Quotations

Ability

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]

Absence

Absurdity

Much absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we can't resemble. [With Samuel Johnson]

To see sensible-looking absurdities, look at some Jehovah-religion.

Accuracy

We should be careful to assist true sayings as far as we know them, for much insane conformity can be bred and schooled for the lack of that.

Well schooled thinking favours accuracy of thought.

Achievement

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

To surmount achievement itself, should naturally be a good thing.

Action

In order to act you must not fail to realise that a sensible-looking man is satisfied merely with thinking. [With Georges Clemenceau]

Persistent clarity can help to stand firm against degrading instincts and molesting women.

The actions of the tongue bear fruits too, at times much later.

Think like a man of action and act like a man of thought: conclude well. [With Henri Bergson]

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

What's about to happen is often like a blossom that should be nipped in the bud firmly.

Adaptability

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

Time management is much of what adaptation eventually is about.

Admiration

Adventure

Adversity

By trying we can easily learn to side with success in front of adversity.

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

One should seek and find a way out of misfortune before it is too late.

Privation can at times lame and drain the formerly pampered minds of men, but prosperity carefully handled is a blessed and handiness-loving teacher that can strengthen more often than not.

Some good sides to adversity are that it can make us learn and get guarded for the future.

Advertising

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]

Elegant advertising may consist in steering nobody else and making nobody immune to their own dear business.

Advice

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]

It happens that he that won't be counselled can't be helped that day - maybe ten years later or too late. [With Benjamin Franklin]

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

Affection

Affliction

Afflictions smite courage and can stultify through sufferings they foster.

Long-suffering hearts may lack in common sense.

The fool believes there's a value in afflictions that's greater than that of avoiding them.

Age

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

Go well against being outsmarted and old age could reach you: be smart enough for that.

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

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

Steadily refuse to accept that anything written per se is a fine alternative to living along.

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]

Aim

Good aims are better than good slogans.

Good and decent aims reach higher up than mere expressions - they reflect in action fairly well.

Ambition

A dubious ambition might be the best one.

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

Many ambitions are lawful enough.

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

Petty ambition rides above lawful quest with most people.

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

The will to develop oneself can be one of the last refuges against too obvious failure.

What's called a good ambition is what we feel to be beautiful, right and wrong.

America

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]

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

Amusement

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

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

Anxiety

Till trouble really troubles you, anxiety is an easy way out in comparison.

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

Appearance

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

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

Argument

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

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

Aristocracy

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

Art and artists

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]

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

In his later years Pablo Picasso was not allowed to roam an art gallery unattended, for he had previously been discovered in the act of trying to improve on one of his (s)old masterpieces.

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]

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 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]

Youthful art needs to go against narcissism.

Ask

Assassination

Authority

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