Quotations: Wisdom Wisdom- what quotations are revered for. All these quotations contain timeless bits of wisdom and many are quite provokative. Find more wisdom quotations at WellofWisdom.com. Quotations are sorted* by: Date Added Quotations can be sorted by: Date Added Star Rating Author's Name ***** "In the struggle against evil, there is no shame in defeat -- only in not fighting." -Steven Hart ***** "Our rich texture of racial, religious, and political diversity will be a godsend in the 21st century. Great rewards will come to those who can live together, learn together, work together, forge new ties that bind together." -Bill Clinton ***** "The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which; he simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both." -Buddha ***** "War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children." -Jimmy Carter ***** "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." -George Orwell ***** "We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism." -J. Robert Oppenheimer ***** "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country ... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign ... until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." -Abraham Lincoln ***** "People who feel the world is tilted against them will spawn the kind of hatred that is very dangerous for all of us." -Bill Gates ***** "The World is not dangerous because of those who do harm but because of those who look at it without doing anything." -Albert Einstein ***** "The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self." -Albert Einstein ***** "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." -Albert Einstein ***** "If we would please in society, we must be prepared to be taught many things we know already by people who do not know them." -Sebastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort ***** "The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss." -Thomas Carlyle ***** "The road up and the road down is one and the same." -Heraclitus ***** "Men of ill judgement oft ignore the good that lies within their hands, till they have lost it." -Sophocles ***** "When the mouse laughs at the cat, there is a hole nearby." -Nigerian proverb Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "It is the property of fools, to be always judging." -Thomas Fuller ***** "Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it." -Albert Einstein ***** "Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals." -Albert Einstein ***** "Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding." -Albert Einstein ***** "Silence is argument carried on by other means." -Ernesto "Che" Guevara ***** "Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which is not there." -E. H. Gombrich ***** "Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations." -Edward de Bono ***** "To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation." -Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ***** "Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they think laughable." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ***** "Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit." -Henry Brooks Adams ***** "The gentle mind by gentle deeds is known. For a man by nothing is so well betrayed, as by his manners." -Edmund Spenser ***** "A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves." -Simone Weil ***** "A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies." -Oscar Wilde ***** "Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself." -Abraham Joshua Heschel ***** "When the well's dry, we know the worth of water." -Benjamin Franklin ***** "Adversity introduces a man to himself." -??? Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "To others we are not ourselves but a performer in their lives cast for a part we do not even know that we are playing." -Princess Elizabeth Bibesco ***** "It is a golden rule not to judge men by their opinions but rather by what their opinions make of them." -Georg Christoph Lichtenberg ***** "Clever liars give details, but the cleverest don't." -??? ***** "He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice. The despotism of custom is everywhere standing up to human advancement." -John Stuart Mill ***** "Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way. And don't pray when it rains if you don't pray when the sun shines." -Satchel Paige ***** "Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect." -Ralph Waldo Emerson ***** "There are no shortcuts to any place worth going." -Beverly Sills ***** "Whoever wishes to keep a secret must hide the fact that he possess one." -Johann Wolfgang Van Goethe ***** "Growth demands a temporary surrender of security." -Gail Sheehy ***** "The foolish neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but never forget." -Thomas Szasz ***** "The wisest mind has something yet to learn." -George Santayana ***** "Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money but you can't get more time." -Jim Rohn ***** "You'll always miss 100% of the shots you don't take." -Wayne Gretzky ***** "Our life is like a land journey: too even and easy and dull over long distances across the plains, too hard and painful up the steep grades; but on the summits of the mountain, you have a magnificent view - and feel exalted - and your eyes are full of happy tears - and you want to sing - and you wish you had wings! And then - you can't stay there, but you must continue your journey - you begin climbing down the other side, so busy with your footholds that your summit experience is forgotten." -Lloyd Douglas ***** "Joy shared is twice the joy. Sorrow shared is half the sorrow." -??? ***** "The heart has its reasons that reason does not know." -Blaise Pascal Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "The quality of your life is the quality of your relationships." -Anthony Robbins ***** "Everything happens for a reason; If you can't find a reason for something, there's a reason for that." -Chris Levi ***** "We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish." -F. A. Hayek ***** "The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false." -Paul Johnson ***** "'The right to do something' does not mean that doing it is right." -William Safire ***** "You point your finger at the moon, the fool stares at your finger." -Chinese Proverb ***** "Kiku wa ittoki no haji, kikanu wa matsudai no haji. (While asking something you don't know to others is a temporary