Cool Quotes

The increase of net incomes, estimated in commodities, which is always the consequence of improved machinery, will lead to new savings and accumulations. These savings are annual, and must soon create a fund much greater than the gross revenue originally lost by the discovery of the machine, when the demand for labor will be as great as before.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

Macintosh

I keep vaguely wondering what Macs [Macintosh computers] are like, but the ones I've seen spend too much time being friendly.

Madness

There's a pinch of the madman in every great man.

I suppose it is much more comfortable to be mad and not know it, than to be sane and have one's doubts.

[Imagination] does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess players do. Mathematicians go mad … but creative artists very seldom.

Oh, that way madness lies. Let me shun that.

Collins languished some years under that depression of mind which enchains the faculties without destroying them, and leaves reason the knowledge of right without the power of pursuing it. … He was for some time confined in a house of lunatics until death came to his relief.

Everyone is more or less mad on one point.

There is a pleasure sure
In being mad which none but madmen know.

We all are born mad. Some remain so.

Avarice, ambition, lust, etc., are nothing but species of madness.

There are said to be pleasures in madness known only to madmen.

Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.

It is better to be mad with the rest of the world than to be wise alone.

His madness was not of the head, but heart.

Magnanimity

Magnanimity becomes a man of fortune.

Majorian

[Majorian] presents the welcome discovery of a great and heroic character, such as sometimes arise, in a degenerate age, to vindicate the honor of the human species.

Majority

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.

The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.

The majority, compose them how you will, are a herd, and not a very nice one.

A government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.

The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have been wrong, must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.

One, with God, is always a majority, but many a martyr has been burned at the stake while the votes were being counted.

Majority And Minority

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.

The thing we have to fear in this country, to my way of thinking, is the influence of organized minorities, because somehow or other the great majority does not seem to organize. They seem to feel that they are going to be effective because of their known strength, but they give no expression of it.

In all companies there are more fools than wise men, and the greater part always get the better of the wiser.

On a candid examination of history, we shall find that turbulence, violence, and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority, have produced factions and commotions which, in republics, have, more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism.

Majority Rule

Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And — since women are a majority of the population — we'd all be married to Mel Gibson.

Malice

Malice drinketh up the greater part of its own poison.

Malice will always find bad motives for good actions.

Malignity

That pure malignity can exist is the extreme proposition of unbelief. It is not to be entertained by a rational agent; it is atheism; it is the last profanation.

Mammon

Mammon has two properties; it makes us secure, first, when it goes well with us, and then we live without fear of God at all; secondly, when it goes ill with us, then we tempt God, fly from him, and seek after another God.

Man

Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires, man is a fallen god who remembers heaven.

That man is an aggressive creature will hardly be disputed. With the exception of certain rodents, no other vertebrate habitually destroys members of its own species.

Cursed is every one who places his hope in man.

God must love the common man, he made so many of them.

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

Such is the human race. Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.

Every man is as God made him, ay, and often worse.

Man differs from the animal only by a little; most men throw that little away.

Mortals, born of woman,
are of few days and full of trouble.
They springs up like flowers and wither away;
like fleeting shadows, they do not endure.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

I know in my heart that man is good.
That what is right will always eventually triumph.
And there's purpose and worth to each and every life.

Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves.

Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow-creatures, than from the convulsions of the elements.

Neither conservatives nor humorists believe man is good. But left-wingers do.

In this primitive and abject state [of hunters and gatherers], which ill deserves the name of society, the human brute, without arts or laws, almost without sense or language, is poorly distinguished from the rest of the animal creation.

For this is the tragedy of man — circumstances change, but he does not.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

[But] the man who dares not expose his life in the defence of his children and his property, has lost in society the first and most active energies of nature.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

With man, most of his misfortunes are occasioned by man.

Man is neither angel nor beast; and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast.

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!

Man is by nature a political animal.

Man was born to mourn and to be wretched; this is the condition of all below the stars, and whoever endeavours to oppose it, acts in contradiction to the will of Heaven.

The state of man: inconstancy, boredom, anxiety.

What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe.

Everything is good when it leaves the hands of the Creator; everything degenerates in the hands of man.

Out of wood so crooked and perverse as that which man is made of, nothing absolutely straight can ever be wrought.

Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.

I believe in the theoretical benevolence, and the practical malignity of man.

Is man an ape or an angel? Now I am on the side the angels.

Mankind is in general more easily disposed to censure than to admiration.

Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so.

Of all the creatures that creep and breathe on earth there is none more wretched than man.

At his best man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice, he is the worst.

Man is a social animal.

Man is a reasoning animal. (Rationale animal est homo.)

Lions do not fight with one another; serpents do not attack serpents, nor do the wild monsters of the deep rage against their like. But most of the calamities of man are caused by his fellow-man.

Some [men] are good, some are middling, but the greater part are bad.

I say to myself in the morning: before the day is out I shall encounter the busybody, the ingrate, the bully, the traitor, the man of envy, the bad neighbor.

Man is nothing else than … a sack of dung, the food of worms.

Speaking generally, men are ungrateful, fickle, hypocritical, fearful of danger, and covetous of gain.

We have altogether a confounded, corrupt, and poisoned nature, both in body and soul; throughout the whole of man is nothing that is good.

The true science and study of man is man.

What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed?

Every man is as Heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.

I wonder men dare trust themselves with men.

Man's state implies a necessary curse;
When not himself, he's mad; when most himself, he's worse.

Man is a watch, wound up at first, but never Wound up again: once down, he's down for ever.

Man is neither an angel nor a brute, and the very attempt to raise him to the level of the former sinks him to that of the latter.

Men are but children of a larger growth.

Trust not a man; we are by nature false,
Dissembling, subtle, cruel and unconstant.

The most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

For what are men who grasp at praise sublime,
But bubbles on the rapid stream of time,
That rise, and fall, that swell, and are no more,
Born, and forgot, ten thousand in an hour?

We are an inferior part of the creation of God. There are natural appearances of our being in a state of degradation.

