Uncategorised quotes and sayings

Actors die so loud.

Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing. Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn't the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values. Our world may have begun that way, but today it is caricature. Our world is a world of things. What we dread most, in the face of the impending debacle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gewgaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts that have made us so uncomfortable. We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky.

Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.

Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.

The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over.

If you are well off and can afford to spend ten or twenty-five dollars a day to hire some patient soul to listen to your troubles you can be readjusted to the crazy scheme of things and spare yourself the humiliation of becoming a Christian Scientist. You can have your ego trimmed or removed, as you wish, just like a wart or bunion.

Man torturing man is a fiend beyond description. You turn a corner in the dark and there he is. You congeal into a bundle of inanimate fear. You become the very soul of anesthesia. But there is no escaping him. It is your turn now...

Nine-tenths of our sickness can be prevented by right thinking plus right hygiene -- nine-tenths of it!

The American ideal is youth -- handsome, empty youth.

Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.

Fame is an illusive thing -- here today, gone tomorrow. The fickle, shallow mob raises its heroes to the pinnacle of approval today and hurls them into oblivion tomorrow at the slightest whim; cheers today, hisses tomorrow; utter forgetfulness in a few months.

There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him.

You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread.

The world isn't kept running because it's a paying proposition. (God doesn't make a cent on the deal.) The world goes on because a few men in every generation believe in it utterly, accept it unquestioningly; they underwrite it with their lives.

The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.

The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.

The real leader has no need to lead -- he is content to point the way.

Husbands are chiefly good lovers when they are betraying their wives.

Fame will go by and, so long, I've had you, fame. If it goes by, I've always known it was fickle. So at least it's something I experienced, but that's not where I live.

Hollywood's a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.

Unfortunately, I am involved in a freedom ride protesting the loss of the minority rights belonging to the few remaining earthbound stars. All we demanded was our right to twinkle.

I've been on a calendar, but I've never been on time.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

Everybody sets out to do something, and everybody does something, but no one does what he sets out to do.

After all there is but one race -- humanity.

A literary movement consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.

Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism.

The poor would never be able to live at all if it were not for the poor.

Reality can destroy the dream; why shouldn't the dream destroy reality?

Remorse: beholding heaven and feeling hell.

No place in England where everyone can go is considered respectable.

There is nothing so consoling as to find one's neighbor's troubles are at least as great as one's own.

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him

You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Maxims and aphorisms, let us remember that wisdom is the true salt of literature, and the books that are most nourishing are richly stored with it, and that is the main object to seek in reading books.

The essence of a quote is the compression of a mass of thought and observation into a single saying.

Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey.

To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

Sport inevitably creates deadness of feeling. No one could take pleasure in it who was sensitive to suffering; and therefore its pursuit by women is much more to be regretted than its pursuit by men, because women pursue much more violently and recklessly what they pursue at all.

A short absence is the safest.

I attempt an arduous task; but there is no worth in that which is not a difficult achievement.

It is a kingly act to assist the fallen.

There is no such thing as pure pleasure; some anxiety always goes with it.

When disposition wins us, the features please.

The time will come when it will disgust you to look in the mirror.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

It is annoying to be honest to no purpose.

A prince should be slow to punish, and quick to reward.

In our leisure we reveal what kind of people we are.

Bear and endure: This sorrow will one day prove to be for your good

Remove the temptation of idleness and cupid's bow is useless.

Nothing is swifter than our years.

Time glides away and as we get older through the noiseless years; the days flee and are restrained by no reign.

Time is the devourer of all things.

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.

Gratitude -- the meanest and most sniveling attribute in the world.

Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch is, and it darts away.

I require three things in a man. He must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.

He [Robert Benchley] and I had an office so tiny that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion.

Razors pain you; rivers are damp; acids stain you; and drugs cause cramp. Guns aren't lawful; nooses give; gas smells awful; you might as well live.

It's not the tragedies that kill us, it's the messes.

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

The two most beautiful words in the English language are: ''Check Enclosed.''

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

I shall stay the way I am because I do not give a damn.

Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.

In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.

Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.

The beginning is the most important part of the work.

Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them.

Let nobody speak mischief of anybody.

No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern.

The democratic youth lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing, now practicing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied in philosophy.