I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better. [Michel de Montaigne]

A

Ability

Do what you can with what you have where you are. [Theodore Roosevelt]

Everyone must row with the oars he has. [English Proverb]

Natural ability grows rare by conformism.

There's something that's much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability. [Elbert Hubbard]

Absurdity

Don't laugh out loud at something that appears absurd or ridiculous - it could have been said by some philosopher earlier. [With Oliver Goldsmith]

Accuracy

Accuracy of statement aids truth; inaccuracy is a near kin to falsehood. [With Tryon Edwards]

Actors and Acting

Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing. [Ralph Richardson. Dh 3]

He brought to every one of his roles this quality of needing the money. [Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. Dh 5]

Achievement

Do not waste this life in vain pursuits. [Cf St. Isaac the Syrian]

Every man who is high up loves to think that he has done it all himself; and the wife smiles at that. [With James Matthew Barrie]

One of the greatest rewards for doing can be the chances it gives to do some more - even better. [With Jonas Salk]

Action

What you do speaks so loud that I can't hear what you say. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

Adaptability

One learns to itch where one can scratch. [Ernest Bramah]

Admiration

We do not always love those whom we admire. [François de La Rochefoucauld]

Adversity

Good sides to adversity are best admired at a distance. [With Seneca]

Advertising

Advertising is the spur on the flank that keeps modern company-helping economy out of hand till the day common sense is restored, if ever it happens. [With Robert W. Sarnoff]

Advertising promotes that divine discontent which makes people strive to improve their economic status. [Ralph S. Butler]

Advertising works secretly against the life of trade. [Ag. Calvin Coolidge]

Let's hope that the product that won't sell without advertising won't sell profitably with advertising. [With Albert Lasker]

Advice

Advice can be like cod liver oil, easy enough to administer but not so pleasant to take for anybody. [With Josh Billings]

Advice is seldom welcome, and those who need it the most, like it the least. [Lord Chesterfield]

Consult your friend well. His counsel may be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgement. [With Seneca]

It is all right when in prosperity to give advice to the afflicted. [With Aeschylus]

He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other. [Francis Bacon]

Affection

The affections are like lightning: you can't tell where they will strike till they have fallen. [Jean Baptiste Lacordaire]

Age

As one grows older, one becomes wiser and more foolish. [François de la Rochefoucauld]

Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form. [André Maurois]

It takes a long time to become young. [Pablo Picasso]

Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative. [Maurice Chevalier]

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. [H. L. Mencken]

Agreement

When two men in business always agree, one of them could be unnecessary. [With William Wrigley, Jr.]

You can at times poke fun with a man who likes to argue red-handedly - agree with him. [With Ed Howe]

Ambition

A blast in the human breast is nothing to boast of. [With Niccolò Machiavelli]

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff than daydreams. [With William Shakespeare]

Most people would succeed above themselves. [Cf. H.W. Longfellow with Arthur P. Stanley]

The men who succeed are the efficient few. [Herbert N. Casson]

America

America . . . is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time. [Thomas Wolfe]

America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair. [Arnold Joseph Toynbee]

America is a willingness of the heart. [F. Scott Fitzgerald]

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age. [Marshall McLuhan]

California is a fine place to live - if you happen to be an orange. [Fred Allen. Dh 14]

In America there's more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is. [Gertrude Stein]

Washington has lots of those Greek and Roman style buildings that practically make you feel like a senator just walking up the steps of them. [P. J. O’Rourke. Dh 19]

You will find the Americans much like the Greeks found the Romans: great, big, vulgar, bustling people . . . [Harold Macmillan]

Amusement

Cards were at first for benefits designed, / Sent to amuse, not to enslave the mind. [David Garrick]

True enjoyments also keep people from vice. [With Samuel Johnson]

When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her. [Michel de Montaigne]

Ancestry

If it is a desirable thing to be well descended, the glory belongs to our ancestors. [With Plutarch]

