A snowflake is one of God's most fragile creations, but look what they can do when they stick together!  ~Author Unknown


In union there is strength.  ~Aesop


Remember upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all.  ~Alexander the Great


If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery


A group becomes a team when each member is sure enough of himself and his contribution to praise the skills of the others.  ~Norman Shidle


Gettin' good players is easy.  Gettin' 'em to play together is the hard part.  ~Casey Stengel


It is a fact that in the right formation, the lifting power of many wings can achieve twice the distance of any bird flying alone.  ~Author Unknown


Sure there's no "I" in "team," but there is a "ME"!  ~Author Unknown

Quotes About Quatatation

Like your body your mind also gets tired so refresh it by wise sayings. ~Hazrat Ali


The only way to read a book of aphorisms without being bored is to open it at random and, having found something that interests you, close the book and meditate. ~Prince Charles-Joseph de Ligne, 1796


I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself. ~Marlene Dietrich


In places this book is a little over-written, because Mr Blunden is no more able to resist a quotation than some people are to refuse a drink.~George Orwell, review of Cricket Country by Edmund Blunden, April 20, 1944, in Manchester Evening News


Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author? ~Philip Gilbert Hamerton, The Intellectual Life, 1873


Many useful and valuable books lie buried in shops and libraries, unknown and unexamined, unless some lucky compiler opens them by chance, and finds an easy spoil of wit and learning. ~Samuel Johnson, 1760


It sometimes happens at the end of a dinner, when jokes and walnuts are cracked together, that the paternity of some trite quotation is put in question, and at once the wit of the whole company is set wool-gathering. ~Frederic Swartwout Cozzens, "Phrases and Filberts," Sayings, Wise and Otherwise


Quotations will tell the full measure of meaning, if you have enough of them. ~James Murray


The quoting of an aphorism, like the angry barking of a dog or the smell of overcooked broccoli, rarely indicates that something helpful is about to happen. ~Lemony Snicket, The Vile Village, 2001


Life itself is a quotation. ~Jorge Luis Borges


While reading writers of great formulatory power - Henry James, Santayana, Proust - I find I can scarcely get through a page without having to stop to record some lapidary sentence. Reading Henry James, for example, I have muttered to myself, "C'mon, Henry, turn down the brilliance a notch, so I can get some reading done." I may be one of a very small number of people who have developed writer's cramp while reading. ~Joseph Epstein, "Quotatious," A Line Out for a Walk: Familiar Essays, 1991


It is a pleasure to be able to quote lines to fit any occasion... ~Abraham Lincoln


A quote is just a tattoo on the tongue. ~Attributed to William F. DeVault


For I often please myself with the fancy, now that I may have saved from oblivion the only striking passage in a whole volume, and now that I may have attracted notice to a writer undeservedly forgotten. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Ralph Keyes calls quotation collectors "quotographers," the men and women who gather catchwords, watchwords, war words, winged words, maxims, mottos, sayings, and quips into books of a thousand pages. Through the centuries quotation collectors have saved quotations that would otherwise be lost. ~Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, 2010


Quotology disdains no quotations whatsoever, a duty it bears stoutly, with bloodshot eyes and sagging shelves. ~Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, 2010


I've compiled a book from the Internet. It's a book of quotations attributed to the wrong people. ~Jerry Seinfeld


It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else. ~Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923


To engage in the agreeable task of culling the beauties of English literature, is like entering into a garden richly stocked with fruits and flowers. There is such an endless variety of blossoms on every side—so much to charm the eye, and woo the touch, that he who merely aims at arranging a suitable wreath, is apt to fail, from the very profusion of materials that are scattered around him. ~Classic Cullings and Fugitive Gatherings by An Experienced Editor, 1831


I have heard that nothing gives an Author so great Pleasure, as to find his Works respectfully quoted by other learned Authors. ~Benjamin Franklin, "Preface," Poor Richard Improved, wording verified by Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations


I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. ~Samuel Johnson, quoted in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. by James Boswell, 1785