shame, not asking at all causes a lifetime of shame)" -Japanese proverb ***** "Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent ... the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding." -Justice Louis Brandeis ***** "Where so many hours have been spent in convincing myself that I am right, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?" -Jane Austen ***** "Only the weak are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong." -Leo Buscaglia ***** "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." -William Clifford ***** "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." -Aristotle ***** "Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure." -George E. Woodberry ***** "He who angers you conquers you." -Elizabeth Kenny ***** "If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow." -Chinese Proverb ***** "The forces of good and evil are working within and around me, I must choose, and in a free will universe I do have a choice." -Sovereign Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "The most successful businessman is the man who holds onto the old just as long as it is good, and grabs the new just as soon as it is better." -Robert P. Vanderpoel ***** "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name." -Lao-Tzu ***** "Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion and empathy." -Dean Koontz ***** "Stupid people always think they are right. Wise people listen to advice." -Proverbs 12:15 ***** "You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you." -Dale Carnegie ***** "The rules have changed. True power is held by the person who possesses the largest bookshelf, not gun cabinet or wallet." -Anthony J. D'Angelo ***** "You must not for one instant give up the effort to build new lives for yourselves. Creativity means to push open the heavy, groaning doorway to life. This is not an easy struggle. Indeed, it may be the most difficult task in the world, for opening the door to your own life is, in the end, more difficult than opening the doors to the mysteries of the universe." -Daisaku Ikeda ***** "Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more." -Mark Twain ***** "New technologies have been disrupting existing equilibria for centuries, yet balanced solutions have been found before." -Pamela Samuelson ***** "A very popular error—having the courage of one’s convictions. It is rather a matter of having the courage for an attack upon one’s convictions. Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies." -Friedrich Nietzsche ***** "Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something." -Henry David Thoreau ***** "Believe not because some old manuscripts are produced, believe not because it is your national belief, believe not because you have been made to believe from your childhood, but reason truth out, and after you have analyzed it, then if you find it will do good to one and all, believe it, live up to it and help others live up to it." -Buddha ***** "Only after the last tree has been cut down, only after the last river has ben poisoned, only after the last fish has been caught, only then will you find that money cannot be eaten." -Cree Indian Prophecy ***** "As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected." -Charles Darwin ***** "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." -Nietzsche ***** "There are no moral phenomena at all, but only moral interpretation of phenomena." -Nietzsche Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." -Nietzsche ***** "The investigation of Nature in the unbiased light of reason is our only guide to truth." -Giordano Bruno ***** "You have to lead people gently toward what they already know is right." -Philip Crosby ***** "Every man I meet is in some way my superior." -Ralph Waldo Emerson ***** "Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner." -Omar Bradley ***** "Truth is eternal, knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them." -Madeleine L'Engle ***** "The harder you fight to hold on to specific assumptions, the more likely there's gold in letting go of them." -John Seely Brown ***** "Honor has not to be won; it must only not be lost." -Arthur Schopenhauer ***** "Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true." -Honore de Balzac ***** "The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything -- or nothing." -Nancy Astor ***** "Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." -Sun-Tzu ***** "In the long run, we get no more than we have been willing to risk giving." -Sheldon Kopp ***** "The policy of being too cautious is the greatest risk of all." -Jawaharlal Nehru ***** "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." -T. S. Eliot ***** "Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place." -Mark Twain ***** "It is common error to infer that things which are consecutive in order of time have necessarily the relation of cause and effect." -Jacob Bigelow Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "What is objectionable, what is dangerous, about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents." -Robert Kennedy ***** "It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end." -Ursula K. LeGuin ***** "Yesterday is but today's memory, tomorrow is today's dream." -Kahlil Gibran ***** "I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody." -Bill Cosby ***** "You don't get harmony when everybody sings the same note." -Doug Floyd ***** "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." -Gandhi ***** "All truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Second it is violently opposed. Third it is accepted as being self-evident." -Schopenhauer ***** "It is not enough for a handful of experts to attempt the solution of a problem, to solve it and then to apply it. The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment." -Albert Einstein ***** "To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection." -Henri Poincaré ***** "Without speculation there is no good and original observation." -Charles Darwin ***** "A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence." -David Hume ***** "To be is to be perceived." -George Berkeley ***** "There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of facts. The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; the truths of fact are contingent and their opposites are possible." -Gottfried Leibniz ***** "Every body continues in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line, except in so far as