Some men by ancestry are only the shadow of a mighty name. [Lucan]

Anger

The greatest remedy for anger could be delay. [Cf. Seneca]

The bright and clever mind, when laughed at, always gets angry. [Cf. Haliburton with Walter S. Landor]

Anticipation

We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting. [Samuel Johnson]

Anxiety

Anxiety will bear a lot of nuisance. [With Josh Billings]

Appearance

Getting talked about is one of the penalties . . . [Kin Hubbard]

When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck. [Richard Cardinal Cushing]

Appetite

Reason should direct and appetite obey. [Cicero]

A well-governed appetite is a great part of liberty. [Seneca]

Argument

A long dispute can mean both parties are wrong. [Cf. Voltaire]

Behind every argument is someone's ignorance. [Louis D. Brandeis]

People generally quarrel because they can't argue. [Gilbert K. Chesterton]

Aristocracy

Authority forgets a dying king. [Alfred, Lord Tennyson]

Some will always be above others . . . [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

Art and artists

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours [too much] else. [Cf. Charles Baudelaire]

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

A person needs at intervals to separate from family and companions and go to new places. [Katharine Butler Hathaway]

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment. [Lionel Trilling]

A work of art is [also in part] an adventure of the mind. [Cf. Eugene Ionesco]

Art is . . . a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest. [Friedrich Nietzsche]

Art is a lie that makes us realise truth . . . that is given us to understand. [Pablo Picasso]

Art is hard for a puritan to understand. [With Günther Grass]

Art is too serious to be taken seriously. [Ad Reinhardt]

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. [Gilbert K. Chesterton]

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys. [Johann Friedrich Von Schiller]

Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories. [John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester]

Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while. [Kin Hubbard]

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic sense of the community. [Robert Menzies]

Fashion in art can make it hard to judge between the temporary and the lasting. [Cf. E. C. Stedman]

Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language. [Robert Menzies]

I can't do everything, But still I can do something [Edward Everett Hale]

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. . . . Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor. [John Berger]

I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of [an artistic] process. [Henry James]

If my husband would ever meet a woman on the street who looked like the women in his paintings, he would fall over in a dead faint. [Mrs. Pablo Picasso]

In America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman. [Sinclair Lewis]

One puts into one's art what one has not been capable of putting into one's existence. It is because he was unhappy that God created the world. [Henri de Montherlant]

People say conversation is a lost art; how often I have wished it were. [Edward R. Murrow]

Progressive art can assist people to learn [what's] at work in the society in which they live. [Angela Davis]

The [image-rich] artist [could] has a very important job to do. He's not [to be] a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed. [Cf. David Hockney]

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which won't actually kill him. At that point, he's in business. [John Berryman]

The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. [Pablo Picasso]

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it. [Gertrude Stein]

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In . . . this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep. [Gilbert K. Chesterton]

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal. [George Santayana]

The finest works of art . . . make it possible for us to know, if [just] for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly. [Aldous Huxley]

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious. [Lester Bangs]

The people who make art their business are mostly imposters. [Pablo Picasso]

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone. [James Baldwin]

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with. [Robert Motherwell]

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up. [Cyril Connolly]

The sole art that suits me is that which tends toward absolutism. [With Andre Gide]

The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is. [Willa Cather]

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted. [Henri Matisse]

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not. [Pablo Picasso]

To serve grand ideas with a major work is not bad, nor is it all there's to art. [With Vaclav Havel]

Too often we give our children answers to remember rather than problems to solve. [Roger Lewin]

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values. [A. Alvarez]

We can't think first and act afterward. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought. [Alfred North Whitehead]

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness. [Jose Ortega Y Gasset]

Ask

The important thing is to not stop questioning. [Albert Einstein]

Assassination

Assassination: the extreme form of censorship. [George Bernard Shaw]

Authority

Authority belongs to the people. [With Thomas Jefferson]