Ah! how unjust to nature, and himself,
Is thoughtless, thankless, inconsistent man.

Mankind are very odd creatures: one half censure what they practise, the other half practise what they censure; the rest always say and do as they ought.

Alas! we are ridiculous animals.

Man originates in muck, wades a while in muck, makes muck, and in the end returns to muck.

The mass of men are neither wise nor good.

Take mankind in general: they are vicious, their passions may be operated upon.

Man must make the angels laugh.

Thou knowest how great is man
Thou knowest his imbecility.

[Man is] half dust, half deity.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.

Man is a fallen god who remembers the heavens.

If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil. He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse.

We may pause in sorrow and silence over the depths of darkness that are in man, if we rejoice in the heights of purer vision he has attained to.

I like man, but not men.

Man is a burlesque of what he should be.

Man is at bottom a wild and terrible animal. We know him only as what we call civilization has tamed and trained him; hence we are alarmed by the occasional breaking out of his true nature. But whenever the locks and chains of law and order are cast off, and anarchy comes in, he shows himself for what he really is.

What creature else
Conceives the circle, and then walks the square?
Loves things proved bad, and leaves a thing proved good?

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.

We have the aspirations of creators and the propensities of quadrupeds.

Man is not an ox, who, when he has eaten his fill, lies down to chew the cud; he is the daughter of the horse leech, who constantly asks for more.

Man, relatively speaking, is the most botched of all the animals and the sickliest, and he has wandered the most dangerously from his instincts.

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Men, my dear, are very queer animals — a mixture of horse-nervousness, ass-stubbornness and camel-malice.

Man is the only animal that eats when he is not hungry, drinks when he is not thirsty, and makes love at all seasons.

There is so much good in the worst of us,
And so much bad in the best of us,
That it ill behooves any of us
To find fault with the rest of us.

Men are carried by horses, fed by cattle, clothed by sheep, defended by dogs, imitated by monkeys, and eaten by worms.

Man is tougher than iron, harder than stone, and more delicate than the rose.

A man is what he is, not what he was.

Man, said the Mother, is the only Beast who kills that which he does not devour, and this quality makes him so much a benefactor to our species [vultures].

I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he, alone among creatures, has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

Mankind

Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this — that you are dreadfully like other people.

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

Most human beings have an absolute and infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

We should expect the best and the worst from mankind, as from the weather.

One of the laws of paleontology is that an animal which must protect itself with thick armour is degenerate. It is usually a sign that the species is on the road to extinction.

Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

The fall of man stands a lie before Beethoven, a truth before Hitler.

At very best, a person wrapped up in himself makes a small package.

[The] vain and transitory scenes of human greatness are unworthy of a serious thought.

We are but dust and shadow.

Never expecting to find perfection in men, and not looking for divine attributes in created beings, in my commerce with my contemporaries, I have found much human virtue.

As I know more of mankind, I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man, upon easier terms than I was formerly.

Drinking when we are not thirsty and making love all year round, madam; that is all there is to distinguish us from other animals.

(Boire sans soif et faire l'amour en tout temps, madame, il n'y a que ça qui nous distingue des autres bêtes.)

What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor.

Broadly speaking, human beings may be divided into three classes: those who are toiled to death, those who are worried to death, and those who are bored to death.

To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind.

O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.

Human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

Manliness

I will have only those glorious manly pleasures of being very drunk and very slovenly.

Manners

Dear Miss Manners: Please list some tactful ways of removing a man's saliva from your face.
Gentle Reader: Please list some decent ways of acquiring a man's saliva on your face.

Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide the lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.

If someone is nice to you but rude to the waiter, they are not a nice person.

Let no one who wishes to receive agreeable impressions of American manners, commence their travels in a Mississippi steamboat.

Manners go on deteriorating.

Foul words corrupt good manners.

Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behavior of the country is mockable at the court.

Men's evil manners live in brass: their virtues
We write in water.

You must practise
The manners of the time if you intend
To have favor from it.

Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy is the best bred in the company.

Never seem wiser or more learned than the people you are with.

Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things.

Many

Many a little makes a mickle.

Marijuana

Marijuana is … self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?

Mark Antony

As Helen was to the Trojans, so has that man been to this republic — the cause of war, the cause of mischief, the cause of ruin.

Market

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.

Markets are too complex to manipulate beneficially.

Bull markets go to people's heads. If you're a duck on a pond, and it's rising due to a downpour, you start going up in the world. But you think it's you, not the pond.

A man must sell his ware after the rates of the market.

Marriage

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes she were not.

Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up.

Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife; he is always proud of himself as the source of it.

Marriage is neither heaven nor hell; it is simply purgatory.

When there's marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.

When a girl marries, she exchanges the attentions of many men for the inattention of one.

Marriage is a mistake every man should make.

As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent.

A good husband should be deaf and a good wife blind.

A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished.

By all means marry: If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.

Choose in marriage only a woman whom you would choose as a friend if she were a man.

When should a man marry? A young man, not yet; an elder man, not at all.

I like being single. I'm always there when I need me.

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.

'Tis more blessed to give than receive; for example, wedding presents.

We were happily married for eight months. Unfortunately, we were married for four and a half years.

What nonsense people talk about happy marriages! A man can be happy with any woman so long as he doesn't love her.

When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her.

When I was a young man, I vowed never to marry until I found the ideal woman. Well, I found her — but alas, she was waiting for the ideal man.

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.

I belong to Bridegrooms Anonymous. Whenever I feel like getting married, they send over a lady in a housecoat and hair curlers to burn my toast for me.

The hardest task in a girl's life is to prove to a man that his intentions are serious.

It is assumed that the woman must wait, motionless, until she is wooed. That is how the spider waits for the fly.

Men are horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably conceited when they are not.

Marriage is the price men pay for sex, sex is the price women pay for marriage.

I think of my wife, and I think of Lot,
And I think of the lucky break he got.

We sleep in separate rooms, we have dinner apart, we take separate vacations — we're doing everything we can to keep our marriage together.

Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.

I never knew what real happiness was until I got married. And by then it was too late.

Bride, n. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.

If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself.

I respect the institution of marriage. I have always thought that every woman should marry — and no man.

A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage.

I don't see why I have to make one man miserable when I can make so many men happy.

Marriage is the death of hope.

Sex alleviates tension. Marriage causes it.

It should be a very happy marriage; they are both so much in love with him.

There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about.

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed.

I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage. They've experienced pain and bought jewelry.

I love being married. It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.

When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.

Metellus Numidicus, the censor, acknowledged to the Roman people, in a public oration, that had kind nature allowed us to exist without the help of women, we should be delivered from a very troublesome companion; and he could recommend matrimony only as the sacrifice of private pleasure to public duty.

But those who marry will face many troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this.

But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world — how he can please his wife — and his interests are divided.

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

In the most rigorous [Roman] laws, a wife was condemned to support a gamester, a drunkard, or a libertine, unless he were guilty of homicide, poison, or sacrilege, in which cases the marriage, as it should seem, might have been dissolved by the hand of the executioner.

A society in which marriage is encouraged and industry prevails soon repairs the accidental losses of pestilence and war.

My wife doesn't care what I do when I'm away, as long as I don't have a good time.

I've traveled the world and been about everywhere you can imagine. There's not anything I'm scared of except my wife.

A man may be a fool and not know it — but not if he is married.

What's the secret to a happy marriage? Lots of square feet [i.e. a big house] and 2 Tivos.

You cannot pluck roses without fear of thorns,
Nor enjoy fair wife without danger of horns.

My wife and I tried two or three times in the last few years to have breakfast together but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.

I am about to be married — and am of course in all the misery of a man in pursuit of happiness.

The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women. It's followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again.

The husband who wants a happy marriage should learn to keep his mouth shut and his cheque book open.

Gosh, maybe that's what true marriage is: two people who want each other to die.

[All] whom I have mentioned failed to obtain happiness, for want of considering that marriage is the strictest tie of perpetual friendship; that there can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity; and that he must expect to be wretched who pays to beauty, riches, or politeness that regard which only virtue and piety can claim.

That old saying which the peasants call the bachelors' prayer: "I pray thee, good Lord, that I may not be married. But if I am to be married, that I may not be a cuckold. But if I am to be a cuckold, that I may not know. But if I am to know, that I may not mind."

Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline.

Marriage is fine as an institution, but bad as a habit.

The stable monogamous marriage is one of the most fundamentally creative inventions of Judeo-Christian civilization.

To destroy marriage law is a step towards destroying the rule of law itself.

Under an oak, in stormy weather,
I joined this rogue and whore together;
And none but he who rules the thunder
Can put this rogue and whore asunder.

It [marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.

One was never married, and that's his hell; another is, and that's his plague.

There is not one in a hundred of either sex who is not taken in when they marry. Look where I will, I see that it is so; and I feel that it must be so, when I consider that it is, of all transactions, the one in which people expect most from others, and are least honest themselves.

To be so bent on marriage, to pursue a man merely for the sake of situation, is a sort of thing that shocks me; I cannot understand it. Poverty is a great evil; but to a woman of education and feeling it ought not, it cannot be the greatest.

I would rather be teacher at a school (and I can think of nothing worse) than marry a man I did not like.

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor — which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony.

A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died: Johnson said, it was the triumph of hope over experience.

It is better to marry than to burn with passion.

So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.

She advised me to prosecute my victories, and time would certainly bring me a captive who might deserve the honour of being enchained for ever.

Marriage is the grave or tomb of wit.

Marriage resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they can not be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.

They took me from my wife, and to save trouble
I wed again, and made the error double.

I soon began to find that they were spreading for me the nets of matrimony.

Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.

Tho' marriage makes man and wife one flesh, it leaves 'em still two fools.

Sharper: Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure: Married in haste, we may repent at leisure.
Setter: Some by experience find those words misplaced: At leisure married, they repent in haste.

I could find it in my heart to marry thee, purely to be rid of thee.

I would be married, but I'd have no wife,
I would be married to a single life.

Wedlock, indeed, hath oft compared been
To public feasts where meet a public rout,
Where they that are without would fain go in
And they that are within would fain go out.

No artist should ever marry … if ever you do have to marry, marry a girl who is more in love with your art than with you.

To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties.

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

Marriage must ceaselessly combat a monster that devours everything: habit.

Never shall I say that marriage brings more joy than pain.

He who would marry is on the road to repentance.

Marriage, to tell the truth, is an evil, but it is a necessary evil.

The first bond of society is marriage; the next, children; then the family.

If thou wouldst marry wisely, marry thy equal.

If you are really devoted to one woman, then bow your head and yield your neck to the yoke.

No man is so virtuous as to marry a wife only to have children.

Amongst all the bonds of benevolence and goodwill there is none more honorable, ancient or honest than marriage.

He that marries for wealth sells his liberty.

One year of joy, another of comfort, and all the rest of content.

Of all actions of a man's life, his marriage does least concern other people; yet of all actions of our life, 'tis most meddled with by other people.

Every man plays the fool once in his life, but to marry is playing the fool all one's life long.

Marry first, and love will come afterwards.

I don't think matrimony consistent with the liberty of subject.

The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages.

Venus, a beautiful, good-natured lady, was the goddess of love; Juno, a terrible shrew, the goddess of marriage: and they were always mortal enemies.

Marriage enlarges the scene of our happiness and miseries. A marriage of love is pleasant; a marriage of interest easy; and a marriage where both meet, happy. A happy marriage has in it all the pleasures of friendship, all the enjoyments of sense and reason; and indeed all the sweets of life.

Very few people that have settled entirely in the country, but have grown at length weary of one another. The lady's conversation generally falls into a thousand impertinent effects of idleness; and the gentleman falls in love with his dogs and his horses, and out of love with everything else.

