The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. -Niels Bohr
No problem is so formidable that you can’t walk away from it. -Charles M. Schulz
One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. -Oscar Wilde
One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar. -Helen Keller
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. -Niels Bohr
No problem is so formidable that you can’t walk away from it. -Charles M. Schulz
One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. -Oscar Wilde
One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar. -Helen Keller
It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen. -Aristotle
Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week. -Alice Walker
Fight for your opinions, but do not believe that they contain the whole truth, or the only truth. -Charles A. Dana
Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. -Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. -Gertrude Stein
Men have become the tools of their tools. -Henry David Thoreau
Reality is that which refuses to go away when I stop believing in it. -Phillip K. Dick
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity…and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. -William Blake
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. -Henry David Thoreau
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations. -Anaïs Nin
The secret of joy is the mastery of pain. -Anaïs Nin
A good composer does not imitate; he steals. -Igor Stravinksy
The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost. -William Carlos Williams
As regards the celebrated struggle for life, it seems to me for the present to have been rather asserted than proved. It does occur, but as the exception; the general aspect of life is not hunger and distress, but rather wealth, luxury, even absurd prodigality — where there is a struggle it is a struggle for power. -Friedrich Nietzsche
People only see what they are prepared to see. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Love demands infinitely less than friendship. -George Jean Nathan
Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution. -Karl Kraus
We haven’t failed. We now know a thousand things that won’t work, so we are much closer to finding what will. -Thomas Edison
For all these new and evolutionary facts, meanings, purposes, new poetic messages, new forms and expressions, are inevitable. -Walt Whitman
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings. -William Blake
A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm. -Hamlet
It is astonishing what you can do when you have a lot of energy, ambition and plenty of ignorance. -Alfred P. Sloan Jr.
The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion. -G.K. Chesterton
Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don’t know and I don’t care. -William Safire
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. -H. L. Mencken
Maps encourage boldness. They’re like cryptic love letters. They make anything seem possible. -Mark Jenkins
There are some defeats more triumphant than victories. -Michel de Montaigne
Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot. -D. H. Lawrence
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. -James Thurber
Rogues are preferable to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest. -Alexandre Dumas
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people. -Arthur Schopenhauer
Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Eat a third and drink a third and leave the remaining third of your stomach empty. Then, when you get angry, there will be sufficient room for your rage. -Babylonian Talmud
As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, keep it. -Mahatma Gandhi
Call on God, but row away from the rocks. -Indian Proverb
To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe. -Marilyn vos Savant
Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you is determinism; the way you play it is free will. -Jawaharlal Nehru
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not. -Thomas H. Huxley
A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. -Mark Twain
There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have. -Don Herold
There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action. -Bertrand Russell
Committee–a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done. -Fred Allen
If thou are a master, be sometimes blind; if a servant, sometimes deaf. -Thomas Fuller
Go often to the house of thy friend; for weeds soon choke up the unused path. -Scandinavian Proverb
The great thing about democracy is that it gives every voter a chance to do something stupid. -Art Spander
An epigraph to an essay on Cochin by Ashis Nandy from Raimundo Panikkar:
the self identity of Man is transcultural, and this cannot have any single point of reference. Pluralism is not synonymous with tolerance of a variety of opinions. Pluralism amounts to the recognition of the unthinkable, the absurd, and up to a limit, intolerable… Reality in itself does not need to be transparent, intelligible.
The characteristic structure of the aphorism itself implies at least two kinds of boundary crossing: a thrusting past banality to further reaches of insight, and an ongoing energy flow that reforms insight continuously in a transmissale form that invites perpetual continuation of the game. [from Lawrence Buell Emerson article]
Americans use tradition to evade history. – Richard E. Nicholls
The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it. -William James
You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do. -Henry Ford
In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior. -Sir Francis Bacon
Security is a kind of death. -Tennessee Williams
Magnificent promises are always to be suspected. -Theodore Parker
The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible. -Carolyn Heilbrun
The good or ill of a man lies within his own will. -Epictetus
Take your life in your own hands and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame. -Erica Jong
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office. -Aesop
It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all. -Samuel Butler
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory. -John Kenneth Galbraith
Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking. -John Maynard Keynes
You must first have a lot of patience to learn to have patience. -Stanislaw J. Lec
I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I’ve ever known. -Walt Disney
You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering. – Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens. -Epictetus
What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books. -Thomas Carlyle
While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior. -Henry C. Link
Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought. -Sir William Osler
The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings. -Okakura Kakuzo
If you wish your merit to be known, acknowledge that of other people. -Oriental Proverb
When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends. -Japanese Proverb
I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave. -E. M. Forster
Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is staggering. -R. Buckminster Fuller
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor. -Neil Gaiman
If you drink, don’t drive. Don’t even putt. -Dean Martin
Space isn’t remote at all. It’s only an hour’s drive away if your car could go straight upwards. -Fred Hoyle
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. -Ellen Parr
Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies. -Thomas Jefferson
The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them. -Mark Twain
Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. -Alfred Lord Tennyson
When they discover the center of the universe, a lot of people will be disappointed to discover they are not it.-Bernard Bailey
Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. -Ambrose Bierce
Oh, darling, let your body in, let it tie you in, in comfort. -Anne Sexton
When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied: ‘Only stand out of my light.’ Perhaps some day we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light. -John W. Gardner
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. -Edgar Allan Poe
If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out. -Jane Austen
It is easier to exclude harmful passions than to rule them, and to deny them admittance than to control them after they have been admitted. -Seneca
We may lay in a stock of pleasures, as we would lay in a stock of wine; but if we defer tasting them too long, we shall find that both are soured by age. -Charles Caleb Colton
Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. -Mark Twain
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. -Vladimir Nabokov
Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations. -Orson Welles
Good taste is the worst vice ever invented. -Edith Sitwell
I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it. -Garrison Keillor
Life is a long lesson in humility. -James M. Barrie
Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality. -Jules de Gaultier
I am not in this world to live up to other people’s expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine. -Fritz Perls
When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other. -Chinese Proverb
No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another. -Charles Dickens
Despise not any man, and do not spurn anything; for there is no man who has not his hour, nor is there anything that has not its place. -Ben Azai You must lose a fly to catch a trout. -George Herbert
Nothing is said that has not been said before. -Terence
When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers. -Oscar Wilde
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. -Martin Luther King Jr.
First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again – and, moreover, give reasons why we believe. -Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. -Tenessee Williams
Government is too big and too important to be left to the politicians. -Chester Bowles
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see. -Arthur Schopenhauer
The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations. -David Friedman
Forsake not an old friend; for the new is not comparable to him: a new friend is as new wine; when it is old, thou shalt drink it with pleasure. -The Bible
If you scatter thorns, don’t go barefoot. -Italian Proverb
A cat is a puzzle for which there is no solution. -Hazel Nicholson
Nothing is more honorable than a grateful heart. -Seneca
It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians. -Henrik Ibsen
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. -Theodore Roosevelt
The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear. -Herbert Agar
Look well into yourself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if you always look there. -Marcus Aurelius
Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race. -H.G. Wells
Men cannot see their reflection in running water, but only in still water. -Chuang Tzu
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one. -George Bernard Shaw
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. -Virginia Woolf
Man and his deed are two distinct things. Whereas a good deed should call forth approbation, and a wicked deed disapprobation, the doer of the deed, whether good or wicked always deserves respect or pity as the case may be. -Mahatma Gandhi
He who sings scares away his woes. -Miguel de Cervantes
There are three ingredients to the good life; learning, earning, and yearning. -Christopher Morley
The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes — ah, that is where the art resides. -Artur Schnabel
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance. -Anatole France
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