He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson of statecraft. [James Russell Lowell]

Let the wisest have the most authority. [Cf. Plato]

Awards

Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war - for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. [John Lennon]

B

Babies

A loud noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other. [Ronald Knox

Beauty

Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse. [Christopher Morley]

Beauty is . . . a valuable asset if you're poor or haven't any sense. [Kin Hubbard]

If you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have. [James Matthew Barrie]

Behaviour

Live so that you can at least get the benefit of the doubt. [Kin Hubbard]

The Bible

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand. [Mark Twain]

The Bible is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth. [With Samuel Butler]

Brightness

People who are smart get into Mensa. People who are really smart look around and leave. [James Randi]

C

Candour

Always maintain your common sense and artful skills, and funnel it all into plain enough dealings. [With Ralph Waldo Emerson]

If we be honest with ourselves, we can be honest with each other. [With George Macdonald]

Examine what's said, mainly, not him who speaks. [With Arabian Proverb]

Certainty and Doubt

When asked whether he really believed a horseshoe hanging over his door would bring him luck:

Of course not, but I am told it works even if you don't believe in it. [Niels Bohr. Dh 54]

D

Danger

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where's the man who has so much as to be out of danger? [Thomas Huxley]

There's nobody who is not dangerous for someone. [Marquise de Sévigné]

The most dangerous thing in the world is to try to leap a chasm in two jumps. [William Lloyd George]

E

Education

I was not unpopular [at school] . . . It is Oxford that has made me insufferable. [Max Beerbohm. Dh 103]

To educate a man in mind and not in morals often amounts to making a menace more effective. [Cf. Theodore Roosevelt]

Education can be a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army. [Cf. Edward Everett]

Nurture children's minds with deep thoughts, for some will never go any higher than they're told and taught. [With Benjamin Disraeli]

The truth is, many things are worth doing only in the most slovenly, halfhearted fashion possible. [Barbara Ehrenreich]

In imitation is a bit suicide. [With Ralph Waldo Emerson]

If education tries to make other persons out of us than we essentially are, deeper inside, it stultifies, and reproach matters. [With Franz Kafka]

Effort

Most people can be supported out of the effort of those earning their own way through creative or careful work. [With Robert A. Taft]

England and the English

F

Facts

Keep very close to facts and they might serve you, even throughout your whole life. [Cf. F. Marion Smith]

On top of carefully garnered, relevant and valid facts, your judgement can be called right, at least a little longer.

Some facts lie outside our most accepted versions of words. [Cf. Thomas Huxley]

Truth can seem remorseless to anyone that's not up to it. [Cf. William C. Redfield]

G

Gallantry

Gallantry of the mind often boils down to saying simple things in a quite elegant manner. [Cf. François de la Rochefoucauld]

Tread on your neighbor's foot to get even and call it rare gallantry if you like. [With Elbert Hubbard]

H

Habit

Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity. [Saint Augustine]

Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time. [Mark Twain]

Happiness

Real happiness isn't just something you remember. [Opp. Oscar Levent]

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet. [James Oppenheim]

I

Idea, ideas

An idea is a point of departure. As soon as you elaborate on it, it can be further modified or at times becomes transformed. [Cf. Pablo Picasso]

A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas, any more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers. [Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort]

Some men appear to be prisoners of ideas. [Cf. Ralph Waldo Emerson]

No matter how good an idea sounds, test it first. [Henry Block]

Never hesitate to lay claim on a good idea. [Cf. Al Neuharth]

Cardinal images and ideas contain kingly factors that lift civilisation and at intervals create needed upheavals, one way or another. [Cf. John H. Vincent]

The value of a good idea lies in the fit use of it. [With Thomas A. Edison]

It is because the world has ideas that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach, once and for all, what others have to think. [With Michel Foucault]

J

Jealousy

Jealousy . . . is the green-eyed monster which mocks the meat it feeds on. [William Shakespeare]