Do you think your mother and I should have lived comfortably so long together if ever we had been married?

She that marries ill never wants something to say for it.

I do not pretend to have discovered that life has any thing more to be desired than a prudent and virtuous marriage.

Men and women, in marrying, make a vow to love one another. Would it not be better for their happiness if they made a vow to please one another?

It is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together.

I believe marriages would in general be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor, upon a due consideration of the characters and circumstances, without the parties having any choice in the matter.

Zounds! madam, you had no taste when you married me!

Taught by care, the patient man and wife
Agree to share the bitter-sweet of life.

A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.

The best thing a woman can do is to marry. It appears to me that even quarrels with one's husband are preferable to the ennui of a solitary existence.

Wishing each other, not divorced, but dead;
They live respectably as man and wife.

When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindu,
His best friends hear no more of him.

Marriage was instituted by God himself for the purpose of preventing promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, for promoting domestic felicity, and for securing the maintenance and security of children.

The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.

Whatever woman may cast her lot with mine, should any ever do so, it is my intention to do all in my power to make her happy and contented; and there is nothing I can imagine that would make me more unhappy than to fail in the effort.

I have come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying, and for this reason: I can never be satisfied with anyone who would be blockhead enough to have me.

… that men and women should at first come together by chance, like each other so well as to commence acquaintance, improve acquaintance into fondness, increase or extinguish fondness by marriage …

Advice to persons about to marry — Don't.

Remember, it's as easy to marry a rich woman as a poor woman.

It doesn't much signify whom one marries, for one is sure to find next morning that it was someone else.

Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care.

Marriage — what an abomination! Love — yes, but not marriage. Love cannot exist in marriage, because love is an ideal; that is to say, something not quite understood — transparencies, color, light, a sense of the unreal. But a wife — you know all about her — who her father was, who her mother was, what she thinks of you and her opinion of the neighbors over the way.

The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happy married life.

It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can.

A marriage is likely to be what is called happy if neither party ever expected to get much happiness out of it.

Marriage is not made for everybody, nor attractive to everybody, nor good for everybody who embarks on it.

It is better for a woman to marry a man who loves her than a man she loves.

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.

Marriage is a condition that most women aspire to and most men submit to.

Marriage is a romance in which the hero dies in the first chapter.

A man should marry a woman half his age, plus seven years.

Marriage is the only evil that man pray for.

His designs were strictly honourable, as the phrase is; that is, to rob a lady of her fortune by way of marriage.

Before going to war say a prayer; before going to sea say two; before getting married say three.

Marriage is the tomb of love.

No matter how fiery love may be, it is cooled by marriage.

Honest men marry soon; wise men not at all.

It is good to marry late, or never.

A young woman married to an old man must behave like an old woman.

When men marry late they love their Autumn child with a twofold affection, — father's and grandfather's both in one.

He loves his bonds who, when the first are broke,
Submits his neck unto a second yoke.

This I set down as a positive truth. A woman with fair opportunities, and without a positive hump, may marry whom she likes.

Martin Luther

The only fit commentator on Paul was Luther not by any means such a gentleman as the Apostle, but almost as great a genius.

Martyrdom

The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.

To die for an idea is to set a rather high price upon conjecture.

Although always prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it should be postponed.

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

He that dies a martyr proves that he was not a knave, but by no means that he was not a fool.

Blood is the worst of all testimonies to the truth.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Marxism

Capitalism seems to have recovered its entrepreneurial vigor. Marxist socialism appears to be dying, except perhaps in that home of lost causes, the university campus.

No Marxist ever seems to have held sensible views on agriculture, perhaps because neither Marx nor Lenin was really interested in it. Marxism is an essentially urban religion.

There is, indeed, no place for mercy in determinist systems such as Marxism. Mercy, like free will, is an anti-determinist idea.

Marxism and Freudianism remain in the witch-doctor stage of myth because they dodge refutation by reformulation, osmosis and imprecision.

Marxism has tremendous appeal in the Third World for exactly the same reason it had tremendous appeal to me in college. It gives you something to believe in when what surrounds you seems unbelievable. It gives you someone to blame besides yourself. It's theoretically tidy. And, best of all, it's fully imaginary so it can never be disproved.

The most important element in the foundation of Marxism is the materialistic interpretation of history. With it Marxism stands or falls.

Marxist

All I know is I'm not a Marxist.

Mask

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Masking

The world, in its best state, is nothing more than a larger assembly of beings, combining to counterfeit happiness which they do not feel, employing every art and contrivance to embellish life, and to hide their real condition from the eyes of one another.

Mass

Many a rascal has attended regularly at mass, and many a good man has never gone at all.

Master

Masters should be sometimes blind and sometimes deaf.

He that is master of himself will soon be master of others.

He who serves two masters has to lie to one of them.

Masterpiece

Whoever has accomplished an immortal work will be as little hurt by its reception from the public or the opinions of critics as a sane man in a madhouse is affected by the upbraidings of the insane.

Materialist

The materialist is a Calvinist without a God.

Mathematician

A great science is mathematics, but mathematicians are often only blockheads.

Mathematics

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.

I have discovered a most remarkable proof, but this margin is too narrow to contain it. [Variation: I have discovered a truly marvellous demonstration (of this general theorem) which this margin is too narrow to contain.]

If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behoves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics.

Mathematics contains much that will neither hurt one if one does not know it nor help one if one does know it.

Means

Man must live by his means, and neither mope nor moan.

It is common, says Bacon, to desire the end without enduring the means.

Media

Remember, son, many a good story has been ruined by over-verification.

The sports page records people's accomplishments, the front page usually records nothing but man's failures.

For most folks, no news is good news; for the press, good news is not news.

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.

The violence of print is often the prelude to the violence of blood.

Media power today, though growing, is essentially blind, negative, destructive, and irresponsible.

It [the press] has ceased altogether to be independent and has become docilely official.

Medicine

The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance; he offers absolution.

… one of those medicines, which will destroy, if it happens not to cure.