it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it." -Isaac Newton ***** "No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience." -John Locke ***** "When the passions become masters, they are vices." -Blaise Pascal Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "There is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible." -René Descartes ***** "If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things." -René Descartes ***** "True and False are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not there is neither Truth nor Falsehood." -Thomas Hobbes ***** "There are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience." -Roger Bacon ***** "There is absolutely no criterion for truth. For reason, senses, ideas, or whatever else may exist are all deceptive." -Carneades ***** "All men by nature desire to know." -Aristotle ***** "The person who elevates simplicity to a supreme value is like the architect who uses a straight-edge against a fluted column: his calculations won't build a sound building, and he will leave out much of the beauty and value of what is there before him." -Martha Nussbaum ***** "Science aims to give us theories which are empirically adequate; and acceptance of a theory involves as belief only that it is empirically adequate." -Bas van Fraassen ***** "Why should there be the method of science? There is not just one way to build a house, or even to grow tomatoes. We should not expect something as motley as the growth of knowledge to be strapped to one methodology." -Ian Hacking ***** "To choose rationally, one must choose morally." -David Gauthier ***** "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart." -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ***** "If we wish to live in the light of reason, we must follow rules or principles; for that is what being rational is." -Isaiah Berlin ***** "If men were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking, they would lose the capacity for asking all the unanswerable questions upon which every civilization is founded." -Hannah Arendt ***** "Existence precedes essence." -Jean-Paul Sartre ***** "Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent." -Ludwig Wittgenstein ***** "The method of 'postulating' what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil." -Bertrand Russell Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "He who angers you conquers you." -Elizabeth Kenny ***** "Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits." -Thomas Edison ***** "We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done." -Longfellow ***** "Clever people master life; the wise illuminate it and create fresh difficulties." -Emil Nolde ***** "The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem." -Theodore Rubin ***** "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." -Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ***** "It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself." -Thomas Jefferson ***** "The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it." -Alan Saporta ***** "Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." -Calvin Coolidge ***** "It is no use saying, 'We are doing our best.' You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary." -Winston Churchill ***** "The price of greatness is responsibility." -Winston Churchill ***** "Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest." -C. S. Lewis ***** "In order to communicate effectively, one must know what is worth knowing and what is worth saying...and the difference between the two." -James Halloran ***** "The loftier the building, the deeper must the foundation be laid." -Thomas Kempis ***** "You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today." -Abraham Lincoln Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day." -Winston Churchill ***** "The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live." -Flora Whittemore ***** "To do two things at once is to do neither." -Publilius Syrus ***** "Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much." -Walter Lippmann ***** "You do not destroy an idea by killing people; you replace it with a better one." -Edward Keating ***** "You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you." -Eric Hoffer ***** "Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." -Confucius ***** "It is better to be defeated on principle than to win on lies." -Arthur Calwell ***** "People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost." -H. Jackson Browne ***** "A proverb is the wisdom of many and the wit of one." -Lord John Russell ***** "The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected." -Cousin Woodman ***** "Everyone is kneaded out of the same dough but not baked in the same oven." -Yiddish proverb ***** "Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress." -Ghandi ***** "It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence." -Mohandas K. Gandhi ***** "People are the common denominator of progress. So... no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated." -John Kenneth Galbraith ***** "Every path serves a purpose." -Gene Oliver Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "My past is my wisdom to use today... my future is my wisdom yet to experience. Be in the present because that is where life resides." -Gene Oliver ***** "By doubting we come at truth." -Cicero ***** "A theory must be tempered with reality." -Jawaharlal Nehru ***** "Action to be effective must be directed to clearly conceived ends." -Jawaharlal Nehru ***** "Patience is the companion of wisdom." -Saint Augustine ***** "To wisdom belongs the intellectual apprehension of things eternal; to knowledge, the rational apprehension of things temporal." -Saint Augustine ***** "Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely." -Auguste Rodin ***** "The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual -- when it begins to ignore the passions, the motions -- it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance." -Isaac Bashevis Singer ***** "We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions." -Isaac Bashevis Singer ***** "What one has not experienced one will never understand in print." -Isadora Duncan ***** "Delay always breeds danger and to protract a great design is often to ruin it." -Miguel de Cervantes ***** "No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself, or to get all the credit for doing it." -Andrew Carnegie ***** "You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today." -Abraham