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Cool Quotes - L

Labor


In a state of nature, it is an invariable law, that a man's acquisitions are in proportion to his labours.
Edmund Burke

The labor we delight in physics (alleviates) pain.
Shakespeare

Labor is no disgrace.
Hesiod

What is there illustrious that is not attended by labor?
Cicero

Life gives nothing to man without labor.
Horace

Labor is a powerful medicine.
St. John Chrysostom

God sells us all things at the price of labor.
Leonardo da Vinci

Labor, as well as fasting, serves to mortify and subdue the flesh. Provided the labor you undertake contributes to the glory of God and your own welfare, I would prefer that you should suffer the pain of labor rather than that of fasting.
St. Francis de Sales

To labor is the lot of man below;
And when Jove gave us life, he gave us woe.
Alexander Pope, Tr. of Homer

Nature recompenses men for their sufferings; it renders them laborious, because to the greatest toils it attaches the greatest rewards. But if arbitrary power take away the rewards of nature, man resumes his disgust for labor, and inactivity appears to be the only good.
C. L. de Montesquieu

When I go into my garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.
R. W. Emerson

A truly American sentiment recognizes the dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in honest toil.
Grover Cleveland

There is no boon in nature. All the blessings we enjoy are the fruits of labor, toil, self-denial, and study.
W. G. Sumner

Labor, even the most humble and the most obscure, if it is well done, tends to beautify and embellish the world.
Gabrielle D'Annunzio

No form of labor is a disgrace. Labor is, on the contrary, the highest degree of nobility for anyone who faithfully coöperates through it and with it in constructing the life of the community and in preserving the nation.
Adolf Hitler

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer to that would be, "Yes." And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be, "No."
Aaron Copland

No man, unless his body or mind be totally disabled, has need to suffer the mortification of seeing himself useless or burthensome to the community: he that will diligently labour, in whatever occupation, will deserve the sustenance which he obtains, and the protection which he enjoys; and may lie down every night with the pleasing consciousness of having contributed something to the happiness of life.
Samuel Johnson

Labor Union


The bad workmen, who form the majority of the operatives in many branches of industry, are decidedly of opinion that bad workmen ought to receive the same wages as good.
J. S. Mill

The methods by which a trade union can alone act are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.
Henry George

Trade unions are the only means by which workmen can protect themselves from the tyranny of those who employ them. But the moment that trade unions become tyrants in their turn they are engines for evil: they have no right to prevent people from working on any terms that they choose.
Mr. Justice Lindley

Facts show that politically independent trade unions do not exist anywhere. There have never been any. Experience and theory say that there never will be any.
Leon Trotsky

There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.
Calvin Coolidge

Lady


Ladies set no value on the moral character of men who pay their addresses to them: the greatest profligate will be as well received as the man of the greatest virtue, and this by a very good woman, by a woman who says her prayers three times a day.
Samuel Johnson

Laissez-faire


Liberty of action and liberty of movement. (Laissez faire et laissez passer.)
Ascribed to J. C. M. V. de Gournay

Land


Still, it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in.
Winston Churchill

If a man own land, the land owns him.
R. W. Emerson

The possession of land involves and carries with it the duty of cultivating that land.
Charles Bradlauch

He is not a full man who does not own a piece of land.
Hebrew Proverb

Language


But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
George Orwell

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations.
Samuel Johnson

Language [is] the leading principle which unites or separates the tribes of mankind.
Edward Gibbon

[Greek is] doubtless the most perfect [language] that has been contrived by the art of man.
Edward Gibbon

Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.
Mark Twain

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
George Orwell

[Greek is] a musical and prolific language, that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of philosophy.
Edward Gibbon

He [Churchill] mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.
Edward R. Murrow

Don't swear, boy. It shows a lack of vocabulary.
Alan Bennett

If Miss means respectably unmarried, and Mrs respectably married, then Ms means nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Angela Carter

They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.
Mark Twain

Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill.
Flann O'Brien

When I survey the Plan [of a Dictionary of the English Language] which I have laid before you, I cannot, my Lord, but confess, that I am frightened at its extent, and, like the soldiers of Caesar, look on Britain as a new world, which it is almost madness to invade. But I hope, that though I should not complete the conquest, I shall at least discover the coast, civilize part of the inhabitants, and make it easy for some other adventurer to proceed farther, to reduce them wholly to subjection, and settle them under laws.
Samuel Johnson

For language is the framework of reason; unless it is ordered and related to truth, reason cannot express itself.
Paul Johnson

A man who deliberately inflicts violence on the language will almost certainly inflict violence on human beings if he acquires the power. Those who treasure the meaning of words will treasure truth, and those who bend words to their purposes are very likely in pursuit of anti-social ones.
Paul Johnson

We are trying to unravel the Mighty Infinite using a language which was designed to tell one another where the fresh fruit was.
Terry Pratchett

To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horse — German.
Charles V

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.
Galen

Man has great power of speech, but the greater part thereof is empty and deceitful. The animals have little, but that little is useful and true; and better is a small and certain thing than a great falsehood.
Leonardo da Vinci

The Italian is pleasant, but without sinews, as a still reflecting water; the French delicate, but even nice as a woman, scarce daring to open her lips for fear of marring her countenance; the Spanish majestical but fulsome, running too much on the o, and terrible like the Devil in a play; the Dutch manlike, but withal very harsh, as one ready at every word to pick a quarrel.
Richard Carew

Every living language, like the perspiring bodies of living creatures, is in perpetual motion and lateration; some words go off, and become obsolete; others are taken in, and by degrees grow into common use; or the same word is inverted to a new sense and notion, which in tract of time makes as observable a change in the air and features of a language as age makes in the lines and mien of a face.
Richard Bentley

It is with language as with manners: they are both established by the usage of people of fashion; it must be imitated, it must be com plied with.
Lord Chesterfield

No grammatical rules have sufficient authority to control the firm and established usage of language. Established custom, in speaking and writing, is the standard to which we must at last resort for determining every controverted point in language and style.
Hugh Blair

The tedious time we moderns employ in acquiring the language of the ancient Greeks and Romans, which cost them nothing, is the principal reason why we cannot arrive at that grandeur of soul and perfection of knowledge that was in them.
C. C. Colton

Language, as well as the faculty of speech, was the immediate gift of God.
Noah Webster

Language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius.
R. W. Emerson

The phraseology of every nation has a taint of drollery about it to the ears of every nation speaking a different tongue.
E. A. Poe

Language is no artificial product, contained in books and dictionaries and governed by the strict rules of impersonal grammarians. It is the living expression of the mind and spirit of a people, ever changing and shifting, whose sole standard of correctness is custom and the common usage of the community.
A. H. Sayce

Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool. Such men have the quaint habit of discovering things fifty years after all the world knows about them — because they read only their own language.
Martin H. Fischer

Spanish is the language for lovers, Italian for singers, French for diplomats, German for horses, and English for geese.
Spanish Proverb

In language, the ignorant have prescribed laws to the learned.
Richard Duppa

Las Vegas


What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.
Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority

Last Words


Let us cross over the river and sit under the shade of the trees.
T. J. "Stonewall" Jackson, last words, 1863.