In medicine, sins of commission are mortal, sins of omission venial.

Mediocrity

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

Perseverance, n. A lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.

The chief characteristic of our time is that the mediocre mind, aware of its own mediocrity, has the boldness to assert the rights of mediocrity and to impose them everywhere.

Among many parallels which men of imagination have drawn between the natural and moral state of the world, it has been observed that happiness, as well as virtue, consists in mediocrity; that to avoid every extreme is necessary, even to him who has no other care than to pass through the present state with ease and safety; and that the middle path is the road of security, on either side of which are not only the pitfalls of vice, but the precipices of ruin.

Medium

There is nothing upon the face of the earth so insipid as a medium. Give me love or hate! a friend that will go to jail for me, or an enemy that will run me through the body!

Meeting

Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

The human race is divided into two groups: those who like to get on with it and those who like to attend meetings.

Melancholy

There is no doubt that a man may appear very gay in company who is sad at heart. His merriment is like the sound of drums and trumpets in a battle, to drown the groans of the wounded and dying.

Merciful powers!
Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature
Gives way to in repose.

Melancholy, indeed, should be diverted by every means but drinking.

Employment, sir, and hardships prevent melancholy.

Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Memory

God gave us memory that we might have roses in December.

I never forgive, but I always forget.

It isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so.

Our memories are independent of our wills. It is not so easy to forget.

For men use, if they have an evil turn, to write it in marble: and whoso doth us a good turn we write it in dust.

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the Queen remarked.

Every revived idea reminds us of a time when something was enjoyed that is now lost, when some hope was not yet blasted, when some purpose had yet not languished into sluggishness or indifference.

Whether it be, that life has more vexations than comforts, or, what is in the event just the same, that evil makes deeper impression than good, it is certain that few can review the time past without heaviness of heart.

Men

Men become old, but they never become good.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

Some men are alive only because it is illegal to kill them.

Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.

Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot.

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

MEN WANTED FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY
Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.

… any that pisseth against the wall.

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

Small things make base men proud.

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more.
Men were deceivers ever;
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.

Men are but children of a larger growth;
Our appetites as apt to change as theirs,
And full as craving too, and full as vain.

Arthur, compelled by masculine instinct, leaned over and frowned at the contents of the case, exactly the way countless males have frowned at household appliances, plumbing, car engines, and all manner of other mechanical objects that they did not begin to understand.

Men And Women

Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.

I dress for women — and I undress for men.

The average girl would rather have beauty than brains because she knows the average man can see much better than he can think.

She was not a woman likely to settle for equality when sex gave her an advantage.

Men have a much better time of it than women; for one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.

A man is a person who will pay two dollars for a one-dollar item he wants. A woman will pay one dollar for a two-dollar item she doesn't want.

I never hated a man enough to give him his diamonds back.

A woman wants a man who will satisfy her every want and need. A man wants every woman to satisfy his one want and need.

I married beneath me — all women do.

A wise woman will always let her husband have her way.

When a man opens the car door for his wife, it's either a new car or a new wife.

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.

Disguise our bondage as we will,
'Tis woman, woman, rules us still.

'Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

A woman is a woman until the day she dies, but a man's a man only as long as he can.

Brigands will demand your money or your life, but a woman will demand both.

Lady Nancy Astor: Winston, if you were my husband, I'd put poison in your coffee.
Winston Churchill: Nancy, if you were my wife, I'd drink it.

Let thy maidservant be faithful, strong, and homely.

Men's magazines often feature pictures of naked ladies. Women's magazines also often feature pictures of naked ladies. This is because the female body is a beautiful work of art, while the male body is hairy and lumpy and should not be seen by the light of day.

Take my word for it, the silliest woman can manage a clever man, but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool.

To find out a girl's faults, praise her to her girl friends.

Women sometimes forgive a man who forces the opportunity, but never a man who misses one.

I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk ahead. He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war.

I don't mind living in a man's world as long as I can be a woman in it.

Whether women are better than men I cannot say — but I can say they are certainly no worse.

A man's womenfolk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity.

Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.

George Moore unexpectedly pinched my behind. I felt rather honored that my behind should have drawn the attention of the great master of English prose.

She plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint — the universal act of women to proclaim ownership.

I've been in love with the same woman for forty-one years. If my wife finds out, she'll kill me.

Most women set out to try to change a man, and when they have changed him they do not like him.

On one issue at least, men and women agree: they both distrust women.

Women do not like timid men. Cats do not like prudent rats.

Misogynist, n. A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

The gods have sent medicines for the venom of serpents, but there is no medicine for a bad woman. She is more noxious than the viper, or than fire itself.

Woman, like good wine, is a sweet poison.

Women are like death: they pursue those who flee from them, and flee from those who pursue them.

A thousand men can easily live together in peace, but two women, even if they be sisters, can never do so.

A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.

To attract men, I wear a perfume called "New Car Interior."

Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man.

Women have simple tastes. They can get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating. To the average man, doomed to some banal drudgery all his life long, they offer the only grand hazard that he ever encounters. Take them away, and his existence would be as flat and secure as that of a moo-cow.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his.

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

King Solomon loved many strange women.

On Valentine's Day, millions of men give millions of women flowers, cards and candy as a heartfelt expression of the emotion that also motivates men to observe anniversaries and birthdays: fear.

Women in general seem to me to be appreciably more intelligent than men. A great many of them suffer in silence from the imbecilities of their husbands.

In every age and country, the wiser, or at least the stronger, of the two sexes, has usurped the powers of the state, and confined the other to the cares and pleasures of domestic life.

All other men govern their wives; but we command all other men, and our wives us.

Women [in ancient Rome] were condemned to the perpetual tutelage of parents, husbands, or guardians; a sex created to please and obey was never supposed to have attained the age of reason and experience. Such, at least, was the stern and haughty spirit of the ancient law.

[Thales] thanked fortune for three things: first of all, that he had been born a man and not a beast; secondly, that he was a man and not a woman; and thirdly, that he was a Greek and not a barbarian.