Journalism

Half my lifetime I have earned my living by selling words, and I hope thoughts. [Winston Churchill]

K

Kindness

A kind heart is a fountain of gladness, and often bursting into smiles. [Washington Irving]

The best portion of a good man's life could be his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. [With William Wordsworth]

You can do a kindness too soon, but you know, soon it can be too late. [Cf. Ralph Waldo Emerson]

King

A king is one who has many things to fear and attend to. [Cf. Francis Bacon]

He must be a wise man himself who is capable of distinguishing one. [Diogenes]

Wise kings should have wise counsellors. [With Diogenes]

L

Labour

A person is hardly handy enough who lives without giving klutzes some helping hints. [With Robert G. Ingersoll]

He that has a trade can have an estate with its honour. [Cf. Benjamin Franklin]

M

Machine

As machines get to be more and more like men, men will come to be more like machines. [Joseph Wood Krutch]

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine so far can do the work of one extraordinary man. [Cf. Elbert Hubbard]

Many men have become like tools of their tools. [Cf. Henry David Thoreau]

On mechanical outfit the future of the human world depends - perhaps. [Cf. Oscar Wilde]

N

Name

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names. [Chinese Proverb]

A person with a bad name is already half-hanged. [Proverb]

Better to see the face than to hear the name. [Zen Saying]

Nicknames stick to people, the worst could stick the most. [Cf. Thomas C. Haliburton]

Nation

Territory is but the body of a nation. The people who inhabit its hills and valleys are its soul, its spirit, its life. [James A. Garfield]

O

Observation

Men have talked about the world without paying attention to the world of their own minds, as if they were asleep or absent-minded. [Heraclitus]

Ovid

The love of glory gives an immense stimulus. [Ovid]

P

Parents

The gullible boy is probably repressed. [Cf. Freya Stark]

One of the most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother. [With Theodore M. Hesburgh]

We never know the agony of the parent till we become parents ourselves - and maybe not even then. [Cf. Henry W. Beecher]

Try to ignore that kids nowadays look brutish and persuade themselves that it is normal.

Q

Quality

Every one is the son of his own works in some sense. [With Miguel De Cervantes]

It is the quality of our work which will please God and not the quantity. [Mahatma Gandhi]

One quality worse than hardness of heart: softness of head. [With Theodore Roosevelt]

We are never so ridiculous by the qualities we have, as by those we affect to have. [Francois De La Rochefoucauld]

R

Race

The belief that there are races all of whose members are foredoomed to eternal inferiority, happens to be a myth. [With Franz Boas]

Rank

To be vain of one's rank or place, is to show that one is below it. [Stanislas I]

Reading

A man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. [Mark Twain]

Education. . . has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals. [G. M. Trevelyan]

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget. [William Lyon Phelps]

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world. [William Penn]

Prerequisite for rereadability in books: that they be forgettable. [Jean Rostand]

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. [Francis Bacon]

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. [Henry David Thoreau]

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life. [Mortimer J. Adler]

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. [Henry David Thoreau]

Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep. [With Tryon Edwards]

S

Scandal

Scandal seens to be what one half of the world takes pleasure in venting, as if brightened by people's miseries. [Cf. Paul Chatfield]

T

Tact

Tact at times amounts to stipulating how far to go too far. [With Jean Cocteau]

Without good and savoury tact your learning process can get blocked. [Cf. Benjamin Disraeli]

Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorises you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. [Oliver Wendell Holmes]

U

Understanding

No one is going to turn down a good meal because he does not understand the digestive mechanism. [V. I. Klassen]

All that men really understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practise. The rest is affectation and imposture. [William Hazlitt]

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it can't understand, and what those things are. [Soren Kierkegaard]

We can become slaves to things we don't understand [Cf. Vernon Howard]

Man know much more than he understands. [Alfred Adler]

Where I am not understood, maybe something very useful and profound is couched underneath. [With Jonathan Swift]

