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Cool Quotes - A

Ability


There is something that is much more scarce, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.
Robert Half

They are able because they think they are able.
Virgil

Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study.
Francis Bacon

The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
Edward Gibbon

Abortion


I will not give to a woman an instrument to procure abortion.
The Hippocratic Oath, c. 400 B. C.

Prevention of birth is a precipitation of murder. He also is a man who is about to be one.
Tertullian

Abraham Lincoln


My fellow citizens, the President is dead, but the Government lives and God Omnipotent reigns.
James Abram Garfield, after President Lincoln's assassination.

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, …
Walt Whitman

Absence


Speak no evil of an absent friend. (Non male loquare absenti amico.)
Plautus

Seldom seen, soon forgotten.
Richard Hilles

The pain without the peace of death.
Thomas Campbell

The absent are as good as dead.
Latin Proverb

The absent and the dead have no friends.
Spanish Proverb

Absence makes the heart go wander.
Author unidentified

Abstemiousness And Gluttony


To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals.
Benjamin Franklin

Short supper; long life.
Serbian proverb

If you find honey, eat just enough—
too much of it, and you will vomit.
Proverbs 25:16

Abstinence


Abstinence is as easy to me, as temperance would be difficult.
Samuel Johnson

Abundance


Abundance kills more than hunger.
German proverb

Accident


Nothing under the sun is ever accidental.
G. E. Lessing

Accusation


If someone accuses you for something you haven't done he either has done it himself or he would do it if he were you.
Edi Rama (Attributed)

Achievement


No man has lived to much purpose unless he has built a house, begotten a son, or written a book.
Italian Proverb

Never mistake activity for achievement.
John Wooden

Accomplishing something provides the only real satisfaction in life.
Thomas Edison

Acquaintance


The wisest man I have ever known once said to me: "Nine out of every ten people improve on acquaintance," and I have found his words true.
Frank Swinnerton

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to min'?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o' lang syne?
Robert Burns

If a man is worth knowing at all, he is worth knowing well.
Alexander Smith

Acquaintance, n. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

A wise man knows everything; a shrewd one, everybody.
Author unidentified

Action


There are two kinds of people: those who don't do what they want to do, so they write down in a diary about what they haven't done, and those who haven't time to write about it because they're out doing it.
Richard Flournoy and Lewis R. Foster

I plow, but I do not write about plowing.
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

It seems to me that man is made to act rather than to know: the principles of things escape our most persevering researches.
Frederick The Great

Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.
Benjamin Disraeli

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those, who in times of moral crisis, do nothing.
Dante Alighieri

To an active mind, indolence is more painful than labor.
Edward Gibbon

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Theodore Roosevelt

"He means well" is useless unless he does well.
Plautus

The inactivity of a conqueror betrays the loss of strength and blood …
Edward Gibbon

No matter how big and tough a problem may be, get rid of confusion by taking one little step toward solution. Do something.
George F. Nordenholt

Colonel Brighton: Look, sir, we can't just do nothing.
General Allenby: Why not? It's usually best.
David Lean

No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
Edmund Burke

This world, where much is to be done and little to be known.
Samuel Johnson

Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.
Napoleon Bonaparte

If you're not making mistakes, then you're not doing anything. I'm positive that a doer makes mistakes.
John Wooden

We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.
Calvin Coolidge

I never worry about action, but only about inaction.
Winston Churchill

Actor


Actors are a nuisance in the earth, the very offal of society.
Timothy Dwight

[Studio official's assessment of Fred Astaire:] Can't act. Slightly bald. Also dances.
Author unidentified

Actress


The life of youth and beauty is too short for the bringing an actress to perfection.
Colley Cibber

Adam


In the Garden of Eden sat Adam,
Massaging the bust of his madam,
He chuckled with mirth,
For he knew that on earth,
There were only two boobs and he had 'em.
Author unidentified

What could Adam have done to God that made Him put Eve in the garden?
Polish Proverb

The tomb of Adam! How touching it was, here in a land of strangers, far away from home, and friends, and all who cared for me, thus to discover the grave of a blood relation. True, a distant one, but still a relation.
Mark Twain

Addiction


It's like I have a shotgun in my mouth, and I've got my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal.
Robert Downey Jr.

Adjective


As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.
Mark Twain

The adjective is the enemy of the noun.
Author unidentified

Admiration


Admiration is a very short-lived passion, that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object.
Joseph Addison

Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Things not understood are admired.
Thomas Fuller

Admonition


Admonish your friends in private; praise them in public.
Publilius Syrus

Adulteress


For the lips of an adulteress drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil; but in the end she is bitter as gall, sharp as a double-edged sword.
Proverbs 5:3-4

All at once he followed her [the adulteress] like an ox going to the slaughter
Proverbs 7:22

Adultery


If a married woman shall be caught lying with another man, both shall be bound and thrown into the river.
The Code of the Hammurabi

But a man who commits adultery lacks judgment;
whoever does so destroys himself.
Proverbs 6:32

Between a man and his wife a husband's infidelity is nothing. The man imposes no bastards on his wife.
Samuel Johnson

A wanton and lascivious eye
Betrays the heart's adultery.
Robert Herrick

Adverb


The adverb is the enemy of the verb.
Author unidentified

Adversity


In time of prosperity friends will be plenty;
In time of adversity not one in twenty.
James Howell

In prosperity, caution; in adversity, patience.
Dutch Proverb

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.
Mark Twain

While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior.
Henry C. Link

Adversity is the state in which man mostly easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.
John Wooden

You can't adjust the winds, but you can adjust your sails.
Author unidentified

Prosperity getteth friends, but adversity trieth them.
Nicholas Ling

In the adversity of our best friends we often find something that is not wholly displeasing to us.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Adversity makes a man wise, not rich.
John Ray