Women don't want to hear what you think. Women want to hear what they think — in a deeper voice.

No one attached to the traditional image of authoritarian patriarchy could imagine the consternation men endure. They have suffered an unexpected blow to the emotional quality of their lives. Its gravity has not been calculated. They have far fewer reliable links than women to the classic currents of family life. They are alienated not only, as Marx said, from the means of production but also from the means of reproduction.

I noticed that the greatest changes observable were with the women, not the men. I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly; but their wives had grown old. These were good women; it is very wearing to be good.

God created men and critics.

Only the stupefying ignorance of young women prevents them from comprehending the stupefying emptiness of the men who cluster round them.

The young women who attract so much attention never change: They are all stupid. They have at best only the crudest notions of their own power, and never calculate motives or consequences. Giving a young woman a young woman's body makes as much sense as giving ten teenagers Lamborghinis and telling them to drive in figure 8s around a parking lot.

That is the really great thing about being an adult male, once you get married and have children the whole decision-making process is taken out of your hands, and I for one am extremely grateful.

For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

My husband said he needed more space, so I locked him outside.

Never marry a man who hates his mother, because he'll end up hating you.

I've never yet met a man who could look after me. I don't need a husband. What I need is a wife.

Follow a shadow, it still flies you,
Seem to fly it, it will pursue:
So court a mistress, she denies you;
Let her alone, she will court you.
Say are not women truly, then,
Styl'd but the shadows of us men?

I finally figured out what men want. Men want a woman they can be incredibly intimate with … who will leave them alone.

Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman's entire but decisive advantage. Through his passion nature has given man into woman's hands, and the woman who does not know how to make him her subject, her slave, her toy, and how to betray him with a smile in the end is not wise.

A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and is confirmed only by other men. Feminist fantasies about the ideal “sensitive” male have failed. Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.

Men are looking for maternal solace in women, and that's the nature of heterosexuality. Now you tell me, who really has all the power?

It is in the best interests of the human race, and of women themselves, for men to be strong.

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.

That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man,
If with his tongue he cannot win a woman.

But as the faculty of writing has been chiefly a masculine endowment, the reproach of making the world miserable has been always thrown upon the women, and the grave and the merry have equally thought themselves at liberty to conclude either with declamatory complaints, or satirical censures, of female folly or fickleness, ambition or cruelty, extravagance or lust.

Women love scallywags, but some marry them and then try to make them wear a blazer.

A pretty girl is like a melody
That haunts you night and day.

He that tastes woman, ruin meets.

When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe her melancholy?
What art can wash her guilt away?

Women naturally expect defence and protection from a lover or a husband.

Men build bridges and throw railroads across deserts, and yet they contend successfully that the job of sewing on a button is beyond them. Accordingly, they don't have to sew buttons.

But no wonder if a fool finds his way into folly
and be wiped of his wits by womanly guile —
it's the way of the world. Adam fell because of a woman,
and Solomon because of several, and as for Samson,
Delilah was his downfall, and afterwards David
was bamboozled by Bathsheba and bore the grief.

The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

But I do think we need to explore the commitment problem, which has caused many women to mistakenly conclude that men, as a group, have the emotional maturity of hamsters. This is not the case. A hamster is MUCH more capable of making a lasting commitment to a woman, especially if she gives it those little food pellets. Whereas a guy, in a relationship, will consume the pellets of companionship, and he will run on the exercise wheel of lust; but as soon as he senses that the door of commitment is about to close and trap him in the wire cage of true intimacy, he'll squirm out, scamper across the kitchen floor of uncertainty and hide under the refrigerator of Non-Readiness.

It is only a man here and there who has any tolerable knowledge of the character even of the women of his own family.

So long as a man desires women his mind is in bondage, as a calf is in bondage to its mother.

Men are more eloquent than women made, But women are more powerful to persuade.

O woman! lovely woman! Nature made thee
To temper man: we had been brutes without you.

What hogs men turn when they grow weary of women!

If the heart of a man is depress'd with cares,
The mist is dispell'd when a woman appears.

It is the man and woman united that makes the complete human being. Separate, she wants his force of body and strength of reason; he, her softness, sensibility and acute discernment. Together, they are most likely to succeed in the world.

Women have a perpetual envy of our vices; they are less vicious than we, not from choice, but because we restrict them.

The two sexes mutually corrupt and improve each other.

The old age of women is sadder and more lonely than of men.

Man is the hunter; woman is his game; … We hunt them for the beauty of their skins.

Man has his will, — but woman has her way.

Men are deceived about women because they forget that they and women do not speak the same language.

Woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition, chiefly in her greater tenderness and less selfishness.

After a quarrel between a man and a woman the man suffers chiefly from the thought that he has wounded the woman; the woman suffers from the thought that she has not wounded the man enough.

Man is for woman a means: the end is always the child.

In revenge as in love woman is always more barbarous than man.

The maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first rate man to the exclusive possession of a third rate one.

If a woman doesn't chase a man a little, she doesn't love him.

If a man has sworn to injure you, you may sleep at night; if a woman, keep awake.

The difference between a man and a woman is that a man looks forward, and a woman remembers.

Therefore you must realize that women rule over you! "Do you not labor and toil, and bring everything and give it to women?"

Love enters a man through his eyes; a woman, through her ears.

Outdoors for man and dog; indoors for woman and cat.

Well, the old theory was "marry an older man because they're more mature." But the new theory is "men don't mature — marry a young one."

The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

A man has every season, while a woman has only the right to spring.

Mencken, H. L.

He [Mencken] was an autodidact, with all the misplaced confidence and all the astonishing gaps that characterize that breed. Not many of us would venture to write a book about democracy without ever having read de Tocqueville, nor embark on a translation of Nietzsche with only a sketchy knowledge of German.

Mencken was a German nationalist, an insecure small-town petit bourgeois, a childless hypochondriac with what seems on the evidence of these pages to have been a room-temperature libido, an antihumanist as much as an atheist, a man prone to the hyperbole and sensationalism he distrusted in others and not as easy with the modern world and its many temptations and diversions as he liked it to be supposed.