My readers, who may at first be apt to consider Quotation as downright pedantry, will be surprised when I assure them, that next to the simple imitation of sounds and gestures, Quotation is the most natural and most frequent habitude of human nature. For, Quotation must not be confined to passages adduced out of authors. He who cites the opinion, or remark, or saying of another, whether it has been written or spoken, is certainly one who quotes; and this we shall find to be universally practiced. ~James Boswell, "The Hypochondriack," No.XXI, The London Magazine: Or, Gentleman's Monthly Intelligencer, June 1779


There is indeed a strange prejudice against Quotation. ~James Boswell, "The Hypochondriack," No. XXII, 1779


Quotation is more universal and more ancient than one would perhaps believe. ~James Boswell, "The Hypochondriack," No.XXI, The London Magazine: Or, Gentleman's Monthly Intelligencer, June 1779


He wrapped himself in quotations—as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors. ~Rudyard Kipling


I am not merely a habitual quoter but an incorrigible one. I am, I may as well face it, more quotatious than an old stock-market ticker-tape machine, except that you can't unplug me. ~Joseph Epstein, "Quotatious," A Line Out for a Walk: Familiar Essays, 1991


For, what though his Head be empty, provided his Common place-Book be full... ~Jonathan Swift, "A Digression in Praise of Digressions," A Tale of a Tub: Written for the Universal Improvement of Mankind. To Which is Added, An Account of a Battel Between the Antient and Modern Books in St. James's Library, 1704


I'm discovering that everybody is a closet quotesmith. Just give them a chance. ~Robert Brault,


I am wonderfully pleased when I meet with any passage in an old Greek or Latin author, that is not blown upon, and which I have never met with in any quotation. ~Joseph Addison, Spectator, No.464


Quotologists encounter happy surprises, bright books by faded authors, treasures hidden under dust. ~Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, 2010


A book of quotations... can never be complete. ~Robert M. Hamilton


What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings—they are so trite, so threadbare, that we can hardly bring our lips to utter them. None the less they embody the concentrated experience of the race, and the man who orders his life according to their teaching cannot go far wrong. How easy that seems! Has any one ever done so? Never. Has any man ever attained to inner harmony by pondering the experience of others? Not since the world began! He must pass through the fire. ~Norman Douglas, South Wind, 1921


Collecting quotations is an insidious, even embarrassing habit, like ragpicking or hoarding rocks or trying on other people's laundry. I got into it originally while trying to break an addiction to candy. I kicked candy and now seem to be stuck with quotations, which are attacking my brain instead of my teeth. ~Robert Byrne, "Sources, References, and Notes," The Other 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said, 1984


Fine phrases I value more than bank-notes. I have ear for no other harmony than the harmony of words. To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for. ~Alexander Smith


Shake was a dramatist of note;
He lived by writing things to quote...
~V. Hugo Dusenbury, "The Private Pantheon of Puck's Private Poet," Puck, January 28, 1880, Vol. VI, No. 151


Learning is often spoken of as if we are watching the open pages of all the books which we have ever read, and then, when occasion arises, we select the right page to read aloud to the universe. ~Alfred North Whitehead, address delivered to the Training College Association of England, quoted in Bulletin of The American Association of University Professors, November 1923, Volume IX, Number 7


Always verify quotations! ~Martin Joseph Routh, quoted in Catholic World: A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and Science, March 1882; in other sources sometimes quoted as "your references"


Collect as precious pearls the words of the wise and virtuous. ~El Amir Abdelkader


Proverbs are potted wisdom. ~Charles Buxton


In such a case the writer is apt to have recourse to epigrams. Somewhere in this world there is an epigram for every dilemma. ~Hendrik Willem van Loon, The Liberation of Mankind, 1926


Most collectors collect tangibles. As a quotation collector, I collect wisdom, life, invisible beauty, souls alive in ink. ~Terri Guillemets


