Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.

~ Jean de la Bruyere, essayist and moralist ( 1645-1696)

I long to accomplish a great & noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great & noble.

~Helen Keller

It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English -- up to fifty words used in correct context -- no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.

~Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1934-1996)

"I don’t fear the man who practiced 10,000 kicks one time. I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times”

~ Bruce Lee

One day I was speeding along at the typewriter, and my daughter -- who was a child at the time -- asked me, "Daddy, why are you writing so fast?" And I replied, "Because I want to see how the story turns out!"

~ Louis L'Amour, novelist (1908-1988)

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.

~ Hermann Hesse

A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.

~Charles Evans Hughes, jurist (1862-1948)

“Technology millionaires don’t hobnob with celebrities or buy a fancy car. They travel to Thailand or they fund an incubator. These things are just as expensive, but that’s the classic hacker ethos that prizes the mind, not materials. … Being concerned with appearance, shopping for clothes and decorating your house are feminine values. Tech millionaires see that type of spending as silly and frivolous.”

~ Generalities-laden insight from Alice Marwick

It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.

~-Anatole France, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate (1844-1924)

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

~T.S. Eliot, poet (1888-1965)

We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witchhunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist.

~ E.B. White, writer (1899-1985)

Life is a long lesson in humility.

~James M. Barrie, novelist, short-story writer, and playwright (1860-1937)

Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its hand with a grip that kills it.

~ Rabindranath Tagore, philosopher, author, songwriter, painter, educator, composer, Nobel Prize in literature (1861-1941)

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.

~ Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer (1564-1642)

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.

~William C. Dement, professor of psychiatry (b. 1928)

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.

~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, novelist (1821-1881)

There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the Establishment - and nothing more corrupting.

~ A.J.P. Taylor, historian (1906-1990)

The hands that help are better far
Than lips that pray.
Love is the ever gleaming star
That leads the way,
That shines, not on vague worlds of bliss,
But on a paradise in this.

~ Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.

~Edward Abbey, naturalist and author (1927-1989)

The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

~ George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950)

Golf is a good walk spoiled.

~ Mark Twain