Mercy

Thwackum was for doing justice, and leaving mercy to heaven.

We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.

Merit

Where he falls short, 'tis Nature's fault alone;
Where he succeeds, the merit's all his own.

Merriment

Merriment is always the effect of a sudden impression. The jest which is expected is already destroyed.

Messiah

But waiting for a messiah is a long business and you get many fake ones.

Mexico

Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.

Middle Class

There is nothing morally unhealthy about the existence of a middle class in society. No one need feel ashamed of being bourgeois, of pursuing a bourgeois way of life, or of adhering to bourgeois cultural and moral standards. That it should be necessary to assert such a proposition is a curious commentary on our age.

The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.

A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit.

He told me … that mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found by long experience was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness.

Military

Veni, vidi, vici.
I came, I saw, I conquered.

War hath no fury like a non-combatant.

They told me it would disrupt my life less if I got killed sooner.

In defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable.

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.

The progress of manufactures and commerce insensibly collects a large multitude within the walls of a city: but these citizens are no longer soldiers; and the arts which adorn and improve the state of civil society, corrupt the habits of the military life.

[A] military force was collected in Europe, formidable by their arms and numbers, if the generals had understood the science of command, and the soldiers the duty of obedience.

[Serving in the military] is a million-dollar experience that you wouldn’t do again for a million dollars.

Mind

I am not absent-minded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven.

[Riemann] had the type of mind that could hold only those things it found interesting, mathematics mostly.

Sweet are the thoughts that savor of content;
The quiet mind is richer than a crown.

Of all the tyrannies on human kind
The worst is that which persecutes the mind.

Strongest minds
Are often those of whom the noisy world
Hears least.

Miracle

Everything is miraculous. It is miraculous that one does not melt in one's bath.

Miscellaneous

"Are you lost daddy," I asked tenderly.
"Shut up," he explained.

He looked at me as if I were a side dish he hadn't ordered.

Mischief

He [Hampden] had a head to contrive, a tongue to persuade, and a hand to execute any mischief.

Misery

Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.

That life has many miseries, and that those miseries are, sometimes at least, equal to all the powers of fortitude, is now universally confessed.

But the joys of life are short, and its miseries are long.

A still small voice spake unto me,
"Thou art so full of misery,
Were it not better not to be?"

Misfortune

We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

What man ever blamed himself for his misfortune?

Kings have long arms, but Misfortune longer:
Let none think themselves out of her reach.

The very remembrance of my former misfortune proves a new one to me.

Of misfortune it never can be certainly known whether, as proceeding from the hand of God, it is an act of favour or of punishment.

Such sufferers are dejected in their misfortunes, not so much for what they feel, as for what they dread; not because they cannot support the sorrows, or endure the wants, of their present condition, but because they consider them as only the beginnings of more sharp and more lasting pains.

Mistake

Most people are stupid. Nothing seems like a mistake until it's a mistake.

There's no way that you can live an adequate life without making many mistakes.

It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.

As she frequently remarked when she made any such mistake, it would be all the same a hundred years hence.

Mob

There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.

Moderate

In the field of controversy I always pity the moderate party, who stand on the open middle ground exposed to the fire of both sides.

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.

Moderation

I have not been afraid of excess: excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.

Moderation is a fatal thing … Nothing succeeds like excess.

Total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.

Constantly practise abstinence and temperance, so that you may be as wakeful after eating as before.

Never go to excess, but let moderation be your guide.

The practice of exercise and temperance had entitled him to a healthy old age.

To walk with circumspection and steadiness in the right path, at an equal distance between the extremes of errour, ought to be the constant endeavour of every reasonable being.

Healthy sleep depends on moderate eating; he rises early, and feels fit. The distress of sleeplessness and of nausea and colic are with the glutton.

Modesty

Don't be so humble. You're not that great.

I was born modest; not all over, but in spots.

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.

Modesty is the only sure bait when you angle for praise.

If only I had a little humility, I would be perfect.

Whoever attributes no merit to himself because he really has none is not modest, but merely honest.

Molière

He [Molière] pleases all the world, but cannot please himself.

Money

He neither drank, smoked, nor rode a bicycle. Living frugally, saving his money, he died early, surrounded by greedy relatives. It was a great lesson to me.

You can't force anyone to love you or to lend you money.

Money is the most egalitarian force in society. It confers power on whoever holds it.

Make money and the whole world will conspire to call you a gentleman.

Never invest your money in anything that eats or needs repairing.

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

Money swore an oath that nobody who did not love it should ever have it.

I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest to make money they don't want to buy things they don't need to impress people they dislike.

The holy passion of friendship is so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring in nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.

When a fellow says, "It ain't the money but the principle of the thing," it's the money.

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.

Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, as long as you've got money.

Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy.

The easiest way for your children to learn about money is for you not to have any.

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.

He [Thomas Edison] considered [money] as a raw material, like metal, to be used rather than amassed, and so he kept plowing his funds into new projects. Several times he was all but bankrupt. But he refused to let dollar signs govern his actions.

Gentlemen, if the man who invented compound interest had secured a patent on his idea he would have had without any doubt the greatest invention the world has ever produced.

Part of the loot went for gambling, part for horses, and part for women. The rest I spent foolishly.

He that wants money, means, and content, is without three good friends.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

Would you know what mony is, go borrow some.

Monk

The peace of the Eastern church was invaded by a swarm of fanatics [monks], incapable of fear, or reason, or humanity; and the Imperial troops acknowledged, without shame, that they were much less apprehensive of an encounter with the fiercest Barbarians.

Pleasure and guilt are synonymous terms in the language of the monks, and they discovered, by experience, that rigid fasts, and abstemious diet, are the most effectual preservatives against the impure desires of the flesh.

The monastic studies have tended, for the most part, to darken, rather than to dispel, the cloud of superstition.

