Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why

-Bernard Baruch

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit in

-Greek Proverb

We're all someone else to everyone else

-Bill Watterson

Before you talk to me about your religion, first show it to me in how you treat other people;  Before you tell me how much you love your God show me how much you love all His children;  Before you preach to me of your passion for your faith, teach me about it through your compassion for your neighbors.  In the end, I'm not interested in what you have to tell or sell as in how you choose to live and give.

-Cory Booker

There are no foreign lands.  It is the traveler only that is foreign.

-Robert Louis Stevenson

Why should the Arabs make peace?  If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel.  That is natural:  We have taken their country.  Sure, God has promised it to us, but what does that matter to them?  Our God is not theirs.  We come from Israel, it's true, but that was two thousand years ago and what is that to them?  There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler and Auschwitz, but was that their fault?  They only see one thing; We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?

-David Ben-Gurion

Sometimes me think "What is Friend?" and then me say "Friend is someone to share last cookie with."

-Cookie Monster

One original thought is worth a thousand mindless quotations

-Diogenes

It will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life.  But it ain't about how hard you're hit, it's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward, how much you can take and keep moving forward.  That's how winning is done

-Rocky Balboa

Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself

-Thomas Harris (Dr. Hannibal Lecter)

You religious right-wingers are the worst.  You don't want the government to tell you what to do, but you want your church to tell others what to do.  You're Pro-Life, but Pro-Death Penalty.  You don't want contraceptives, but no abortions either. You want unfit parents to have children they can't afford, yet cut social funds that would help these people.  Then you want to punish people who knew they couldn't raise a baby for not raising their baby.   You are a confused and scary group

-Anonymous

I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy.  Because they know what it's like to feel absolutely worthless and they don't want anyone else to feel like that

-Robin Williams

To be honest, the best tea tastes delicious whether it comes in a porcelain pot, or a tin cup...There is a simple honor in poverty

-Uncle Iroh (Avatar: The Last Airbender)

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell

-George Orwell

Be not ignorant of any thing in a great matter or small 

-Apocrypha 5:15

Those who wish to appear wise among fools, among the wise seem foolish

-Quintillian

Post coitum omne animal triste (After sex every animal is sad)

-Latin Proverb

The devil can cite scripture for his purposes

-William Shakespeare (Merchant of Venice)

An entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives.

 -Chuck Palahniuk

He who gives to the poor will never want, but he who shuts his eyes will have many curses.

-Proverbs 28:27

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong 

-Voltaire

You can't stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.

-Winnie the Pooh (A.A. Milne)

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.

-Marcus Aurelius

Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever. For what is the time of a man, except it be interwoven with that memory of ancient things of a superior age?

-Cicero

The present you ignore eventually becomes the past you cling to.

 - Magnificent Ruin

The man who has sufficient power over himself to wait until his nature has recovered its even balance is the truly wise man, but such beings are seldom met with.

-Casanova

Deep within us—no matter who we are—there lives a feeling of wanting to be lovable, of wanting to be the kind of person that others like to be with. And the greatest thing we can do is to let people know that they are loved and capable of loving.

-Fred Rogers

She never felt like she belonged anywhere, except for when she was laying on her bed, pretending to be somewhere else.

- Eleanor and Park (Rainbow Rowell)

The really potent part of love is that it allows you to carry around beliefs about yourself that make you feel special, desirable, precious, innately good. Your lover couldn't have seen [these qualities] in you, even temporarily, if they weren't part of your essential being

-Martha Beck

If you can't handle me at my diddliest, you don't deserve me at my doodliest

-Ned Flanders (The Simpsons)

I don't care they stole my idea.  I care that they don't have any of their own.

-Nikola Tesla

He who receives a benefit should never forget it; he who bestow should never remember it.

- Pierre Charron

She had blue skin.
And so did he.
He kept it hid.
And so did she.
They searched for blue
Their whole life through.
They passed right by -
and never knew

-Shel Silverstein

Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.

