Fun and Random Quotes

"There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired."
Nick Carraway, in The Great Gatsby

 

"God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."
Reinhold Niebuhr

Here are some delightful sayings for your perusal and enjoyment, categorized in a somewhat organized manner.
The categories are:

Art
Books and Literature
Education
Hope
Life
Love
The Mind and Knowledge
Poetry
Random
Religion
Shakespeare
Teaching
Tolerance
Writing

"Less artsy, more fartsy!"
Homer Simpson

"Art is why I get up in the morning, but my definition ends there. It doesn't seem fair that I'm living for something I can't even define."
Ani Difranco, in "Out of Habit"

"Art lies in concealing art. (Ars est celare artem.)"
Ovid

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"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it."
Herman Melville

"A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."
Milton, Aeropagitica

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

"Reading is a creative activity. You have to visualize the characters, you have to hear what the voices sound like."
Madeleine L'Engle

"Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but molds it to its purpose."
Oscar Wilde

"Literature is the orchestration of platitudes."
Thorton Wilder

"God wove a web of loveliness

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"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts."
Henry Adams

"Me fail English? That's un-possible!"
Ralph Wiggum

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"Beware of how you take away hope from another human being."
Oliver Wendell Holmes

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"Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating."
O. Henry

"For what is your life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away."
New Testament, James 4:14

"Some of us will do our jobs well and some will not, but we will all be judged by only one thing--the result."
Vince Lombardi

"Winners make the grade. Whiners make excuses."
some poster I saw somewhere

"There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it."
Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

"If you have no confidence in self you are twice devastated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started."
Marcus Garvey

"Gaurd well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"God has not called us to see through each other, but to see each other through."
Horace Moody

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"The Eskimo as 52 names for snow because it is important to him; there ought to be as many names for love."
Margaret Atwood

"Love distills desire upon the eyes, love brings bewitching grace into the heart."
Euripedes

"What our souls are made of, yours and mine are the same."
Emily Bronte

"I am two fools, I know,
For loving, and for saying so
In Whining poetry.
John Donne

"There is always some madness in love. But there is also some reason in madness."
Friedrich Nietzsche

"kisses are a better fate
than wisdom."
e.e. cummings

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"Imagination is more important that knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
Einstein

"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality."
Jules de Gautier

"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge."
Bertrand Russell

"Everything looks bad if you remember it."
Homer Simpson

"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."
Confucious

"Only two things are finite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Einstein

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
Martin Luther King, Jr.

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"A poem should not mean
But be."
Archibald Macleish, "Ars Poetica"

"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."
Wordsworth

"We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves."
Locke

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"At last the ladder, which had been built slowly, slowly, one hope at a time, reached up to the clouds. And the dreamer began to climb."
unknown

"God sends meat and the devil sends cooks."
Thomas Deloney

"Thou shalt know by experience how salt the savor is of other's bread and how sad a path it is to climb and descend another's stairs."
Dante, Paradise

"Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand."
Abraham Lincoln

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"I have got a religion--my own religion...In fact I've got more than the lot of them, with all their mumbo-jumbo.--I worship God! I believe in the Supreme Being; a Creator, no matter who he may be, who has placed us here to do our duty as citizens....But I don't need to go and kiss a lot of silver-plate in a church, and support a pack of humbugs who live getter than we do ourselves! You can praise God just as well in the woods and the fields, or by gazing up into the vault of heaven, like the ancients. My God is the God of Socrates, of Franklin Voltaire and Beranger!...I cannot worship an old fogey of a God who walks around in a garden with a stick in his hand, lodges with his friends in the bellies of whales, dies with a cry on his lips and comes to life again three days later: all of which is intrinsically abusurd and utterly opposed, moreover, to all physical laws: which incidentally indicates that the priests have always wallowed in a shameful ignorance wherein they strive to engulf the peoples of the world along with them."
Gustave Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, spoken by Homais, the chemist

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"Subtract from many modern poets all that may be found in Shakespeare, and trash will remain."
C.C. Colton

"And Hamlet how boring, how boring to live with,
So mean and self-conscious, blowing and snoring
His wonderful speeches, full of other folks' whoring.
D.H. Lawrence, in When I Read Shakespeare

"Good friend for Jesvs sake forbeare,
To digg the dust encloased heare.
Bles be ye man yt spares thes stones.
And curst be he yt moves my bones.
Epitaph on Shakespeare's tombstone in Stratford

"There is neither good or bad but thinking makes it so."
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

"Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.
Shakespeare, Hamlet

"...Life is but a poor player
that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
and is heard no more. It is a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
signifying nothing."
Shakespeare, Macbeth

"I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul."
Shakespeare, Hamlet (I, v, 15)

Polonius: How do you read, my lord?
Hamelt: Words, words, words.
Shakespeare, Hamlet (II, ii, 192)

"These are but wild and whirling words."
Shakespeare, Hamlet (I, v, 133)

"O for a muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention.
Shakespeare, Henry V (Prologue)

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"Our American professors like their literature clear, cold, pure, and very dead."
Sinclair Lewis

"Spoon-feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon."
E.M. Forster

"No other job in the world could possibly dispossess one so completely as this job of teaching. You could stand all day in a laundry, for instance, still in possession of your mind. But this teaching utterly obliterates you. It cuts right to your being; essentially, it takes over your spirit. It drags it out from where it would hide."
Sylvia Ashton-Warner

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"Tolerance is respect, acceptance, and appreciation of the rich diversity of our world's cultures, our forms of expression, and ways of being human. It is fostered by knowledge, openness, communication, and freedom of thought, conscience, and belief. Tolerance is harmony in difference."
Declaration of the Principles on Tolerance (1995), The United Nations.

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"We write to taste life twice."
Anais Nin

"You don't write because you want to say something. You write because you have to say something."
F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Then, rising with Aurora's light,
The Muse invoked, sit down to write;
Blot out, correct, insert, refine,
Enlarge, diminish, interline.
Jonathon Swift

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If you have any favorite quotes, email me with suggestions!

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Last updated August 13, 2002