I here present thee with a hive of bees, laden some with wax, and some with honey. Fear not to approach! there are no wasps, there are no hornets here. If some wanton bee chance to buzz about thine ears, stand thy ground and hold thy hands—there's none will sting thee, if thou strike not first. If any do, she hath honey in her bag will cure thee too. ~Francis Quarles


We love quotations; they strengthen us in our own belief; they show that some other spirit, perhaps a master-spirit, has gone thus far with us: to such we cling as the ivy to the oak. ~S.J.W., "On Female Education," in The Christian Teacher (National Review), 1835


It is a rich storehouse for those who love quotations. It is as full of fine bon mots as a Christmas pudding is full of plums. ~"Fitz-Greene Halleck as a Poet," Hours at Home: A Popular Monthly of Instruction and Recreation, February 1868, about Halleck's poem "Fanny"


Don't you love quotations? I am immensely fond of them; a certain proof of erudition.... [I]f you should happen to write an insipid poem... send it to me, and my fiat shall crown you with immortality. ~Frances Brooke, Lady Julia Mandeville , 1763


...the curious hunter-up of rare quotations... the young and struggling scribbler... ~William Francis Henry King, "Introduction," Classical and Foreign Quotations, 1889


...the taste of the finely-worded truth rolled upon the tongue as its thought is revolved in the mind. ~William Francis Henry King, "Introduction," Classical and Foreign Quotations, 1889


It has been said that death ends all things. This is a mistake. It does not end the volume of practical quotations, and it will not until the sequence of the alphabet is so materially changed as to place D where Z now stands. ~Harper's Bazar: Facetiæ, September 1, 1888, quoted in A Dictionary of Quotations in Prose by Anna L. Ward, 1889


Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay to an author. ~André-Marie Ampère


They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge. ~Edward Bulwer Lytton


Not everything that can be extracted appears in anthologies of quotations, in commonplace books, or on the back of Celestial Seasonings boxes. Only certain sorts of extracts become quotations. ~Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture, 2011


The multiplicity of facts and writings is become so great that every thing must soon be reduced to extracts and dictionaries. ~Voltaire


He picked something out of everything he read. ~Pliny


Books are the beehives of thought; laconics, the honey taken from them. ~James Ellis, quoted in Edge-Tools of Speech by Maturin M. Ballou, 1899


Life is like quotations. Sometimes it makes you laugh. Sometimes it makes you cry. Most of the time, you just don't get it. ~Author Unknown


A case which commonly happens with us in London, as well as our Neighbours in Paris, where if a Witty Man starts a happy thought, a Million of sordid Imitators ride it to death. ~Thomas Brown, Laconics: Or, New Maxims of State and Conversation


A well arranged scrapbook, filled with choice selections, is a most excellent companion for anyone who has the least literary taste. ~Chaning, quoted in Sayings: Proverbs, Maxims, Mottoes by Charles F. Schutz, 1915


Most of the noted literary men have indulged in the prudent habit of selecting favorite passages for future reference. ~Charles F. Schutz, Sayings: Proverbs, Maxims, Mottoes, 1915


It is bad enough to see one's own good things fathered on other people, but it is worse to have other people's rubbish fathered upon oneself. ~Samuel Butler


[W]hen I hear or read a good line I can hardly wait to tell it to somebody else... ~Robert Byrne, The Third and Possibly the Best 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said, 1986


Particles of science are often very widely scattered. Writers of extensive comprehension have incidental remarks upon topicks very remote from the principal subject, which are often more valuable than formal treatises, and which yet are not known because they are not promised in the title. He that collects those under proper heads is very laudably employed, for though he exerts no great abilities in the work, he facilitates the progress of others, and by making that easy of attainment which is already written, may give some mind, more vigorous or more adventurous than his own, leisure for new thoughts and original designs. ~Samuel Johnson, The Idler, December 1, 1759


Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Plato; Or, The Philosopher"


The mind will quote whether the tongue does or not. ~Attributed to Emerson in Edge-Tools of Speech by Maturin M. Ballou, 1886