-Laurence J. Peter

We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - romantic love and gunpowder

-Andre Maurois

I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day

- Douglas Adams

All the world's major religions, with their emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance and forgiveness can and do promote inner values.  But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate.  This is why I am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond Religion altogether

-Dalai Lama

Everyone in the world is on the same great ship called Earth.  If part of the ship goes into disrepair, if part of the crew is not fed and sustained, well, the whole vessel is threatened

- Marshall Vian Summers

She was not a women likely to settle for equality when sex gave her an advantage.

-Anthony Delano

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting

-George Orwell

I dreamed a thousand new paths. I woke and walked my old one. 

- Chinese proverb

When I was a child, my mother said to me "If you become a soldier, you'll be a general.  If you become a monk, you'll end up as Pope."  Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

-Pablo Picasso

When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers 

- African proverb

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

-Cyril Connolly

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious

-Albert Einstein

The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority

-Georg Lichtenberg

Let silence take you to the core of life 

- Rumi

It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising the sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and an usurper soon found. The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin. Let us, then, look to the great cause, and endeavor to preserve it in full force. Let us by all wise and constitutional measures promote intelligence among the people as the best means of preserving our liberties. 

- James Madison

Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law. 

- Thomas Jefferson

Between the optimist and the pessimist, the difference is droll. The optimist sees the doughnut; the pessimist the hole!

-McLandburgh Wilson

He is not only dull himself but causes dullness in others 

- Samuel Johnson

I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it 

-Mark Twain

 You build your reputation by being attacked when alive and praised when you’re dead

-Chuck Palahniuk

Will cannot be quenched against its will.

-Dante Alighieri

There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.

-Kurt Vonnegut

The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without

-Ernest Hemingway

The high sentiments always win in the end, the leaders who offer blood, toil, tears, and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.

-George Orwell

Only the shallow know themselves.

-Oscar Wilde

Love is a word that has been hijacked by greeting card companies, cult leaders, sentimentalists, pop singers, false profits, pedophiles, romcoms, McDonalds, and a million other unsavory types, who transform the most incredible thing that humans can experience into an inflatable, gaudy imitation of itself that they use for their selfish desires and nefarious marketing campaigns.  These bastards have made the highest and most intense experience accessible to humans almost impossible to talk about without feeling embarassed.

-Duncan Trussell

Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.

-Jean Jacques Rousseau

Earth laughs in flowers.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Conversation is three women stand on the corner talking. Gossip is when one of them leaves.

-Herb Shriner

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.

-Mark Twain

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.

-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it— namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.

-Mark Twain

Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens, then everybody disagrees.

-Boris Marshalov

Out beyond the fields of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field...
I'll meet you there

-Rumi

If anyone is crazy enough to want to kill a president of the United States, he can do it. All he must be prepared to do is give his life for the president's.

-John F. Kennedy

Attention to health is life greatest hindrance.

-Plato

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

- Will and Ariel Durant

If you believe everything you read, better not read.

-Japanese Proverb

I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of work, because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.

-Andy Warhol

Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.

-Karl Kraus

Destiny has two ways of crushing us -- by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them.

-Henri Frederic Amiel

You know children are growing ups hen they start asking questions that have answers.

-John J. Plomp

You don’t know how much you don’t know until your children grow up and tell you.

-S. J. Perelman

The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.

-Duke of Windsor

When kids hit one year old, it’s like hanging with a miniature drunk. They bump into things. They laugh and cry. They urinate. They vomit.

-Johnny Depp

People who say they sleep like a baby seldom have one.
-Leo Burke

Chase her. Chase her even when she’s already yours. That’s the only way you’ll be assured to never lose her.

-Anonymous

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

-Confucius

Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson.

-Voltaire

Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win

-Sun Tzu

An onion can make people cry, but there has never been a vegetable invented to make them laugh.

-Will Rogers

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...

- Isaac Asimov

One drop of hatred left in the cup of joy turns the most blissful draught into poison.