Lincoln ***** "It isn't the incompetent who destroy an organization. It is those who have achieved something and want to rest upon their achievements who are forever clogging things up." -Charles Sorenson ***** "He only profits from praise who values criticism." -Heinrich Heine ***** "The weather-cock on the church spire, though made of iron, would soon be broken by the storm-wind if it... did not understand the noble art of turning to every wind." -Heinrich Heine Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "The empires of the future are the empires of the mind." -Winston Churchill ***** "In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists." -Eric Hoffer ***** "Prejudice is the child of ignorance." -Hazlitt ***** "Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt." -Graham Greene ***** "Character is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. There are too many people who think that the only thing that's right is to get by, and the only thing that's wrong is to get caught." -J. C. Watts ***** "Science is the search for truth - it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others. We need to have the spirit of science in international affairs, to make the conduct of international affairs the effort to find t he right solution, the just solution of international problems, not the effort by each nation to get the better of other nations, to do harm to them when it is possible." -Linus Pauling ***** "A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." -Douglas Adams ***** "Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common." -Denis Diderot ***** "It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err." -Mahatma Gandhi ***** "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius--and a lot of courage--to move in the opposite direction." -Ernst F. Schumacher ***** "It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust." -Samuel Johnson ***** "If you disclose your alms, even then it is well done, but if you keep them secret, and give them to the poor, then that is better still for you; and this wipes off from you some of your evil deeds." -The Koran ***** "We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe." -Oliver Wendell Holmes ***** "The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it." -William Faulkner ***** "If you are near the enemy, make him believe you are far from him. If you are far from the enemy, make him believe you are near." -Sun-Tzu, The Art of War ***** "As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found -- in himself." -Erich Frohm Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth. To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me; a system of ethics built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle." -Albert Einstein ***** "It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go." -Bertrand Russell ***** "What men really want is not knowledge but certainty." -Bertrand Russell ***** "Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do." -James Harvey Robinson ***** "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible." -Bertrand Russell ***** "The body says what words cannot." -Martha Graham ***** "Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another." -Juvenal ***** "In wildness is the preservation of the World." -Henry David Thoreau ***** "Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see." -Paul Klee ***** "A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free." -Nikos Kazantzakis ***** "The trodden worm curls up. This testifies to its caution. It thus reduces its chances of being trodden upon again. In the language of morality: Humility." -Friedrich Nietzsche ***** "Errors of haste are seldom committed singly. The first time a man always does too much. And precisely on that account he commits a second error, and then he does too little." -Friedrich Nietzsche ***** "By seeking the beginnings of things, a man becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards: in the end he also believes backwards." -Friedrich Nietzsche ***** "an a donkey be tragic? To perish beneath a load that one can neither bear nor throw off? This is the case of the Philosopher." -Friedrich Nietzsche ***** "Once for all I wish to be blind to many things--Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge." -Friedrich Nietzsche ***** "'All truth is simple.' --Is not this a double lie?" -Friedrich Nietzsche Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and the power itself in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is increasing--that resistance has been overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but competence. The first principle of our humanism: The weak and the failures shall perish. They ought even to be helped to perish." -Friedrich Nietzsche ***** "Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger." -Friedrich Nietzsche ***** "My life has no aim and this is evident even from the accidental nature of its origin. That I can posit an aim for myself is another matter. But a state has no aim; we alone give it aim." -Friedrich Nietzsche ***** "A belief, however necessary it may be for the preservation of a species, has nothing to do with truth. The falseness of a judgment is not for us necessarily an objection to a judgment. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species preserving, perhaps even species cultivating. To recognize untruth as a condition of life--that cetainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil." -Friedrich Nietzsche ***** "It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all other drives to accept as a norm." -Friedrick Nietzsche ***** "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts." -William Shakespeare ***** "The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception." -Friedrich Nietzsche ***** "He who knows others is learned. He who knows himself is wise." -Lao Tzu ***** "Truth comes out of error more readily than out of confusion." -Francis Bacon ***** "There are no foolish questions and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions." -Charles P. Steinmetz ***** "I have learned the novice can often see things that the expert overlooks. All that is necessary is not to be afraid of making mistakes, or of appearing naive." -Abraham Maslow ***** "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing." -Albert Einstein ***** "The obvious is always least understood." -Clemens Wenzel Lothar Metternich-Winneburg ***** "A prudent question is one half of