V

Value

A great part of the miseries of mankind are brought on them by false estimates they have made of the value of things. [With Benjamin Franklin]

Vanity

Virtue wouldn't go far if vanity did not keep it company. [François de La Rochefoucauld]

Vain-glorious men are the scorn of the wise, the admiration of fools, the idols of paradise, and the slaves of their own vaunts. [Francis Bacon]

W

Want

The keener the want the lustier the growth. [Wendell Phillips]

War (the art of war)

War challenges virtually every other institution of society [the justice and equity of its economy, the adequacy of its political systems, the energy of its productive plant, the bases, wisdom and purposes of its foreign policy. [Walter Millis]

Soldiers win battles and generals get the credit for them. [Cf. Napoleon Bonaparte]

Waste

Regular waste can be worse than loss. Every sound person would do well to keep the topic of waste before him rather often. The scope of thrift is limitless. [Cf. Thomas A. Edison]

Make the best use of both time and money. Add industry and frugal dealings if they pay very well and if you’re free to it. [Cf. Benjamin Franklin]

Weakness

The weakest soul, within itself unblest, leans for all pleasure on another's breast. [Oliver Goldsmith]

Going for character: why not now, and where you stand? [Cf. Robert Louis Stevenson]

Y

Youth

Don't let young people tell you their aspirations; when they drop them they might drop you for it. [With Logan Pearsall Smith]

Youth is life as yet unblemished by much tragedy, but hardly by TV. [Cf. Alfred North Whitehead]

When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over. [George MacDonald]

Not yet hardened, many young die good. [With Nathaniel Hawthorne and Oliver Herford]

The American ideal is youth - handsome, empty youth. [Henry Miller]

The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another. [Quentin Crisp]

Young and happy ones are news. If they aren't up to something, that might be called news too. [With Kenneth Rexroth]

Old people can get tremendously nervous from it, and frauds. [With Wallace Stevens]

When older men declare war, youths are trained to fight and die. [With Herbert Hoover]

An old man with something of the youth in him, may feel young in mind and heart only. [With Marcus T. Cicero]

If youth but knew and age but could - but what? [With Henri Estienne]

Youth is not merely a question of years. [Natalie Clifford Barney]

The child accepts child life is real life. [With George Orwell]

The Youth of a Nation are the trustees of posterity. [Benjamin Disraeli]

Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favour. [Samuel Johnson]

Youth of assumed personalities and disguises may be called the time of the sincerely insincere. [With V. S. Pritchett]

Z

Zeal

Zeal has to be very blind or badly regulated where it encroaches on the rights of others. [With Quesnel]

Zen

Great Zen is an artistic endeavour for those that reach up to it. [Cf. Samuel Butler]

If you let go over a cliff and die completely, and then come back to life - after that you can't be described full well any more. [With Zen Saying]

In studying the Zen way, realising it can be hard; once you have realised it, preserving it can be hard. When you can preserve it, cutting it into practice can be hard. [Cf. Zen Saying]

Added Words on Words

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it. [George Santayana]

There is nothing so ridiculous but some philosopher has said it. [Cicero]

Quotations help us remember the simple yet profound truths that give life perspective and meaning. [Chriswell Freeman]

One good quote may be worth a book.

Good words may allow your creativity to flow as long as you keep depending on things.

You can enjoy the company of like minded people or that special person. Even words of such persons may assist you.

The Gist of this Quotations Collection

We should prefer correct thinking to catchy phrases or demagogy. Here I have boiled down, toned down and reassembled many sayings and present such trimmed ideas along with straight quotations.

Keys

More on the use of abbreviations like with, mod, hum and cf: [Link]
Numbers in square brackets [ ] refer to page numbers.
Text in square brackets [ ] is supplied for this edition.
Round brackets ( ) are used where brackets are found in the cited material.

Sources

The material is culled from a number of Internet sources besides quotation collections and proverb collections in book form.