-Joann Friedrich Von Schiller

Once you've learned to study in a bathing suit on the grass with muscled men throwing frisbees over your head, you can accomplish almost anything

-Susan Rice

If you have a talent, use it in every which way possible. Don't hoard it. Don't dole it out like a miser. Spend it lavishly like a millionaire intent on going broke.

-Brendan Francis

There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

-Dorothy Parker

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
God knows twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear
But Ive a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

-Alan Seeger

It is only necessary to have courage, for strength without self-confidence is useless.

-Casanova

I have an honorary degree...which is kind of like having a Nerf vibrator

-Robin Williams

Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow. Delay may give clearer light as to what is best to be done.

-Aaron Burr

The first to apologize is the bravest.  The first to forgive is the strongest. The first to forget is the happiest.

-Anonymous

I found your essay to be good and original. However, the part that was original was not good and the part that was good was not original.

-Samuel Johnson

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to change

-Mark Twain

If you would win the world, melt it, do not hammer it.

-Alexander MacLaren

I want to do with you what spring does with cherry trees

-Pablo Neruda

Savor the imminent weirdness of the day

-Charles Baxter

For whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.

-Sir Walter Raleigh

I choose to love you in silence…
For in silence I find no rejection,I choose to love you in loneliness…
For in loneliness no one owns you but me,I choose to adore you from a distance…
For distance will shield me from pain,I choose to kiss you in the wind…
For the wind is gentler than my lips,I choose to hold you in my dreams…
For in my dreams, you have no end.

-Rumi

Most human beings are quite likeable if you do not see too much of them.

-Robert Wilson Lynd

You have to allow a certain amount of time in which you are doing nothing in order to have things occur to you, to let your mind think.

-Mortimer Adler

Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. As a peacemaker the lawyer has superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.

-Abraam Lincoln

Stop quoting the laws to us. We carry swords

 -Pompey The Great

The secret to creativity is to hide your sources

-Albert Einstein

The often unreflected respect for old laws, old customs, and old Religion we have to thank for all the mischief in the world 

-Georg Lichtenberg

Whatever I was looking for, it was always you 

- Rumi

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. 

- Mark Twain

There is no friend as loyal as a book

-Ernest Hemmingway

(Journalists like you belong to) what we call the reality-based community...(people who) believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality...That's not the way the world really works anymore.  We're an Empire now, and when we act, we can create our own reality.  And while you're studying that reality - judiciously as you will -we'll act again, creating other new realities which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.  We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

-Karl Rove

Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart

-Khalil Gilbran

Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory

-Dr. Seuss

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex

-Aldous Huxley

Ignorance is never out of style. It was in fashion yesterday, it is the rage today and it will set the pace tomorrow.

-Frank Dane

What is better - to be born good or to overcome your evil nature through great effort

-Paarthurnax (Sykrim)

Have a heart that never hardens, a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts

-Charles Dickens

God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them

-German Proverb

Sticks and stones are hard on bones aimed with angry art.
Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.

-Phyllis McGinley

The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth that it prevents you from achieving

-Russel Green

There is no normal life that is free of pain. It’s the very wrestling with our problems that can be the impetus for our growth

- Fred Rogers

“Every woman”

he starts to say,

then looks around

-Anon

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need

-Cicero

Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

-Jiddu Krishnamurti

It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one

-Voltaire

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things." 
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

--Through the Looking Glass, Louis Carroll

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. 