wisdom." -Francis Bacon ***** "The first step is always to succeed in becoming surprised - to notice that there is something funny going on." -David Gelernter ***** "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." -Albert Einstein Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "The freedom to create is somehow linked with facility of access to those obscure regions below the conscious mind." -Loren Eiseley ***** "The creator is both detached and committed, free and yet ensnared, concerned but not too much so. ... If motivation is too strong the person is blinded; if the objective situation is too tightly structured, the person sees none of its alternative possiblities." -Robert Macleod ***** "If the individual is narrowly concentrated on the goal, to the exclusion of other relevant aspects of the problem situation, he is often unable to achieve a solution. The creative thinker must stand sufficiently detached from his work." -Mary Henle ***** "Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached." -Simone Weil ***** "The greatest poets are those with memories so great that they extend beyond their strongest experiences to their minutest observations of people and things far outside their own self-centeredness." -Stephen Spender ***** "Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come of nothing." -Joshua Reynolds ***** "Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong." -Thomas Jefferson ***** "One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ***** "To get anywhere, or even to live a long time, a man has to guess, and guess right, over and over again, without enough data for a logical answer." -Robert Heinlein ***** "The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution." -Bertrand Russell ***** "He who can properly define and divide is to be considered a god." -Plato ***** "To understand is to perceive patterns." -Isaiah Berlin ***** "Intelligence is that faculty of mind, by which order is preceived in a situation previously considered disordered." -Haneef A. Fatmi ***** "We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds through our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language." -Benjamin Lee Whorf ***** "I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." -J. B. S. Haldane ***** "In order to draw a limit to thinking, we should have to think both sides of this limit." -Ludwig Wittgenstein Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." -Ludwig Wittgenstein ***** "That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way." -Doris Lessing ***** "Man errs as long as he strives." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ***** "Time does not relinquish its rights, either over human beings or over mountains." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ***** "Art is long, life short; judgment difficult, opportunity transient." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ***** "Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man." -Loren Eiseley ***** "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite." -William Blake ***** "Mind is locked in matter like the spirit Ariel in a cloven pine. Like Ariel, men struggle to escape the drag of the matter they inhabit, yet it is the spirit that they fear." -Loren Eiseley ***** "All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ***** "The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." -Albert Einstein ***** "All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ***** "There are two kinds of truth, small truth and great truth. You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth." -Niels Bohr ***** "The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it." -Alan Saporta ***** "Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow grow, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation." -George Washington ***** "To see what is right and not to do it, is want of courage." -Confucius Analects ***** "We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects." -Herman Melville Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." -Aristotle ***** "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." -Franklin D. Roosevelt ***** "Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." -Samuel Johnson ***** "When a thing has been said, and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it." -Anatole France ***** "Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want." -Clive Barnes ***** "Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius." -Henri-Frederic Amiel ***** "If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking." -Lyndon Baines Johnson ***** "I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge." -Igor Stravinsky ***** "Any business arrangement that is not profitable to the other person will in the end prove unprofitable for you. The bargain that yields mutual satisfaction is the only one that is apt to be repeated." -B. C. Forbes ***** "Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends." -S. Weir Mitchell ***** "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -H. L. Mencken ***** "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few." -Shunryu Suzuki ***** "Do not fear your enemies. The worst they can do is kill you. Do not fear friends. At worst, they may betray you. Fear those who do not care; they neither kill nor betray, but betrayal and murder exists because of their silent consent." -Bruno Jasienski ***** "Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought." -Albert von Szent-Gyorgy ***** "Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of real peace." -Dalai Lama ***** "Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live." -Oscar Wilde Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." -Jonathan Swift ***** "If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things." -Vincent Van Gogh ***** "The universe is not indifferent to intelligence, it is actively hostile to it." -??? ***** "Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "Certain flaws are necessary for the whole. It would seem strange if old friends lacked certain quirks." -Goethe ***** "Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." -William Pitt ***** "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin ***** "With the first link, a chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." -Captain Jean-Luc Picard ***** "The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is besides the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech." -Justice Anthony