Late


Good that comes too late is good as nothing.
H. G. Bohn

A little too late is much too late.
German Proverb

Five minutes! Zounds! I have been five minutes too late all my life-time!
Hannah Cowley

Do not shorten the morning by getting up late; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Laughter


But let me laugh awhile, I've mickle time to grieve.
John Keats

Life does not cease to be funny when people die, any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
George Bernard Shaw

I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me to be the most civilised music in the world.
Peter Ustinov

If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.
Joseph Addison

In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal and so ill-bred, as audible laughter.
Lord Chesterfield

Sayings designed to raise a laugh are generally untrue and never complimentary. Laughter is never far removed from derision.
Quintilian

Laughter does not seem to be a sin, but it leads to sin.
St. John Chrysostom

He who laughs at everything is as big a fool as he who weeps at everything.
Baltasar Gracián

In laughter there is always a kind of joyousness that is incompatible with contempt or indignation.
Voltaire

I am neither of a melancholy nor a cynical disposition, and am as willing and as apt to be pleased as anybody; but I am sure that, since I have had the full use of my reason, nobody has ever heard me laugh.
Lord Chesterfield

He who laugheth too much hath the nature of a fool; he that laugheth not at all hath the nature of an old cat.
Thomas Fuller

That frolic which shakes one man with laughter will convulse another with indignation.
Samuel Johnson

No one is sadder than the man who laughs too much.
Jean Paul Richter

Man alone suffers so excruciatingly in the world that he was compelled to invent laughter.
F. W. Nietzsche

He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
Rafael Sabatini

One who is always laughing is a fool; and one who never laughs a knave.
Spanish Proverb

Laughter And Tears


I laugh at everything, for fear of being obliged to weep.
Caron de Beaumarchais

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has troubles enough of its own.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.
Luke 6:25

Law


When I came back to Dublin I was court-martialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in by absence.
Brendan Behan

Justice delayed is justice denied.
William Ewart Gladstone

This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Courtroom, n. A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with betting odds in favor of Judas.
H. L. Mencken

The people can change Congress but only God can change the Supreme Court.
George W. Norris

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
Robert Frost

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
Adam Smith

I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.
Michel Eyquem, seigneur de Montaigne

It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judiciary to say what the law is, not what the law should be.
Author unidentified

[Whenever] the offense inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigor of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind.
Edward Gibbon

[The] operation of the wisest laws is imperfect and precarious. They seldom inspire virtue, they cannot always restrain vice.
Edward Gibbon

There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.
Alexis de Tocqueville

But the wisdom and authority of the legislator are seldom victorious in a contest with the vigilant dexterity of private interest.
Edward Gibbon

Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made.
Otto von Bismarck

[It] is the interest as well as duty of a sovereign to maintain the authority of the laws.
Edward Gibbon

A Locrian, who proposed any new law, stood forth in the assembly of the people with a cord round his neck, and if the law was rejected, the innovator was instantly strangled.
Edward Gibbon

A jurisdiction thus vague and arbitrary was exposed to the most dangerous abuse: the substance, as well as the form, of justice were often sacrificed to the prejudices of virtue, the bias of laudable affection, and the grosser seductions of interest or resentment.
Edward Gibbon

With the utmost deference for these excellent civilians, I cannot but consider this confusion of the judicial and legislative authority as a very perilous constitutional precedent.
Rev. H. H. Milman

The science of the laws is the slow growth of time and experience.
Edward Gibbon

The books of jurisprudence were interesting to few, and entertaining to none: their value was connected with present use, and they sunk forever as soon as that use was superseded by the innovations of fashion, superior merit, or public authority.
Edward Gibbon

Whatever is secret must be doubtful, and our natural horror of vice may be abused as an engine of tyranny.
Attributed by Gibbon to Montesquieu

A sentence of death and infamy was often founded on the slight and suspicious evidence of a child or a servant: the guilt [of the defendant] was presumed by the judges [due to the nature of the charge], and paederasty became the crime of those to whom no crime could be imputed.
Edward Gibbon

The discretion of the judge is the first engine of tyranny.
Edward Gibbon

But a law, however venerable be the sanction, cannot suddenly transform the temper of the times.
Edward Gibbon

[A] thousand quarrels must arise under a law, and among men, whose sole umpire [is] the sword.
Edward Gibbon

Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.
Bertrand Russell

The law functions as formal embodiment of a moral code, not as free-standing substitute for it.
Mark Steyn

To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.
Martin Luther King Jr.

Others are hardened, obstinate, stiff-necked, rebel-hearted; these must be affrighted by the law, by examples of God's wrath: as the fires of Elijah, the deluge, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the downfall of Jerusalem.
Martin Luther

People crushed by law, have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous.
Edmund Burke

In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.
Abigail Adams

We must not make a scarecrow of the law,
Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,
And let it keep one shape, till custom make it
Their perch and not their terror.
Shakespeare

It is the function of a judge not to make but to declare the law, according to the golden mete-wand of the law and not by the crooked cord of discretion.
Edmund Burke

Written laws are like spiders' webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.
Anacharsis

Wherever Law ends,
Tyranny begins.
John Locke

The strange American ardor for passing laws, the insane belief in regulation and punishment, plays into the hands of the reformers, most of them quacks themselves. Their efforts, even when honest, seldom accomplish any appreciable good.
H. L. Mencken

One of the main purposes of laws in a democratic society is to put burdens upon intelligence and reduce it to impotence. Ostensibly, their aim is to penalize anti-social acts; actually their aim is to penalize heretical opinions.
H. L. Mencken

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.
Jonathan Swift

Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner.
H. L. Mencken

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
Oliver Goldsmith

There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity — the law of nature, and of nations.
Edmund Burke

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
Edmund Burke

Whatever is not forbidden is permitted.
Johann [Christoph] Friedrich von Schiller

How long soever it hath continued, if it be against reason, it is of no force in law.
Edward Coke

The more mandates and laws are enacted, the more there will be thieves and robbers.
Lao-Tsze

It makes no difference whether a good man has defrauded a bad man or a bad man defrauded a good man, or whether a good or a bad man has committed adultery: the law can look only to the amount of damage done.
Aristotle

Good law means good order.
Aristotle

It is best that laws should be so constructed as to leave as little as possible to the decision of those who judge.
Aristotle

The law follows custom.
Plautus

Law is nothing else but right reason, calling us imperiously to our duty, and prohibiting every violation of it.
Cicero

No law perfectly suits the convenience of every member of the community; the only consideration is, whether upon the whole it be profitable to the greater part.
Livy

What a slight foundation for virtue it is to be good only from fear of the law!
Seneca

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
Tacitus

Good men need no laws, and bad men are not made better by them.
Ascribed to Demonax of Cyprus

Lawmakers ought not to be law-breakers.
English Proverb

There is nothing more difficult to undertake, more uncertain to succeed, and more dangerous to manage, than to prescribe new laws. Because he who innovates in that manner has for his enemies all those who made any advantage by the old laws; and those who expect to benefit by the new will be but cool and lukewarm in his defence.
Niccolò Machiavelli

No man is so exquisitely honest or upright but he brings his actions and thoughts within compass and danger of the laws, and that ten times in his life might not lawfully be hanged.
Michel de Montaigne

That law may be set down as good which is certain in meaning, just in precept, convenient in execution, agreeable to the form of government, and productive of virtue in those that live under it.
Francis Bacon

Here the great art lies, to discern in which the and in what things persuasion only is to work.
John Milton

A good law is that which is needful for the good of the people, and withal perspicuous.
Thomas Hobbes

Unnecessary laws are not good laws, but traps for money.
Thomas Hobbes

The law, being made, is but words and paper swords of men.
James Harrington

Too many matters have been regulated by laws, which nature, long custom and general consent ought only to have governed.
William Petty

No written laws can be so plain, so pure,
But wit may gloss and malice may obscure.
John Dryden

