 Truisms. These quotations contain information that is absolutely, and often unabashedly true. ;) Get more truisms at Well of Wisdom.
***** "If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world." -Albert Einstein ***** "If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you'll find you've done it." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "Thousands upon thousands are yearly brought into a state of real poverty by their great anxiety over not to be thought poor." -Robert Mallett ***** "There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us." -F. H. Bradley ***** "One never dives into the water to save a drowning man more eagerly than when there are others present who dare not take the risk." -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche ***** "He gives twice who gives promptly." -Publilius Syrus ***** "People hate those who make them feel their own inferiority." -Lord Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield ***** "The trouble with using experience as a guide is that the final exam often comes first and then the lesson." -??? ***** "Nothing so much prevents our being natural as the desire to seem so." -François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld ***** "It's always been and always will be the same in the world: The horse does the work and the coachman is tipped." -??? ***** "A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped." -Marcel Proust ***** "We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "Endurance is frequently a form of indecision." -Princess Elizabeth Bibesco ***** "Nothing knits man to man like the frequent passage from hand to hand of cash." -Walter Richard Sickert ***** "To the man who is afraid everything rustles." -Sophocles ***** "One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing." -Oscar Wilde Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "Rudeness is a weak man's imitation of strength." -Eric Hoffer ***** "It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place." -Henry Louis Mencken ***** "Fortune does not change men; it unmasks them." -Suzanne Necker ***** "The graveyards are full of indespensible men." -Charles de Gaulle ***** "To turn $100 into $110 is work. To turn $100 million into $110 million is inevitable." -Edgar Bronfman ***** "A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election." -Bill Vaughan ***** "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." -Bertrand Russell ***** "Don't worry over what other people are thinking about you. They're too busy worrying over what you are thinking about them." -??? ***** "Time flies whether you're having fun or not." -Mary Engelbreit ***** "It's a very funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it." -William Somerset Maugham ***** "Even if you are on the right track you'll get run over if you just sit there!" -??? ***** "The walls we build around us to keep out the sadness also keep out the joy." -Jim Rohn ***** "Discourse on virtue and they pass by in droves. Whistle and dance the shimmy, and you've got an audience." -Diogenes ***** "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe there are two kinds of people and those who don't." -Benchley's Law of Distinction ***** "A single fact can spoil a good argument." -??? ***** "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -Thomas Edison Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do." -Dale Carnegie ***** "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." -Albert Einstein ***** "When ideas fail, words come in very handy." -Goethe ***** "The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal." -Erich Fromm ***** "To find fault is easy; to do better may be difficult." -Plutarch ***** "A mediocre idea that generates enthusiasm will go further than a great idea that inspires no one." -Mary Kay Ash ***** "Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth." -Lillian Hellman ***** "We learn something every day, and lots of times it's that what we learned the day before was wrong." -Bill Vaughn ***** "Discourse on virtue and they pass by in droves. Whistle and dance the shimmy, and you've got an audience." -Diogenes ***** "The harder you work, the luckier you get." -McAlexander ***** "How long a minute is depends on what side of the bathroom door you're on." -??? ***** "A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of." -Burt Bacharach ***** "The number of people watching you is directly proportional to the stupidity of your action." -??? ***** "It doesn't matter what temperature the room is; it's always room-temperature." -??? ***** "Taxes: Of life's two certainties, the only one for which you can get an extension." -??? ***** "The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was." -??? Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch." -??? ***** "All supposedly 'selfless' acts are entirely selfish. When a man gives to charity, rest assured he values the happiness it brings him more than the money itself. If he did not, he would not give away his money!" -James Halloran ***** "The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat." -Lily Tomlin ***** "It is impossible to love and to be wise." -Francis Bacon ***** "Difference engenders hate." -??? ***** "There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere." -William James ***** "By legend and perhaps by nature philosophers are more accustomed to the armchair than the workbench." -Ian Hacking ***** "Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don't recognize them." -Anne Landers ***** "It is only too easy to catch people's attention by doing something worse than anyone else has dared to do it before." -Claude Monet ***** "No one is completely unhappy at the failure of his best friend." -Groucho Marx ***** "Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative." -Henry Kissinger ***** "If you don't control your mind, someone else will." -John Allston ***** "The most common of all antagonisms arises from a man's taking a seat beside you on the train, a seat to which he is completely entitled." -Robert Benchley ***** "No man was ever so much deceived by another as by himself." -Greville ***** "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable." -John F. Kennedy ***** "Only the winners decide what were war crimes." -Gary Wills Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "'He means well' is useless unless he does well." -Plautus ***** "Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind." -John F. Kennedy ***** "Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect." -Ralph Waldo Emerson ***** "How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it." -Marcus Aurelius ***** "Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater." -William Hazlitt ***** "Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go." -William Feather ***** "Bad habits are like a comfortable bed, easy to get into, but hard to get out of." -??? ***** "Who begins too much accomplishes little." -German proverb ***** "What breaks in a moment may take years to mend." -Swedish proverb ***** "Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing." -Oscar Wilde ***** "The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it." -??? ***** "A rumor is one thing that gets thicker instead of thinner as it is spread." -Richard Armour ***** "Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm." -Donella Meadows ***** "The real measure of your wealth is how much you'd be worth if you lost all your money." -??? ***** "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." -P. J. O'Rourke ***** "Opportunity may knock only once, but temptation leans on the doorbell." -??? Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "You may delay, but time will not." -Benjamin Franklin ***** "Life has no rehearsals, only performances." -??? ***** "No matter how much spin, effort, lunch or dinner you give the media, they will not fail to notice whether you have won or lost." -Robin Renwick ***** "When you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself." -Isaac Bashevis Singer ***** "Procrastination is the thief of time." -Edward Young ***** "It is easier to be critical than correct." -Benjamin Disraeli ***** "Our deeds follow us, and what we have been makes us what we are." -John Dykes ***** "The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe... Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end." -H. L. Mencken ***** "Necessity never made a good bargain." -Benjamin Franklin ***** "Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what happened, but of what men believe happened." -Gerald W. Johnston ***** "We seldom attribute common sense except to those who agree with us." -La Rochefoucauld ***** "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." -Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy ***** "To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad." -Oliver Wendell Holmes ***** "We're supposed to be perfect our first day on the job and then show constant improvement." -Ed Vargo ***** "Everybody's a self-made man; but only the successful ones are ever willing to admit it." -??? Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds." -George Eliot ***** "Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves." -Bertrand Russell ***** "One man's theology is another man's belly laugh." -Robert Heinlein ***** "At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded." -Ludwig Wittgenstein ***** "To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense." -Ayn Rand ***** "What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art." -Augustus Saint-Gaudens ***** "To speak of right and wrong per se makes no sense at all. No act of violence, rape, exploitation, destruction, is intrinsically unjust, since life itself is violent, rapacious, exploitative, and destructive, and cannot be conceived otherwise." -Friedrich Nietzsche ***** "Man would sooner have the Void for his purpose than be void of Purpose." -Friedrich Nietzsche ***** "In civilized life, where the happiness, and indeed almost the existence, of man depends so much upon the opinion of his fellow men, he is constantly acting a studied part." -Washington Irving ***** "No matter where or what, there are makers, takers, and fakers." -Robert Heinlein ***** "The Ideal is in thyself, the impediments too is in thyself." -Thomas Carlyle ***** "We invent what we love, and what we fear." -John Irving ***** "Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves." -Jean-Jacques Rousseau ***** "The coward regards himself as cautious, the miser as thrifty." -Publilius Syrus ***** "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes." -Oscar Wilde ***** "Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack for being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as often as the right ones. We get along in life this way." -Lewis Thomas Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination." -Christopher Isherwood ***** "No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "It seems safe to say that significant discovery, really creative thinking, does not occur with regard to problems about which the thinker is lukewarm." -Mary Henle ***** "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -George Santayana ***** "It is better to know nothing than to know what ain't so." -Josh Billings ***** "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." -Albert Einstein ***** "He that leaveth nothing to chance will do few things ill, but he will do very few things." -George Savile ***** "People only see what they are prepared to see." -Ralph Waldo Emerson ***** "The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend." -Robertson Davies ***** "What is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary." -Richard Harkness ***** "Some people have a large circle of friends while others have only friends that they like." -??? ***** "Foolproof systems don't take into account the ingenuity of fools." -Gene Brown ***** "The quality of an organization can never exceed the quality of the minds that make it up." -Harold R. McAlindon ***** "Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to." -Mark Twain ***** "The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them." -Mark Twain ***** "It is better to deserve honours and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them." -Mark Twain Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person." -Mark Twain ***** "We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." -Anais Nin ***** "He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals." -Benjamin Franklin ***** "Life is only one damn thing after another." -Elbert Hubbard ***** "Experience is somthing you don't get until just after you need it." -??? ***** "The one who loves the least, controls the relationship." -Robert Anthony ***** "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." -Oscar Wilde ***** "Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike." -Oscar Wilde ***** "The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "Truth would quickly cease to become stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it." -Henry Louis Mencken ***** "Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time." -Henry Louis Mencken ***** "We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe." -Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe ***** "An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows." -Dwight D. Eisenhower ***** "We learn from history that we do not learn from history." -Georg Wilhelm F. Hegel ***** "If the enemy is in range, so are you." -??? ***** "If a million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing." -Anatole France Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "While money doesn't buy love, it puts you in a great bargaining position." -??? ***** "A sweater is a garment worn by a child when his mother feels chilly." -??? ***** "All things being equal, fat people use more soap." -??? ***** "Never wrestle a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it." -??? ***** "If you can't answer a man's argument, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names." -Elbert Hubbard ***** "A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary." -Thomas Carruthers ***** "The big theives hang the little ones." -Czech Proverb, regarding capital punishment ***** "Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be." -William Hazlitt 152 quotes in this category Return to The Quotation Station main page. |