I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there; but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Many moons ago dictionaries of quotations may have been less needed than they are today. In those good/bad old days, people walked around with entire poems and all the Shakespearean soliloquies in their heads.... ~Joseph Epstein, Foreword to Fred R. Shapiro's Yale Book of Quotations, 2006


Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar's dinner, from a hundred charities? ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Quotation and Originality," Letters and Social Aims, 1876


Short sentences drawn from long experience. ~Miguel de Cervantes


In phrases as brief as a breath worldly wisdom concentrates. ~Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, 2010


It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive. ~Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens), Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World, 1897


As by some might be saide of me: that here I have but gathered a nosegay of strange floures, and have put nothing of mine unto it, but the thred to binde them. Certes, I have given unto publike opinion, that these borrowed ornaments accompany me; but I meane not they should cover or hide me... ~Michel de Montaigne, "Of Phisiognomy," translated by John Florio; commonly modernized to "I have gathered a posy of other men's flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own."


A profusion of fancies and quotations is out of place in a love-letter. True feeling is always direct, and never deviates into by-ways to cull flowers of rhetoric. ~Christian Nestell Bovee, Intuitions and Summaries of Thought: Vol. II, 1862


I believe it was Gayelord Hauser, the nutritionist, who said that "you are what you eat," but if you happen to be an intellectual, you are what you quote. ~Joseph Epstein, "Quotatious," A Line Out for a Walk: Familiar Essays, 1991


Some lines are born quotations, some are made quotations, and some have "quotation" thrust upon them. ~Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture, 2011


Luminous quotations, also, atone, by their interest, for the dulness of an inferior book, and add to the value of a superior work by the variety which they lend to its style and treatment. ~Christian Nestell Bovee, "Quoters and Quoting," Institutions and Summaries of Thought, 1862


Patch grief with proverbs; make misfortune drunk... ~William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, c.1598


For I am proverbed with a grandsire phrase... ~William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet


The devil can cite scripture for his purpose. ~William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice


This fellow pecks up wit, as pigeons peas;
And utters it again when God doth please:
He is wit's pedler; and retails his wares...
~William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost (Boyet)


Our "experienced Editor" has learnt the advantages of variety in his experience. The volume before us contains a little of every thing. Sense and nonsense, sentiment and wit, pathos and merriment, short passages from different authors, a stock of anecdote, and a number of bon-mots. It is an agreeable miscellany, best characterised in the words of Shakespeare: "He has been at a great feast of languages, and stolen all the scraps." ~The London Literary Gazette; and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, &c., December 4, 1830, No.724, "Review of New Books," about Classic Cullings and Fugitive Gatherings by An Experienced Editor


Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations. ~Orson Welles, attributed


Anatole France frankly advised, "When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it." Yes, indeed, but do more. Copy many well-said things. Pierce them together. Assimilate them. Make the process of reading them a way to form the mind and shape the soul. As anthologies can never be complete, we will never exhaust the ways quotations can enrich our lives. ~Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture, 2011


A good maxim is never out of season. ~English Proverb


A proverb is to speech what salt is to food. ~Arabic Proverb


Don't quote your proverb till you bring your ship into port. ~Gaelic Proverb


Good sayings are like pearls strung together. ~Chinese Proverb


Proverbs are the daughters of daily experience. ~Dutch Proverb


Proverbs are the lamps to words. ~Arabian Proverb


Proverbs are the literature of reason. ~French Proverb


We who are quotatious are never truly alone, but always hear the cheerful flow of remarks made by dead writers so much more intelligent than we. ~Joseph Epstein, "Quotatious," A Line Out for a Walk: Familiar Essays, 1991


The best aphorisms are.... portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feeling. They furnish the largest amount of intellectual stimulus and nutriment in the smallest compass. About every weak point in human nature, or vicious spot in human life, there is deposited a crystallization of warning and protective proverbs. ~William Rounseville Alger, "The Utility and the Futility of Aphorisms," The Atlantic Monthly, February 1863