Kennedy ***** "How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of good will." -Albert Einstein ***** "The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot." -Mark Twain ***** "The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready." -Henry David Thoreau ***** "Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius." -Arthur Conan Doyle ***** "Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. . . . the human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive." -Frank Herbert ***** "Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul." -Mark Twain Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough." -Seneca ***** "Nothing endures but change." -Heraclitus ***** "There are two kinds of men who never amount to very much: Those who cannot do what they are told, and those who can do nothing else." -Cyrus H. K. Curtis ***** "Some people speak from experience; others, from experience, don't speak." -??? ***** "Kindness is loving people more than they deserve." -Joseph Joubert ***** "Your friend is the man who knows all about you and and still likes you." -Elbert Hubbard ***** "Life is what happens while you are making other plans." -John Lennon ***** "You know nothing for sure...execept the fact that you know nothing for sure." -John F. Kennedy ***** "When you're arguing with a fool, make sure he isn't doing the same thing." -??? ***** "Anything that is given can be at once taken away. We have to learn never to expect anything, and when it comes it's no more than a gift on loan." -John McGahern ***** "You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do." -Olin Miller ***** "Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood." -Marie Curie ***** "Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names." -John F. Kennedy ***** "We tell lies when we are afraid, ... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger." -Tad Williams ***** "As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular." -Oscar Wilde ***** "A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies." -Oscar Wilde Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "To be clever enough to get a great deal of money, one must be stupid enough to want it." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "Whilst we have prisons it matters little who occupies the cells." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind--that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking." -Henry Louis Mencken ***** "The man who does not read good books is at no advantage over the man who can't read them." -Mark Twain ***** "I am different from Washington; I have a higher, grander standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won't." -Mark Twain ***** "Let us be thankful for the fools; but for them the rest of us could not succeed." -Mark Twain ***** "There is such a thing as a hatred of lies and dissimulation, which is the outcome of a delicate sense of humor; there is also the selfsame hatred but as the result of cowardice, in so far as falsehood is forbidden by Divine law. Too cowardly to lie." -Friedrich Nietzsche ***** "The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work." -Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe ***** "The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything." -Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe ***** "In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep." -Albert Einstein ***** "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind." -Albert Einstein ***** "The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations." -Benjamin Disraeli ***** "No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism." -Winston Churchill Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "Whether you think you can or think you can't -- you are right." -Henry Ford ***** "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes." -Winston Churchill ***** "There was never an angry man that thought his anger unjust." -St. Francis De Sales ***** "Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be." -Thomas a Kempis ***** "Never explain. Your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway." -Elbert Hubbard ***** "Four things come not back: the spoken word, the spent arrow, the past, the neglected opportunity." -Omar Idn Al-Halif ***** "I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect." -Edward Gibbon ***** "Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few." -Benjamin Franklin ***** "I don't know what will be used in the next world war, but the 4th will be fought with stones." -Albert Einstein ***** "Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius." -Benjamin Disraeli ***** "Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it." -Confucious ***** "He that thinks himself the wisest is generally the least so." -C.C. Colton ***** "The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none." -Thomas Carlyle ***** "Every man's life lies within the present; for the past is spent and done with, and the future is uncertain." -Marcus Aurelius ***** "Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness." -Chinese Proverb ***** "If you have to swallow a frog, try not to think about it. If you have to swallow two frogs, don't swallow the smaller one first." -??? Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "It is well, when judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality." -Arnold Bennett ***** "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof." -Galbraith's Law ***** "There are two rules for success: 1) Never tell everything you know." -Roger H. Lincoln ***** "It's important to remember that just because there are crooks, zealots and morons supporting a position, it does not automatically follow that the position is wrong." -Jan D. Wolter ***** "When I face an issue of great import that cleaves both constituents and colleagues, I always take the same approach. I engage in deep deliberation and quiet contemplation. I wait to the last available minute and then I always vote with the losers. Because, my friend, the winners never remember and the losers never forget." -Thomas H. Kean ***** "Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?" -Abraham Lincoln ***** "It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and say the opposite." -Sam Levenson ***** "Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge." -Cicero ***** "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 345 quotes in this category Return to The Quotation Station main page.