Law cannot persuade where it cannot punish.
Thomas Fuller

Much law, but little justice.
Thomas Fuller

The more laws, the more offenders.
Thomas Fuller

Laws too gentle are seldom obeyed; too severe, seldom executed.
Benjamin Franklin

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket.
Charles Macklin

Just to the windward of the law.
Charles Churchill

Laws should be made by legislators, not by judges.
C. B. Beccaria

Laws are generally nets of such a texture as the little creep through, the great break through, and the middle-sized alone are entangled in.
William Shenstone

Let all the laws be clear, uniform and precise: to interpret laws is almost always to corrupt them.
Voltaire

The law is to us precisely what I am in my barnyard, a bridle and check to prevent the strong and greedy from oppressing the timid and weak.
St. John de Crèvecoeur

The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.
Samuel Johnson

Ignorance of the law is no excuse in any country. If it were, the laws would lose their effect, because it can be always pretended.
Thomas Jefferson

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow.
Alexander Hamilton

When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces upon me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool.
Sydney Smith

Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding, and should therefore be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties, which may make anything mean everything or nothing, at pleasure.
Thomas Jefferson

Good men must not obey the laws too well.
R. W. Emerson

The law is for the protection of the weak more than the strong.
Mr. Justice Erle

We bury men when they are dead, but we try to embalm the dead body of laws, keeping the corpse in sight long after the vitality has gone. It usually takes a hundred years to make a law; and then, after it has done its work, it usually takes a hundred years to get rid of it.
H. W. Beecher

No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober.
Samuel Smiles

Laws never would be improved if there were not numerous persons whose moral sentiments are better than the existing laws.
J. S. Mill

I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.
U. S. Grant

We know how laws are made — we who have been behind the scenes. They are the products of selfishness, deception and party prejudice. True justice is not in them, and cannot be in them.
Lyof N. Tolstoy

It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best laws, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.
Theodore Roosevelt

While there still is doubt, while opposite convictions still keep a battlefront against each other, the time for law has not come.
O. W. Holmes II

The more laws the less justice.
German Proverb

Law And Order


Rape and violence occur not because of patriarchal conditioning but because of the opposite, a breakdown of social controls.
Camille Paglia

Law-Abiding


Fear God, and offend not the prince nor his laws,
And keep thyself out of the magistrate's claws.
Thomas Tusser

The observance of the law is the greatest solvent of public ills.
Calvin Coolidge

It is the duty of a citizen not only to observe the law but to let it be known that he is opposed to its violation.
Calvin Coolidge

Lawsuit


To go to law is for two persons to kindle a fire, at their own cost, to warm others and singe themselves to cinders.
Owen Felltham

If you've a good case, try to compromise; if a bad one, take it into court.
French Proverb

Lawyer


No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth.
Jean Giraudoux

I don't want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do; I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do.
J. Pierpont Morgan

Every Federal Judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizen has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mahjong factory, we'd all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by half.
H. L. Mencken

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.
Benjamin Franklin

A man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client.
Author unidentified

Lawyers use the law as shoemakers use leather; rubbing it, pressing it, and stretching it with their teeth, all to the end of making it fit their purposes.
Ascribed to Louis XII of France

Adversaries … in law
Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends.
Shakespeare

A man may as well open an oyster without a knife as a lawyer's mouth without a fee.
Barten Holyday

Your pettifoggers damn their souls,
To share with knaves in cheating fools.
Samuel Butler

A man without money needs no more fear a crowd of lawyers than a crowd of pickpockets.
William Wycherley

Of lawyers and physicians I shall say nothing, because this country [Pennsylvania in the late 17th century] is very peaceable and healthy. Long may it so continue, and never have occasion for the tongue of the one nor the pen of the other, both equally destructive of men's estates and lives.
Gabriel Thomas

God has not given laws to make out of right wrong, and out of wrong right, as the unchristianlike lawyers do, who study law only for the sake of gain and profit.
Martin Luther

Sometimes a man who deserves to be looked down upon because he is a fool is despised only because he is a lawyer.
C. L. de Montesquieu

Laws are best explained, interpreted and applied by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding and eluding them.
Jonathan Swift

God works wonders now and then;
Behold! a lawyer, an honest man.
Benjamin Franklin

The fell [cruel, savage] attorney prowls for prey.
Samuel Johnson

I would be loth to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.
Samuel Johnson

Yes, Jamie, he was a bad man, but he might have been worse; he was an Irishman, but he might have been a Scotchman; he was a priest, but he might have been a lawyer.
Samuel Parr

I question not but there are many attorneys born with open and honest hearts: but I know not one that has had the least practice who is not selfish, trickish, and disingenuous.
William Shenstone

A lawyer's opinion is worth nothing unless paid for.
English Proverb

By law's dark by-ways he had stored his mind
With wicked knowledge how to cheat mankind.
George Crabbe

Who calls a lawyer rogue, may find, too late,
On one of these depends his whole estate.
George Crabbe

I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.
John Keats

He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.
Charles Lamb

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.
H. G. Bohn

I will not counsel or maintain any suit or proceeding which shall appear to me to be unjust, nor any defense except such as I believe to be honestly debatable under the law of the land.
Model oath for candidates for admission to the bar

A lawyer has no business with the justice or injustice of the cause which he undertakes unless his client asks his opinion, and then he is bound to give it honestly. The justice or injustice of the cause is to be decided by the judge.
Samuel Johnson

Laziness


Laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him.
Author unidentified

A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest —
and poverty will come on you like a bandit
and scarcity like an armed man.
Proverbs 6:10,11

Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth.
Proverbs 10:4

That indolent but agreeable condition of doing nothing.
Pliny the Younger

I understand there's a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons and old movies. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy.
Anthony Bourdain

Laziness is often mistaken for patience.
French Proverb

It is always holiday to the lazy. (Ignavis semper feriae sunt.)
Latin Proverb

Lazy youth makes lousy age.
Scottish Proverb

Leader


All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.
Eric Hoffer

You have to learn to be a follower before you become a leader.
Charlie Munger

Leadership


It is hard to look up to a leader who keeps his ear to the ground.
James H. Boren

It is frequently a misfortune to have very brilliant men in charge of affairs; they expect too much of ordinary men.
Thucydides

There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.
Alexandre Ledru-Rollin

He who thinks he leads, and has no one following him is only taking a walk.
Author unidentified

"Cheshire-Puss," she began, "would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't care much where —" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
Lewis Carroll

When I want to know what France thinks, I ask myself.
Charles de Gaulle

I must follow them. I am their leader.
Andrew Bonar Law

You have lost a useful commander, and you have made a very wretched emperor.
Saturninus, when his troops put him forward as a contender to the Roman Emperor.