It is the habit of the mind to condense into diminutive, agreeable and striking forms the results of experience and observation in all the departments of life. As the carbon, disengaged by fire in its multitudinous offices, crystallizes into a diamond that flashes fire from every facet, and bears at every angle the solvent power of the mother flame; so great clouds of truth are evolved by human experience, which are crystallized at last into proverbs, that flash with the lights of history and illuminate the darkness which rests upon the track of the future. ~Timothy Titcomb (J.G. Holland), "An Exordial Essay," Gold-foil: Hammered from Popular Proverbs, 1859


The proverbs of a nation furnish the index to its spirit and the results of its civilization. ~Timothy Titcomb (J.G. Holland), "An Exordial Essay," Gold-foil: Hammered from Popular Proverbs, 1859


[T]hey are the offspring of experience... instinct with blood and breath and vitality.... They are not propositions, conceived in the understanding and addressed to life, but propositions born of life itself, and addressed to the heart. They were not conceived in the minds of the great few, but they sprang from the life of the people. ~Timothy Titcomb (J.G. Holland), "An Exordial Essay," Gold-foil: Hammered from Popular Proverbs, 1859


A single gnomic line can come to resonate with centuries of subsequent wisdom. ~Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture, 2011


Proverbs were bright shafts in the Greek and Latin quivers... ~Isaac D'Israeli, "The Philosophy of Proverbs," Curiosities of Literature, 1893


The ancients, who in these matters were not perhaps such blockheads as some may conceive, considered poetical quotation as one of the requisite ornaments of oratory. ~Isaac D'Israeli, "Quotation," A Second Series of Curiosities of Literature, Volume I, second edition, 1824


All this is labour which never meets the eye.... But too open and generous a revelation of the chapter and the page of the original quoted, has often proved detrimental to the legitimate honours of the quoter. They are unfairly appropriated by the next comer; the quoter is never quoted, but the authority he has afforded is produced by his successor with the air of an original research. ~Isaac D'Israeli, "Quotation," A Second Series of Curiosities of Literature, Volume I, second edition, 1824


Whatever is felicitously expressed risks being worse expressed: it is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellent lies before us. We quote, to save proving what has been demonstrated, referring to where the proofs may be found. We quote, to screen ourselves from the odium of doubtful opinions, which the world would not willingly accept from ourselves; and we may quote from the curiosity which only a quotation itself can give, when in our own words it would be divested of that tint of ancient phrase, that detail of narrative, and that naïveté, which we have for ever lost, and which we like to recollect once had an existence. ~Isaac D'Israeli, "Quotation," A Second Series of Curiosities of Literature, Volume I, second edition, 1824


A well-read writer, with good taste, is one who has the command of the wit of other men; he searches where knowledge is to be found; and though he may not himself excel in invention, his ingenuity may compose one of those agreeable books, the deliciæ of literature, that will out-last the fading meteors of his day. ~Isaac D'Israeli, "Quotation," A Second Series of Curiosities of Literature, Volume I, second edition, 1824


The art of quotation requires more delicacy in the practice than those conceive who can see nothing more in a quotation than an extract. Whenever the mind of a writer is saturated with the full inspiration of a great author, a quotation gives completeness to the whole; it seals his feelings with undisputed authority. ~Isaac D'Israeli, "Quotation," A Second Series of Curiosities of Literature, Volume I, second edition, 1824


Centuries have not worm-eaten the solidity of this ancient furniture of the mind. ~Isaac D'Israeli


Nor must you find fault with me if I often give you what I have borrowed from my various reading, in the very words of the authors themselves. ~Macrobius, translated from Latin


If you would the truth oppose
By quotations, you will find
Plenty; but, when all is done,
Though they're many, truth is one.
~Tomas de Iriarte, Fabulas Literarias, translated from Spanish