I have somewhere heard or read the frank confession of a Benedictine abbot: "My vow of poverty has given me a hundred thousand crowns a year; my vow of obedience has raised me to the rank of a sovereign prince." — I forget the consequences of his vow of chastity.

[The monks'] credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science.

[All] the manly virtues were oppressed by the servile and pusillanimous reign of the monks.

[The monks'] minds were inaccessible to reason or mercy.

Monkey

I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a monkey, without very mortifying reflections.

Mood

If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.

Moon

The moon like a flower
In heaven’s high bower,
With silent delight,
Sits and smiles on the night.

Moral Imperative

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

Morality

When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.

[It] seems as if anything I like is either illegal or immoral or fattening.

I profoundly believe it takes a lot of practice to become a moral slob.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

Moral indignation is in most cases two percent moral, forty-eight percent indignation, and fifty percent envy.

Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law.

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.

In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the current.

Any of us can achieve virtue, if by virtue we merely mean the avoidance of the vices that do not attract us.

[Sir Stafford Cripps] has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.

I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.

We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions which are unbridled by morality and true religion.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Not everything that is legal is reputable.

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

A society can survive the collapse of its economy, but not of its citizens' morality.

Our society is obsessed with personal rights, but it will survive only if we each adopt personal obligations.

People do bad things to other people because they do not have good values [not because of poverty or other societal problems].

The difference between moral people and immoral people is not that moral people don't have rage; it is that moral people control their rage, and immoral people don't.

Those who are merciful when they must be cruel, will, in the end, be cruel to those who deserve mercy.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I?

[The] dreaming mind is regrettably immoral.

The only valid source for moral life is a living God.

The notion of obeying "iron laws" or "a higher law," rather than the traditional, absolute morality taught in the churches, was a Hegelian one. Marx and Lenin translated it into a class concept; Hitler into a race one.

The truth is that no political cause is worth the abandonment of elementary morality. Whether terrorism works varies with the case, but it can never serve an ideal.

We do not look in great cities for our best morality.

Better suffer ill than doe ill.

It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure."

Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

There is … only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

For what are treatises of morality, but persuasives to the practice of duties, for which no arguments would be necessary, but that we are continually tempted to violate or neglect them?

But he that suffers the slightest breach in his morality, can seldom tell what shall enter it, or how wide it shall be made; when a passage is open, the influx of corruption is every moment wearing down opposition, and by slow degrees deluges the heart.

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.

` "Take some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."

"You mean you can't take less," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take more than nothing."

Moron

Nature abhors a moron.

See the happy moron,
He doesn't give a damn,
I wish I were a moron,
My God! perhaps I am!

Mortality

All men think all men mortal but themselves.

Alive, we are like a sleek black water beetle.
Skating across still water in any direction
We choose, and soon to be swallowed
Suddenly from beneath.

Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save. When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing.

Now therefore why are you disturbed, seeing that you are to perish? Why are you moved, seeing that you are mortal?

We are all mortal, and each one is for himself. (Nous sommes tous mortels, et chacun est pour soi.)

Mother

No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.

My mother had a good deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.

Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother.

I am what her savage loving has made me.

I have reached the age when a woman begins to perceive that she is growing into the person she least plans to resemble: her mother.

Motivation

Whatever is universally desired, will be sought by industry and artifice, by merit and crimes, by means good and bad, rational and absurd, according to the prevalence of virtue or vice, of wisdom or folly.

There's many a one who would be idle if hunger didn't pinch him; but the stomach sets us to work.

Motivational

Become the person you know you should be.

You can't do anything about what you've done, but you can do something about what you're going to do.

Motive

We are sometimes not ourselves conscious of the original motives of our actions, and when we know them, our first care is to hide them from the sight of others.

Mourning

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure.

My child, let your tears fall for the dead, and as one in great pain begin the lament. Lay out the body with due ceremony, and do not neglect the burial.

Nature's law,
That man was made to mourn!

Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!

Medvedenko: Why do you wear black all the time?
Masha: I'm in mourning for my life, I'm unhappy.

Movement

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it — but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

Movie

I would have been more successful if I had left movies immediately. Stayed in the theater, gone into politics, written; anything. I've wasted a greater part of my life looking for money and trying to get along. Trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paint box, which is a movie. And I've spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with making a movie. It's about 2 percent movie making and 98 percent hustling. That's no way to spend a life.

Multitasking

He who attempts to do all, will waste his life in doing little.

Multitude

If there be any among those common objects of hatred I do condemn and laugh at, it is that great enemy of reason, virtue and religion, the multitude, that numerous piece of monstrosity, which taken asunder seem men, and the reasonable creatures of God; but confused together, make but one great beast, and a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra.

Be gone, ye blockheads, Heraclitus cries,
And leave my labours to the learn'd and wise:
By wit, by knowledge, studious to be read,
I scorn the multitude, alive and dead.

(Ἡράκλειτος ἐγώ· τί μεὦ κάτω ἕλκετ᾽ ἄμουσοι;
Οὐχ᾽ ὑμῖν ἐπόνουν, τοῖς δέ μ᾽ ἐπισταμένοις.
Εἷς ἐμοὶ ἄνθρωπος τρισμύριοι οἱ δ᾽ ἀνάριθμοι
Οὐδείς· ταῦτ᾽ αὐδῶ καὶ παρὰ Περσεφόνῃ.)

Murder

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one!

English law does not permit good persons, as such, to strangle bad persons, as such.

Who will free me from this turbulent priest [Thomas Becket]?

Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out.

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbathbreaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.

Music

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes — ah, that is where the art resides!

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

She said, "I know you … you cannot sing". I said, "That's nothing, you should hear me play piano."

When one woman was asked how long she had been going to symphony concerts, she paused to calculate and replied, "Forty-seven years — and I find I mind it less and less."

I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.

Music is the best solace for a sad and sorrowful mind; by it the heart is refreshed and settled again in peace.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know,
And all of heaven we have below.

Music has charms to sooth a savage breast.

Myth

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.

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