For my part, I would rather be the chief man in this [poor] village than the second man in Rome.
Julius Caesar

The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes.
Tony Blair

If human progress had been merely a matter of leadership we should be in Utopia today.
Thomas B. Reed

I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too; and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm.
Elizabeth I

Lean


Men of a lean habit of body are commonly a long time healthy, having good appetites and strong stomachs for digestion.
Tobias Venner

As the lean people are the most active, unquiet, and ambitious, they everywhere govern the world, and may certainly oppress their antagonists whenever they please.
David Hume

A goose, a woman, and a goat are bad things lean.
Portuguese Proverb

Learning


The easily embarrassed are unable to learn.
Author unidentified

Such is often the folly of men, whom nature has enabled to obtain skill and knowledge, on terms so easy, that they have no sense of the value of the acquisition; they are qualified to make such speedy progress in learning, that they think themselves at liberty to loiter in the way, and by turning aside after every new object, lose the race, like Atalanta, to slower competitors, who press diligently forward, and whose force is directed to a single point.
Samuel Johnson

What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.
Henry Brooks Adams

The mind is slow to unlearn what it has been long in learning.
Seneca

Men learn while they teach. (Homines, dum docent, discunt.)
Seneca

A man without learning grows old like an ox; his flesh grows, but not his wisdom.
The Dhammapada

A man of learning is never bored.
Jean Paul Richter

Bees are sometimes drowned (or suffocated) in the honey which they collect. So some writers are lost in their collected learning.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.
George Bernard Shaw

Learning without wisdom is a load of books on an ass's back.
Japanese Proverb

Much learning, much sorrow.
John Clarke

A handful of good life is better than a bushel of learning.
George Herbert

The love of learning and the love of money rarely meet.
George Herbert

Learning makes the wise wiser and the fool more foolish.
John Ray

Learning makes a good man better, and an ill man worse.
Thomas Fuller

Of learned fools I have seen ten times ten; of unlearned wise men, I have seen a hundred.
Benjamin Franklin

Much learning shows how little mortals know.
Edward Young

Learning is acquired by reading books; but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading men, and studying all the various editions of them.
Lord Chesterfield

When we are young we learn much because we are universally ignorant; we observe everything because everything is new.
Samuel Johnson

Skill comes so slow, and life so fast doth fly,
We learn so little and forget so much.
John Davies

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring.
Ernest Hemingway

Left Wing


The left-wing movement … has pretty well killed intelligent criticism in this country. Books are judged not by their worth as works of art, but by their political content.
H. L. Mencken

Legislation


No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are rare in the history of the world.
H. D. Thoreau

One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.
Thomas B. Reed

Blundering experiments in legislation cannot be simply abandoned if they do not work well; even if they are set aside, they leave their effects behind; and they create vested interests which make it difficult to set them aside.
W. G. Sumner

Legislator


It has been sagaciously conjectured, that the artful legislator indulged the stubborn prejudices of his countrymen.
Edward Gibbon

Leisure


It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents.
H. D. Thoreau

The advantage of leisure is mainly that we may have the power of choosing our own work, not certainly that it confers any privilege of idleness.
John Lubbock (Lord Avebury)

Better give a shilling than lend and lose half a crown.
Thomas Fuller

Lending


If you lend you either lose the money or gain an enemy.
Albanian Proverb

Money lent to a friend must be recovered from an enemy.
German Proverb

It is better to give one lire than to lend twenty.
Italian Proverb

Never lend a horse, a razor, or your wife.
Polish Proverb

If you have had enough of your friend, lend him some money.
Russian Proverb

Lenin


Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.
Winston Churchill

Lent


Marry in Lent, and you'll live to repent.
English Proverb

Leonardo da Vinci


The Medici created and destroyed me.
Leonardo da Vinci

Lese-Majesty


The slander of majesty shall not be punished, for if it proceed from levity it is to be despised; if from madness, to be pitied; if from malice, forgiven.
Codex Theodosianus

Letter


A short letter to a distant friend is, in my opinion, an insult like that of a slight bow or cursory salutation; — a proof of unwillingness to do much, even where there is a necessity of doing something.
Samuel Johnson

Levee


There is nothing but that frail breastwork of earth between the people and destruction.
Mark Twain

Lexicographer


It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward.

Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries; whom mankind have considered, not as the pupil, but the slave of science, the pioneer of literature, doomed only to remove rubbish and clear obstructions from the paths of Learning and Genius, who press forward to conquest and glory, without bestowing a smile on the humble drudge that facilitates their progress. Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach and even this negative recompense has been yet granted to very few.

Samuel Johnson

Lexicographer, n. A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.
Samuel Johnson

But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer.
Samuel Johnson

Liar


The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilised being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company.
Oscar Wilde

A liar's way leads to disgrace, and his shame is ever with him.
Ecclesiasticus 20:26

A liar is far worse, and does greater mischief, than a murderer on the highway; for a liar and false teacher deceives people, seduces souls, and destroys them under the color of God's Word.
Martin Luther

A liar is always lavish of oaths.
Pierre Corneille

The greatest fools are the greatest liars.
Lord Chesterfield

Even a liar tells a hundred truths to one lie; he has to, to make the lie good for anything.
H. W. Beecher

The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society.
Oscar Wilde

The wretch that often has deceiv’d,
Though truth he speaks, is ne’er believ’d.

(Quicunque turpi fraude semel innotuit,
Etiamsi verum dicit, amittit fidem
.)

Phaedrus

The liar, and only the liar, is invariably and universally despised, abandoned, and disowned: he has no domestick consolations, which he can oppose to the censure of mankind; he can retire to no fraternity, where his crimes may stand in the place of virtues; but is given up to the hisses of the multitude, without friend and without apologist.
Samuel Johnson

Liberal


Not being a liberal, I have very little grasp of things that I know nothing about.
P. J. O'Rourke

Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.
William F. Buckley, Jr.

I consider it a great homage to public opinion to find every scoundrel nowadays professing himself a liberal.
Benjamin Disraeli

Liberalism


So much of contemporary liberalism seems to be never having grown up.
Jay Nordlinger

[Liberalism] is hostile to law [and has a preference for] policy without law.
Theodore Lowi

The search for a moral equivalent of war continues to define American liberalism to this day.
Jonah Goldberg

You can't go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal.
Robert Downey Jr.

The tone and tendency of liberalism … is to attack the institutions of the country under the name of reform and to make war on the manners and customs of the people under the pretext of progress.
Benjamin Disraeli

Liberality


Liberality is not giving much but giving wisely.
Author unidentified

Libertarianism And Liberalism


[Libertarianism] is about curbing state power to let people be and do what they want. Liberalism is about using state power to make people do and be what liberals want. And that makes all the difference in the world.
Jonah Goldberg

Liberty


They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin

The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.
Edmund Burke

The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.
Alexis de Tocqueville

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Thomas Jefferson, et al.

There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.
Margaret Thatcher

There's only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
P. J. O'Rourke

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
Charles Austin Beard

It is in the township that the strength of free peoples resides. Municipal institutions are for liberty what primary schools are for science; they place it within reach of the people … Without municipal institutions, a nation is able to give itself a free government, but it lacks the spirit of liberty.
Alexis de Tocqueville

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Thomas Jefferson

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Patrick Henry

Liberty is, to the lowest rank of every nation, little more than the choice of working or starving; and this choice is, I suppose, equally allowed in every country.
Samuel Johnson

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.
Edmund Burke

Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.
Edmund Burke

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
Lord Acton

But the true danger is, when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.
Edmund Burke

For liberty is a good to be improved, and not an evil to be lessened.
Edmund Burke

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
Edmund Burke

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
Edmund Burke

It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty.
Francis Bacon

Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open.
Clive Bell

Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.
Isaiah Berlin

It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty — and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.
H. L. Mencken

Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
H. L. Mencken

They [classical Liberals] themselves, as a practical matter, advocate only certain narrow kinds of liberty — liberty, that is, for the persons they happen to favor. The rights of other persons do not seem to interest them.
H. L. Mencken

I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say.
H. L. Mencken

The freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.
George Mason

The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.
John Philpot Curran

Liberty too must be limited in order to be possessed.
Edmund Burke

A love of liberty is planted by nature in the breasts of all men.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus

No favor produces less permanent gratitude than the gift of liberty, especially among people who are ready to make a bad use of it.
Livy

Only in states in which the power of the people is supreme has liberty any abode.
Cicero

Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own.
Shakespeare

Liberty is the power that we have over ourselves.
Hugo Grotius

Lean liberty is better than fat slavery.
John Ray

In those few places where men enjoy what they call liberty, it is continually in a tottering situation, and makes greater and greater strides to that fault of despotism which at last swallows up every species of government.
Edmund Burke

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.
J. J. Rousseau

Liberty is not a fruit that grows in all climates, and so it is not within the reach of all people.
J. J. Rousseau

They make a rout about universal liberty without considering that all that is to be valued, or indeed can be enjoyed by individuals, is private liberty. Political liberty is good only so far as it produces private liberty.
Samuel Johnson

'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume;
And we are weeds without it.
William Cowper

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
Edmund Burke

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.
Thomas Jefferson

O Liberty! what crimes are committed in thy name!
Ascribed to Mme. Roland, on her way to the guillotine

God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it.
Daniel Webster

While I trust that liberty and free institutions, as we have experienced them, may ultimately spread over the globe, I am by no means sure that all people are fit for them; nor am I desirous of imposing or forcing our peculiar forms upon any other nation that does not wish to embrace them.
Daniel Webster

The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited: he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.
J. S. Mill

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.
R. W. Emerson

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Abraham Lincoln

If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?
Herbert Spencer

Mankind is tired of liberty.
Benito Mussolini

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Mr. Justice Louis D. Brandeis

Libius Severus


History has scarcely deigned to notice [Libius Severus's] birth, his elevation, his character, or his death.
Edward Gibbon

Library


Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
Saul Bellow

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.
Samuel Johnson

What a sad want I am in of libraries, of books to gather facts from! Why is there not a Majesty's library in every county town? There is a Majesty's jail and gallows in every one.
Thomas Carlyle

Burn the libraries, for all their value is in the Koran.
The Caliph Omar, on the fall of Alexandria

To desire to have many books, and never to use them, is like a child that will have a candle burning by him all the while he is asleep.
Henry Peacham

That place that does contain
My books, the best companions, is to me
A glorious court, where hourly I converse
With the old sages and philosophers;
And sometimes, for variety, I confer
With kings and emperors, and weight their counsels.
John Fletcher and Philip Massinger

The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Thomas Carlyle

A man's library is a sort of harem, and I observe that tender readers have a great pudency in showing their books to a stranger.
R. W. Emerson

Lie


When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies.
Shakespeare

Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie.
Rudyard Kipling

The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.
Elena Gorokhova

Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no fibs.
Oliver Goldsmith

One sometimes sees more clearly in the man who lies than in the man who tells the truth. Truth, like the light, blinds. Lying, on the other hand, is a beautiful twilight, which gives to each object its value.
Albert Camus (Attributed)

From all that terror teaches,
From lies of tongue and pen,
From all the easy speeches
That comfort cruel men,
From sale and profanation
Of honour and the sword,
From sleep and from damnation,
Deliver us, good Lord!
G. K. Chesterton

Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.
George Orwell

Life


A man said to the Universe, "Sir, I exist!"

"However," replied the Universe, "the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."

Stephen Crane

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.
H. L. Mencken

Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness.
André Maurois

[The Forgotten Man] is the clean, quiet, virtuous domestic citizen who pays his debts and his taxes and is never heard of out of his little circle. … [He] works and votes — generally he prays — but his chief business in life is to pay.
William Graham Sumner

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost

There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.
Alfred Korzybski

Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker is sorry.
Mark Twain

Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.
Thomas La Mance

I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

The first half of our life is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.
Clarence Darrow

The game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as playing a poor hand well.
H. T. Leslie

What the meaning of human life may be I don't know; I incline to suspect that it has none.
H. L. Mencken

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.
Elbert Hubbard

Do not despair of life. You have no doubt force enough to overcome your obstacles. Think of the fox prowling through wood and field in a winter night for something to satisfy his hunger. Notwithstanding cold and hounds and traps, his race survives. I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide.
Henry David Thoreau

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

And remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
Author unidentified

What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.
Nietzsche

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants and the other is getting it.
Oscar Wilde

Never abandon life. There is a way out of everything except death.
Winston Churchill

Fancy living in one of these streets, never seeing anything beautiful, never eating anything savoury, never saying anything clever!
Winston Churchill, when touring the slums

We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed.
Attributed to Thomas Fuller

The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.
Eric Hoffer

Men of thought seldom work well together, whereas between men of action there is usually an easy camaraderie.
Eric Hoffer

How little can we foresee the consequences either of wise or unwise action, of virtue or of malice! Without this measureless and perpetual uncertainty the drama of human life would be destroyed.
Winston Churchill

Men work simply in order to escape the depressing agony of contemplating life — that their work, like their play, is a mumbo-jumbo that serves them by permitting them to escape from reality.
H. L. Mencken

Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband's clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible.
H. L. Mencken

Life is short, but death lasts forever.
Author unidentified

How little it takes to make life unbearable … A pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
H. L. Mencken

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
Oscar Wilde

Life is a hideous thing.
H. P. Lovecraft

At the door of life, by the gate of breath,
There are worse things waiting for men than death.
Algernon Charles Swinburne

Don't believe the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
R. J. Burdette

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
Mark Twain

Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?
Rose Kennedy

I value kindness to human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and old men and women warmer in the winter, and happier in the summer.
Brendan Behan

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Søren Kierkegaard

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
Douglas Adams

Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out — it's the grain of sand in your shoe.
Robert Service

A bad habit never disappears miraculously; it's an undo-it-yourself project.
Abigail Van Buren

Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.
George Santayana

Music is essentially useless, as life is.
George Santayana

If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.
Tallulah Bankhead

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
Robert Frost

I think you should live your life so that the maximum number of people will attend your funeral.
Scott Adams

The Europeans … are less unhappy than we, but they are not happy. Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.
Samuel Johnson, Rasselas

[All] of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon — instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.
Dale Carnegie

If thou wouldst live long, live well;
For folly and wickedness shorten life.
Benjamin Franklin

The unexamined life is not worth living.
Socrates

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And — which is more — you'll be a Man, my son!
Rudyard Kipling

You can never begin to live
Until you dare to die.
Henry van Dyke

A stout heart, a clear conscience, and never despair.
John Quincy Adams

Life is subject to change without notice.
Author unidentified

Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.
Benjamin Franklin

You thought it was hard? If kindergarten is busting your ass, I got some bad news for you about the rest of life.
Samuel Halpern

No, you can't go getting mad at people because they're shitty. Life will get mad at them, don't worry.
Samuel Halpern

Just worry about living, dying is the easy part.
Samuel Halpern

Life is pain … Anyone who says differently is selling something.
William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all.
William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

Wish not so much to live long as to live well.
Author unidentified

The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men.
Henry David Thoreau

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.
Douglas Adams

Don't be so hard on yourself; don't put pressure on yourself; life is just a chain of experiments and results … you'll be perfect when you're dead.
Dan Harmon

Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
National Lampoon's Animal House movie

Life is short. Why make it any shorter by not taking care of yourself?
Author unidentified

So large a part of human life passes in a state contrary to our natural desires that one of the principal topics of moral instruction is the art of bearing calamities. And such is the certainty of evil that it is the duty of every man to furnish his mind with those principles that may enable him to act under it with decency and propriety.
Samuel Johnson

I long ago come [sic] to the conclusion that all life is six to five against.
Damon Runyon

The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.
Rabindranath Tagore

There is a big difference between thinking … "This is a bad chapter" and "This is the last chapter" [of one's life].
Dr. Stephen Viars

Yet hope not Life from Grief or Danger free,
Nor think the Doom of Man revers’d for thee.
Samuel Johnson