Unless created as freestanding works, quotations resemble "found" art. They are analogous, say, to a piece of driftwood identified as formally interesting enough to be displayed in an art museum or to a weapon moved from an anthropological to an artistic display.... The presenter of found art, whether material or verbal, has become a sort of artist. He has not made the object, but he has made it as art. ~Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture, 2011


You complain, Velox, that the epigrams which I write are long. You yourself write nothing; your attempts are shorter. ~Marcus Valerius Martialis, translated from Latin


Most of those who make collections of verse or epigram are like men eating cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all. ~Sébastien-Roch Nicolas


A classic lecture, rich in sentiment,
With scraps of thundrous Epic lilted out
By violet-hooded Doctors, elegies
And quoted odes, and jewels five-words-long
That on the stretch'd forefinger of all Time
Sparkle for ever...
~Alfred Tennyson, The Princess: A Medley, 1847


A fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a man of wit, and a pebble in the hand of a fool. ~Joseph Roux, Meditations of a Parish Priest, 1886, translated from French by Isabel F. Hapgood


A wise word is not a substitute for a piece of herring. ~Sholom Aleichem


I wonder if "an" ever occurs before "haughty" except in a quotation, or whether you can make anything sound like a quotation by adding a word like "goeth"? ~Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture, 2011


There is hardly a mistake which in the course of our lives we have committed, but some proverb, had we known and attended to its lesson, might have saved us from it. ~Richard Chenevix Trench, Proverbs and Their Lessons, 1905


Language would be tolerable without spicy, epigrammatic sayings, and life could no doubt be carried on by means of plain language wholly bereft of ornament. But if we wish to relish language, if we wish to give it point and piquancy, and if we want to drive home a truth, to whip up the flagging attention of our listener, to point a moral or adorn a tale, we must flavour our speech with proverbs. ~John Christian, "Introduction," Behar Proverbs, 1891


Aphorism or maxim, let us remember that this wisdom of life is the true salt of literature; that those books, at least in prose, are most nourishing which are most richly stored with it; and that it is one of the great objects, apart from the mere acquisition of knowledge, which men ought to seek in the reading of books. ~John Morley, Aphorisms: An Address Delivered Before the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, November 11, 1887


Proverbs accordingly are somewhat analogous to those medical Formulas which, being in frequent use, are kept ready-made-up in the chemists’ shops, and which often save the framing of a distinct Prescription. ~Richard Whately, Elements of Rhetoric


The words that enlighten the soul are more precious than jewels. ~Hazrat Inayat Khan


You may get a large amount of truth into a brief space. ~Attributed to Beecher in Edge-Tools of Speech by Maturin M. Ballou, 1899


I said that I loved the wise proverb,
Brief, simple and deep;
For it I'd exchange the great poem
That sends us to sleep.
~Bryan Waller Procter


Who knows but that all the men to whom reference has been made, and a multitude of others who lived in by-gone ages borrowed their wise sayings from the talk of the firesides and the conversations of the market places; so that the origin of many proverbs now flippantly quoted in the converse of men is lost in the mists of forgotten centuries. ~Dwight Edwards Marvin, The Antiquity of Proverbs, 1922


The teachings of elegant sayings
Should be collected when one can.
For the supreme gift of words of wisdom,
Any price will be paid.
~Nāgārjuna


The lips of the wise are as the doors of a cabinet; no sooner are they opened, but treasures are poured out before thee. Like unto trees of gold arranged in beds of silver, are wise sentences uttered in due season. ~The Economy of Human Life, Translated from an Indian Manuscript, Written by an Ancient Bramin



The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram; and the proverbs of nations, which embody the commonsense of nations, have the brisk concussion of the most sparkling wit. ~Edwin P. Whipple, lecture delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Association, December 1845


In the Bodleian Library at Oxford, there is an English Translation of Saint Paul's Epistles, printed in the black letter, which the Princess used while she was here imprisoned; in a blank leaf of which, the following paragraph, written with her own hand, and in the pedantry of the times, yet remains: "I walke many tim