-Douglas Adams

Lord what fools these mortals be 

-Puck (William Shakespeare, Midsummer Nights Dream)

Horses and poets should be fed, not overfed 

-Charles X

Dum spiro spero. (While I breathe, I hope)

-Latin Proverb

The world wants to be deceived 

- Sebastian Brant

A liar should have a good memory 

-Quintillian

There are some remedies worse than the disease

-Publius Syrus

If I cannot bend Heaven I shall move Hell 

- Virgil

A man has no better thing under the sun, than to eat, drink and be merry 

-Ecclesiastes 8:15

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents

-George Orwell

Fear not hell, for if it exists you shall find yourself in good company

-H.L. Mencken

If you wish to go fast, go alone.  If you wish to go far, go together 

-African proverb

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind

-Albert Einstein

States are not moral agents, people are and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions

-Noam Chomsky

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream 

-Edgar Allen Poe

Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having opinions at all

-Georg Lichtenberg

You are not a drop in the ocean.  
You are the entire ocean in a drop

-Rumi

He is a self-made man and worships his educator 

- John Bright

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they will kill you

-Oscar Wilde

Sometimes I wonder if the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or imbeciles who really mean it. 

- Mark Twain

Some people are just born human, the rest of us take a lifetime to get there

-Rant Casey (Chuck Palahniuk)

We must be careful about what we pretend to be.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Never confuse movement with action

-Ernest Hemmingway

The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.

-John F. Kennedy

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.

-Jack London

In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it.

-John Ruskin

Thank Heaven, the sun has gone in, and I don't have to go out and enjoy it.

-Loan Pearsall Smith

The really important things are said over cocktails and are never done.

-Peter F. Drucker

A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams

-John Barrymore

An action is not virtuous merely because it is unpleasant to do.

- W. Somerset Maugham

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.

 

-Upton Sinclair

Doing what you love means dealing with things you don’t. 

- David Shore

Of course I believe in free enterprise, but in MY system of free enterprise, the democratic principle is that there never was, never has been, never will be, room for the ruthless exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few.

-Harry S. Truman

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.

- Niels Bohr

People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

 - Isaac Asimov

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

- Plato

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser. 

- John W. Gardner

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

- Samuel Johnson

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

- Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

- Chuck Palahniuk

One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.

-Robert F. Kennedy

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.

- Victor Hugo

Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me and be my friend.

- Albert Camus

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

- John Adams

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

- Hippocrates

Politics have no relation to morals.

- Machiavelli

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

- H.L. Mencken

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.

-David Brin

It’s pretty amazing that our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the ground, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, buy it, and bring it home is considered to be less effort than what it takes to just wash the spoon when you’re done with it.

Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics. You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded. Because the elements, the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars. And the only way they could get into your body is if the stars were kind enough to explode. So forget Jesus. The stars died so you could be here today.

 

- Lawrence Krauss

Every atom you posses has almost certainly passed through several stars and been a part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.  We are so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of atoms - up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested - probably once belonged to Shakespeare.  A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethove, and any other historical figure you care to name.  So we are all reincarnations - albeit short-lived ones.  When we die, our atoms disassemble and move off to find new uses elsewhere, as part of a leaf, a  part other human being or a drop of dew 

- Bill Bryson

Where there’s life, there’s hope. 

- Cicero

You can commit no mistake and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.

- Jean-Luc Picard

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

- Howard Zinn

But - you see, a bank or a company can’t do that, because those creatures don’t breathe air, don’t eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money. If they don’t get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat. It is a sad thing, but it is so… The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

- John Steinbeck

The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made. 

- Jean Giraudoux

If the pen is mightier than the sword, then why can't we put the s at the end and make words instead of wars?

- Anonymous

The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear 

- Jiddu Krishnamurti

It will happen to all of us, that at some point you get tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that the party’s over, but slightly worse: the party’s going on — but you have to leave. And it’s going on without you. That’s the reflection that I think most upsets people about their demise. All right, then, because it might make us feel better, let’s pretend the opposite. Instead, you’ll get tapped on the shoulder and told, “Great news! This party’s going on forever – and you can’t leave. You’ve got to stay; the boss says so. And he also insists that you have a good time.

- Christopher Hitchens

When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means the sun is about to set 

- Lin Yutang

The first follower is actually an underestimated form of leadership in itself.  The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader 

- Derek Silvers

By saying not to worry

She says something

worrisome

 -Anonymous

The world is governed more by appearances than realities, so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.

- Daniel Webster