Tomorrow is promised to no man.
Author unidentified

When I survey my past life, I discover nothing but a barren waste of time with some disorders of the body, and disturbances of the mind very near to madness.
Samuel Johnson

In our sad condition, our only consolation is the expectation of another life. Here below all is incomprehensible.
Martin Luther

What is the prime of life? May it not be defined as a period of about twenty years in a woman's life, and thirty in a man's?
Plato

We rarely find anyone who can say he has lived a happy life, and who, content with his life, can retire from the world like a satisfied guest.
Horace

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares;
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain;
My crop of corn is but a field of tares;
And all my good is but vain hope of gain:
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun;
And now I live, and now my life is done.
Chidiock Tichborne

You are, my Lord, but just entering into the world; I am going out of it. I have played long enough to be heartily tired of the drama. Whether I have acted my part in it well or ill, posterity will judge with more candour than I, or than the present age, with our present passions, can possibly pretend to. For my part, I quit it without a sigh, and submit to the sovereign order without murmuring.
Edmund Burke

The Answer to the Great Question Of … Life, the Universe and Everything … [is] Forty-two.
Douglas Adams

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Shakespeare

Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.
Samuel Johnson

Life, in which nothing has been done or suffered to distinguish one day from another, is to him that has passed it, as if it had never been, except that he is conscious how ill he has husbanded the great deposit of his Creator.
Samuel Johnson

Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou liv’st
Live well; how long or short permit to Heaven.
John Milton

Life is an incurable disease.
Abraham Cowley

It is natural for every man uninstructed to murmur at his condition, because, in the general infelicity of life, he feels his own miseries, without knowing that they are common to all the rest of the species.
Samuel Johnson

There are but three events in a man’s life: birth, life and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.
Jean de La Bruyère

Do not men die fast enough without being destroyed by each other? Can any man be insensible of the brevity of life? and can he who knows it, think life too long?
François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon

Thus, not only in the slumber of sloth, but in the dissipation of ill-directed industry, is the shortness of life generally forgotten.
Samuel Johnson

Few and evil have the days of the years of my life been.
Genesis 47:9 (KJV)

Life is a jest; and all things show it.
I thought so once; but now I know it.
John Gay

Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator.
H. L. Mencken

Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.
Psalms 90:10

To avoid illness eat less: to have a long life worry less.
Chinese Proverb

Men deal with life, as children with their play,
Who first misuse, then cast their toys away.
William Cowper

A little while and I will be gone from among you, whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we came, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
Crowfoot

That's essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.
Woody Allen

The trials of living and the pangs of disease make even the short span of life too long.
Herodotus

Life is long to the miserable, but short to the happy.
Publilius Syrus

Nature has given us life at interest like money, with no day fixed for repayment.
Cicero

We are always beginning to live, but we are never living.
Marcus Manilius

Life, if well used, is long enough.
Seneca

Nature has given man nothing better than the shortness of his life.
Pliny the Elder

Blessed is he that hath a short life.
St. Clement

The utmost span of a man's life is a hundred years. Half of it is spent in night, and of the rest half is lost by childhood and old age. Work, grief, longing and illness make up what remains.
Bhartrihari

My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and they come to an end without hope.
Job 7:6

This life is fickle, frail and vain.
Anonymous

The world's a bubble, and the life of man
Less than a span;
In his conception wretched, from the womb
So to the tomb;
Curst from the cradle, and brought up to years
With cares and fears.
Who then to frail mortality shall trust,
But limns the water, or but writes in dust.
Francis Bacon

The longer life, the greater grief.
Randle Cotcrave

When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat;
Yet, fooled with hope, men favor the deceit.
John Dryden

Why are we so fond of a life that begins with a cry and ends with groan?
Mary, Countess of Warwick, on her deathbed

When life is miserable it is painful to endure it;
when it is happy it is horrible to lose it.
Jean de la Bruyère

Who breathes must suffer, and who thinks must mourn;
And he alone is blessed who ne'er was born.
Matthew Prior

Reflect that life, like every other blessing,
Derives its value from its use alone.
Samuel Johnson

Life is tedious.
Samuel Johnson

What is the life of man? Is it not to shift from side to side from sorrow to sorrow — to button up one cause of vexation and unbutton another?
Laurence Sterne

Philosophers there are who try to make themselves believe that this life is happy; but they believe it only while they are saying it, and never yet produced conviction in a single mind.
Samuel Johnson

A painful passage o'er a restless flood,
A vain pursuit of fugitive false good,
A sense of fancied bliss and heartfelt care,
Closing at last in darkness and despair.
William Cowper

A useless life is an early death.
J. W. Goethe

Life to the great majority is only a constant struggle for mere existence, with the certainty of losing it at last.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Short as life is, some find it long enough to outlive their characters, their constitutions and their estates.
C. C. Colton

Between two worlds, life hovers like a star
'Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon's verge,
How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be!
Byron

Do you desire to master the art of prolonging life? Rather apply yourself to the art of enduring it.
Ernst von Feuchtersleben

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
Christina Rossetti

To procure life, to obtain a mate, and to rear offspring: such is the real business of life.
W. Winwood Reade

Life is one long process of getting tired.
Samuel Butler

When a man says he has exhausted life one always knows life has exhausted him.
Oscar Wilde

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
George Santayana

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.
George Bernard Shaw

Life is simply one damned thing after another.
Ascribed to Frank Ward O'Malley

Life is like a fire; it begins in smoke, and ends in ashes.
Arab Proverb

The life of man is like a long journey with a heavy load on the back.
Japanese Proverb

Life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.
Ernest Hemingway

I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me.
John Keats

He that embarks in the voyage of life, will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind, than the strokes of the oar; and many founder in the passage, while they lie waiting for the gale that is to waft them to their wish.
Samuel Johnson

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Life And Death


Thou canst not judge the life of man until death hath ended it.
Sophocles

The child was born, and cried;
Became a man, after fell sick, and died.
Anonymous

Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Shakespeare

Our lives are but our marches to the grave.
John Fletcher

Let one imagine a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death, some of whom, being beheaded every day in the sight of the others, those who remain see their own condition in that of their fellows, and, regarding each other with grief, and without hope, await their turn: this is a picture of the condition of men.
Blaise Pascal

Teach me to live that I may dread
The grave as little as my bed.
Thomas Ken

Born in throes, 'tis fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs.
Herman Melville

We see all this [the uncertainty of life and unexpected death], and yet, instead of living, let year glide after year in preparations to live.
Samuel Johnson

The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.
Thomas Carlyle

I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.
John Keats

Every day above earth is a good day.
Ernest Hemingway

Linguist


Men who can speak a number of different tongues are notorious for having little to say in any of them.
H. R. Huse

Lion


Do not pluck the beard of a dead lion.
Martial

Listening


No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.
Mignon McLaughlin

A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something.
Wilson Mizner

Literature


When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder
That such trivial people should muse and thunder
In such a lovely language.
D. H. Lawrence

The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.
Edmund Wilson

H. L. Mencken suffers from the hallucination that he is H. L. Mencken — there is no cure for a disease of that magnitude.
Maxwell Bodenheim

Nobody can read Freud without realizing that he was the scientific equivalent of another nuisance, George Bernard Shaw.
Robert Maynard Hutchins

The trouble with the publishing business is that too many people who have half a mind to write a book do so.
William Targ

No author is a man of genius to his publisher.
Heinrich Heine

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
George Bernard Shaw

When a thing has been said and well said, have no scruple; take it and copy it.
Anatole France

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
William Faulkner

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.
Samuel Johnson

When told not to end a sentence with a preposition, Churchill replied, "This is nonsense up with which I will not put."
Winston Churchill

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Mark Twain

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.
Oscar Wilde

Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
Oscar Wilde

He that I am reading seems always to have the most force.
Michel Eyquem, seigneur de Montaigne

Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be happy to read them.
Saul Bellow

The only reward to be expected from literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.
Voltaire

Thieves cannot destroy it [literature], and it is improved by time; it is the only monument that is proof against death.
Martial

It is after public passion has subsided that our most celebrated writers have produced their chef d'oeuvres; as it is after the eruption of a volcano that the land in its vicinity is the most fertile.
Stanislaus Leszcynski

When literature is the sole business of life it becomes a drudgery; when we are able to resort to it only at certain hours it is a charming relaxation.
Samuel Rogers

Literature, American


The curious have observed that the progress of humane literature (like the sun) is from the East to the West; thus has it traveled thro Asia and Europe, and now is arrived at the eastern shore of America.
Nathaniel Ames

Little


Little strokes fell great oaks. (Earlier variation by John Lyly: Many strokes overthrow the tallest oak.)
John Ray

Liverpool


Liverpool, though not very delightful as a place of residence, is a most convenient and admirable point to get away from.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Living


It matters not how long you live, but how well.
Publilius Syrus

They lived long that have lived well.
Thomas Wilson

Where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live.
Thomas Browne

They seldom live well who think they shall live long.
Thomas Fuller

The men who start out with the notion that the world owes them a living generally find that the world pays its debt in the penitentiary or the poorhouse.
W. G. Sumner

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense.
Thomas Carlyle

Lloyd George


He [Lloyd George] did not seem to care which way he travelled providing he was in the driver's seat.
Lord Beaverbrook

Location


I can't say as ever I was lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.
Daniel Boone

Logic


The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.
Eric Hoffer

Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.
Lord Dunsany

London


When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.
Samuel Johnson

The different departments of life are jumbled together. … Actuated by the demons of profligacy and licentiousness, they are seen everywhere rambling, riding, rolling, rushing, justling, mixing, bouncing, cracking, and crashing, in one vile ferment of stupidity and corruption.
Tobias Smollett, of Charing Cross in the 18th century

London is a modern Babylon.
Benjamin Disraeli

There is fiercer crowded misery
In garret-toil and London loneliness
Than in cruel islands 'mid the far-off sea.
John Forster

In London we may suffer, but no one has any excuse dull.
John Lubbock

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.
Arthur Conan Doyle

London Times


If I to leave to remote some memorial of existing British civilization, I would prefer, not our docks, not our railways, not our public buildings, not even the palace in which we now hold our sittings; I would prefer a file of the Times newspaper.
E. G. Bulwer-Lytton

Loneliness


"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! — quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

Edgar Allan Poe

The surest sign of age is loneliness.
A. Bronson Alcott

Long Life


"Enlarge my life with multitude of days!"
In health, in sickness, thus the suppliant prays:
Hides from himself his state, and shuns to know
That life protracted is protracted woe.
Samuel Johnson

Longevity


He lives long that lives till all are weary of him.
H. G. Bohn

Look


You should have seen her face then. Gratitude? Lord, what do you want with words to express that? Words are only painted fire, a look is the fire itself. She gave that look, and carried it away to the treasury of heaven, where all things that are divine belong.
Mark Twain

Loquacity


Loquacious people seldom have much sense.
Baltasar Gracián

Lord Byron


Lord Byron is an exceedingly interesting person, and as such is it not to be regretted that he is a slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices, and as mad as the winds?
P. B. Shelley

I have a thorough aversion to his [Lord Byron’s] character, and a very moderate admiration of his genius; he is great in so little a way.
Charles Lamb

I never heard a single expression of fondness for him [Lord Byron] fall from the lips of any of those who knew him well.
T. B. Macaulay

Los Angeles


Los Angeles is like San Diego's older, uglier sister that has herpes.
Samuel Halpern

Love


People who throw kisses are hopelessly lazy.
Bob Hope

The greatest love is a mother's; then comes a dog's; then a sweetheart's.
Polish proverb

It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.
Agnes Repplier

If I'm such a legend, then why am I so lonely? Let me tell you, legends are all very well if you've got somebody around who loves you.
Judy Garland

The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Many a man has fallen in love with a girl in a light so dim he would not have chosen a suit by it.
Maurice Chevalier

Let there be spaces in your Togetherness.
Kahil Gibran

I never loved another person the way I loved myself.
Mae West

As soon as you cannot keep anything from a woman, you love her.
Paul Géraldy

Those who are faithless know the pleasures of love; it is the faithful who know love's tragedies.
Oscar Wilde

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
H. L. Mencken

The quarrels of lovers are the renewal of love.
Terence

The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her.
H. L. Mencken

The most disgusting cad in the world is the man who, on grounds of decorum and morality, avoids the game of love. He is one who puts his own ease and security above the most laudable of philanthropies.
H. L. Mencken

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness. But after that he begins to bunch them.
H. L. Mencken

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.
Oscar Wilde

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.
Oscar Wilde

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.
Samuel Johnson

It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.
Eric Hoffer

Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.
Peter Ustinov

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:13

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
Bertrand Russell

Then fly betimes, for only they
Conquer love that run away.
Thomas Carew

Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.
William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

If you would be loved, love and be lovable.
Benjamin Franklin

[What] some guys mean when they say "I love you" is what I mean when I say, "I love turkey."
Rabbi Daniel Lapin

Infatuation is effortless. Love takes work.
Chana Levitan

Love is the fart Of every heart;
It pains a man when ’tis kept close,
And others doth offend when ’tis let loose.
Sir John Suckling

You've been good to me, baby,
Better than I've been to myself.
O'Kelly Isley, Rudolph Isley, and Ronald Isley

For [passionate] love is strong as death; Jealousy is cruel as the grave.
Song of Solomon 8:6 (KJV)

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.
Shakespeare

The wounds invisible
That love’s keen arrows make.
Shakespeare

Love sought is good, but giv’n unsought is better.
Shakespeare

There is no disguise which can for long conceal love where it exists or simulate it where it does not.
La Rochefoucauld

Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
Julian Barnes

But say what you will, ’tis better to be left, than never to have been loved. To pass our youth in dull indifference, to refuse the sweets of life because they once must leave us, is as preposterous as to wish to have been born old, because we one day must be old.
William Congreve

Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.
1 Peter 4:8

He who doesn’t see his lover's faults as virtues is not in love.
J. W. Goethe

I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.
Samuel Butler

To live is like to love — all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.
Samuel Butler

Man desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love.
Adam Smith

Alas! the love of women! it is known
To be a lovely and a fearful thing!
Lord Byron

If this be not love, it is madness, and then it is pardonable.
William Congreve

I hold it true, whate'er befall,
I feel it when I sorrow most;
"Tis better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all.
Alfred Tennyson

It is with true love as with ghosts. Everyone talks of it, but few have ever seen it.
La Rochefoucauld

Better a small serving of vegetables with love than a fattened calf with hatred.
Proverbs 15:17

An old man in love is like a flower in Winter
Portuguese Proverb

It is easy for them who have never been loved to sneer at love.
Welsh Proverb

In their first passion women are in love with their lovers; in all others they are in love with love.
La Rochefoucauld

It is commonly a weak man who marries for love.
Samuel Johnson

Woman likes to believe that love can achieve anything. It is her peculiar superstition.
F. W. Nietzsche

Men always want to be a woman's first love — A women like to be a man's last romance.
Oscar Wilde

When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.
Oscar Wilde

Women in love are less ashamed than men.
They have less to be ashamed of.
Ambrose Bierce

Love and eggs are best when they are fresh.
Russian Proverb

The course of true love never did run smooth.
Shakespeare

Love, like man himself, dies of overeating much oftener than of hunger.
Jean Paul Richter

A man has choice of beginning love, but not to end it.
H. G. Bohn

Love is like war: you begin when you like and leave off when you can.
Spanish Proverb

Without good eating and drinking love grows cold.
Terence

When poverty comes in at doors, love leaps out at windows.
John Clarke

Love is a delightful day's journey. At the farther end kiss your companion and say fare-well.
Ambrose Bierce

At the touch of love every one becomes a poet.
Plato

Love blinds all men alike, both the reasonable and the foolish.
Menander

Even a god, falling in love, could not be wise.
Publilius Syrus

I do love; and it hath taught me to rhyme, and to be melancholy.
Shakespeare

Love is the tyrant of the heart; it darkens
Reason, confounds discretion; deaf to counsel,
It runs a headlong course to desperate madness.
John Ford

No man, at one time, can be wise, and love.
Robert Herrick

All the passions make us commit faults, but love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones.
La Rochefoucauld

When a man is really in love he looks insufferably silly.
John Vanbrugh

Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.
Anna Louise de Staël

Love is the state in which man sees things most decidedly as they are not.
F. W. Nietzsche

The heart that loves is always young.
Greek Proverb

It is more useful to be loved than to be venerated.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Love is perfidious.
Plautus

Love is a fiend, a fire, a heaven, a hell,
Where pleasure, pain, and sad repentance dwell.
Richard Barnfield

Oh, what a Heaven is love! Oh, what a Hell!
Thomas Dekker

Love and honor make poor companions.
Baltasar Gracián

I look upon love as a sort of hostile transaction, very necessary to keep the world going, but by no means a sinecure to the parties concerned.
Byron

True love always involves renunciation of one's personal comfort.
Lyof N. Tolstoy

I have noticed that there are times when every second woman likes you. Is love, then, a magnetism which we sometimes possess and exercise unconsciously, and sometimes do not possess?
George Moore

Love is only half an illusion; the lover, but not his love, is deceived.
George Santayana

We cannot permit love to run riot; we must build fences around it, as we do around pigs.
E. W. Howe

Love is like a well: a good thing to drink out of, but a bad thing to fall into.
Author unidentified

How miserable is the man who loves.
Plautus

In love, pain and pleasure are always at war.
Publilius Syrus

Though the beginning of love bring delight, the end bringeth destruction.
John Lyly

The sweets of love are mix'd with tears.
Robert Herrick

The rose is sweetest washed with morning dew,
And love is loveliest when embalmed in tears.
Walter Scott

He who falls in love has come to the end of happiness.
Japanese Proverb

Love conquers all. (Omnia vincit amor.)
Virgil

Love can do much, but money can do more.
Giovanni Torriano

Love demands all, and has a right to all.
Ludwig van Beethoven

It is hardly an argument against a man's general strength of character that he should be mastered by love. A fine constitution doesn't insure one against smallpox.
George Eliot

I do love her just as a man holds a wolf by the ears: but, for fear of turning upon me and pulling out my throat, I would let her go to the Devil.
John Webster

Follow love and it will flee,
Flee love and it will follow thee.
John Ray

They love too much that die for love.
John Ray

Blue eyes say, "Love me or I die"; black eyes say, "Love me or I kill thee."
Spanish Proverb

Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame.
Song of Songs 8:6

When we can't get what we love we must love what we have.
Roger de Bussy-Rabutin

And love's the noblest frailty of the mind.
John Dryden

All love is lost but upon God alone.
William Dunbar

You never understand anybody that loves you.
Ernest Hemingway

When love grows diseased, the best thing we can do is put it to a violent death; I cannot endure the torture of a lingering and consumptive passion.
George Etherege

Love And Hate


Love, friendship, respect do not unite people as much as common hatred for something.
Anton Chekhov

The more we love a woman the nearer we are to hating her.
La Rochefoucauld

Love and hatred are natural exaggerators.
Hebrew Proverb

He who loves you will make you weep, but he who hates you may make you laugh.
Spanish Proverb

Lover


"You are the greatest lover I have ever had."

"Well, I practice a lot when I'm alone."

Woody Allen

I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.
Edward Gibbon

One minute is a lover high atop a tree, the next minute down among the briars is he, now up, now down, as a bucket in a well.
Geoffrey Chaucer, modern translation

It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason it is more difficult to show a ready wit all day long than to produce an occasional bon mot.
Honoré de Balzac

There was never proud man thought so absurdly well of himself as the lover doth of the person loved; and therefore it was well said that it is impossible to love and to be wise.
Francis Bacon

Lovers complain of their hearts, but the distemper is in their heads.
Thomas Fuller

A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
Balzac

A woman's little affections always fool her lover, and he goes into ecstasies over things which only make her husband shrug his shoulders.
Balzac

The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was Heaven whilst he pursued her as a star; she cannot be Heaven if she stoops to such a one as he.
R. W. Emerson

Loyalty


There is a great deal of talk about loyalty from the bottom to the top. Loyalty from the top down is even more necessary and much less prevalent.
George S. Patton, Jr.

Luck


Of course not, but I am told it works even if you don't believe in it.
Niels Bohr, when asked if he believed a horseshoe above the door would bring good luck

Luck sometimes visits a fool, but never sits down with him.
German Proverb

Luck is one-half of success.
Hindu Proverb

He who is lucky passes for a wise man, too.
Italian Proverb

To wait for luck is the same as waiting for death.
Japanese Proverb

Luck never gives; it only lends.
Swedish Proverb

Lukewarm


Lukewarmness I account a sin
As great in love as in religion.
Abraham Cowley

Lunatic


Every lunatic thinks all other men are crazy.
Publilius Syrus

The various admirable movements in which I have been engaged have always developed among their members a large lunatic fringe.
Theodore Roosevelt

Lust


Do not lust in your heart after her beauty or let her captivate you with her eyes.
Proverbs 6:25

Turn away your eyes from a shapely woman, and do not gaze at beauty belonging to another; many have been seduced by a woman's beauty, and by it passion is kindled like a fire.
Ecclesiasticus 9:8

She [Elizabeth I] hath abused her body, against God's laws, to the disgrace of princely majesty and the whole nation's reproach, by unspeakable and incredible variety of lust, which modesty suffereth not to be remembered.
William Cardinal Allen

I'll come no more behind your scenes, David [Garrick]; for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities.
Samuel Johnson

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.
1 Peter 2:11 KJV

Lust is an appetite of the mind by which temporal goods are preferred to eternal goods.
St. Augustine

The sages figured lust in the form of a satyr; of. shape, part human, part bestial; to signify that the followers of it prostitute the reason of a man to pursue the appetites of a beast.
Richard Steele

Luxury


Faint-hearted men are the fruit of luxurious countries. The same soil never produces both delicacies and heroes.
Herodotus

People have declaimed against luxury for 2000 years, in verse and in prose, and people have always delighted in it.
Voltaire

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
H. D. Thoreau

Lying


In time and place a harmless lie is a great deal better than a hurtful truth.
Roger Ascham

Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!
Shakespeare

A man had rather have a hundred lies told of him than one truth which he does not wish should be told.
Samuel Johnson

The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offence.
F. W. Nietzsche

Better a lie that soothes than a truth that hurts.
Czech Proverb

Lyre


It is idle to play the lyre for an ass.
Saint Jerome

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Last updated: March 28, 2024