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
Thomas Carlyle

Advertisement


Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
Stephen Leacock

Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark: you know what you are doing, but nobody else does.
Edgar Watson Howe

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
Thomas Jefferson

I always hated those testimonials on TV … [where the actress says,] "If I can do it, you can do it." How the hell does she know what I can and cannot do?
Stephen Furst

Advice


When we ask advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
Marquis de Lagrange

Whatever your advice, make it brief.
Horace

Advice is least heeded when most needed.
English Proverb

You may give him good advice, but who can give him wit to take it?
Thomas Fuller

The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.
Oscar Wilde

Beware the advice of a poor man.
Spanish Proverb

Never advise anyone to go to war or to marry.
Spanish Proverb

Years ago, my mother used to say to me, "In this world, Elwood, you must be be oh so smart or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.
Elwood P. Dowde (James Stewart), "Harvey"

Ask advice only of your equals.
Danish Proverb

Many receive advice, few profit by it.
Publilius Syrus

Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

[But] if the royal ear [of Theodoric] was open to the voice of truth, a saint and a philosopher are not always to be found at the ear of kings.
Edward Gibbon

If you've ever taken advice from a cartoonist, there's a good chance it didn't end well.
Scott Adams

We may give Advice, but we cannot give Conduct.
Author unidentified

It is better to advise than upbraid, for the one corrects the erring; the other only convicts them.
Epicetus

How is it possible to expect that mankind will take advice, when they will not so much as take warning?
Jonathan Swift

Advice is seldom welcome …
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield

We ask advice but mean approbation.
C. C. Colton

Ah, gentle dames! it gars me greet,
To think how mony counsels sweet,
How mony lengthen'd, sage advices,
The husband frae the wife despises!

(Ah, gentle ladies, it makes me cry,
To think how many counsels sweet,
How much long and wise advice
The husband from the wife despises!)

Robert Burns

Affectation


The qualities we have do not make us so ridiculous as those we affect to have.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Affection


Affection is a coal that must be cooled;
Else, suffered, it will set the heart on fire.
William Shakespeare

I could have been happy with a servant girl had she only in sincerity of heart responded to my affection.
S. T. Coleridge

Age


One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell that would tell anything.
Oscar Wilde

I'm very pleased with each advancing year. It stems back to when I was forty. I was a bit upset about reaching that milestone, but an older friend consoled me. 'Don't complain about growing old—many, many people do not have that privilege.'
Earl Warren

Old age is not so bad when you consider the alternatives.
Maurice Chevalier

As for me, except for an occasional heart attack, I feel as young as I ever did.
Robert Benchley

You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.
Woody Allen

Nothing so dates a man as decrying the younger generation.
Adlai Stevenson

There are three categories of age: youth, middle age, and "Gee, you're looking well."
Dean Rusk

Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret.
Benjamin Disraeli

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Aggression


Aggression unchallenged is aggression unleashed.
Phaedrus

Agnostic


In every unbeliever's heart there is an uneasy feeling that, after all, he may awake after death and find himself immortal. This is his punishment for his unbelief. This is the agnostic's Hell.
H. L. Mencken

Agreeable


My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me.
Benjamin Disraeli

Alice Roosevelt Longworth


I can do one of two things. I can be president of the United States or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.
Theodore Roosevelt

Alliance


Close alliances with despots are never safe for free states.
Demosthenes

Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations—entangling alliances with none.
Thomas Jefferson

The nature of the English government forbids, of itself, reliance on her engagements; and it is well known she has been the least faithful to her alliances of any nation of Europe.
Thomas Jefferson

Any alliance whose purpose is not the intention to wage war is senseless and useless
Adolph Hitler

Alliteration


Alliteration tickles the ear, and is a very popular form of language among savages.
Benjamin Disraeli

Alms


I must be dunned for alms, and do not scramble over hedges and ditches in searching for opportunities of flinging away my money on good works.
Horace Walpole

I do not give alms: I am not poor enough for that.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Alone


It is better to be alone than in ill company.
George Pettie

A man is never alone, not only because he is with himself and his own thoughts, but because he is with the Devil, who ever consorts with our solitude.
Thomas Browne

I was never less alone than while by myself.
Edward Gibbon

Woe unto him that is never alone, and cannot bear to be alone.
P. G. Hamerton

A man alone is either a god or a devil. (Homo solus aut deus, aut daemon.)
Latin Proverb

Altruism


It is the freeman who must win freedom for the slave; it is the wise man who must think for the fool; it is the happy who must serve the unhappy.
Jean Paul Richter

Nobody does good to men with impunity.
Auguste Rodin

Ambassador


A sovereign should always regard an ambassador as a spy.
The Hitopadesa

Ambassadors are the eyes and ears of the state.
Francesco Guicciardini

[An ambassador is] a politician who is given a job abroad in order to get him out of the country.
Author unidentified

Ambition


Vain the ambition of kings
Who seek by trophies and dead things
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.
John Webster

It seems that ambition makes most people wish to be loved rather than to love others.
Aristotle

Be content with your lot; one cannot be first in everything.
Aesop

I would to God there were more ambition in the country … ambition of that laudable kind, to excel.
John Adams

Men are generally idle, and ready to satisfy themselves, and intimidate the industry of others, by calling that impossible which is only difficult.
Samuel Johnson

Ambition is a vice, but it may be the father of virtue.
Quintilian

The same ambition can destroy or save,
And makes a patriot as it makes a knave.
Alexander Pope

Where ambition ends happiness begins.
Hungarian proverb

America


In England I would rather be a man, a horse, a dog, or a woman, in that order. In America I think the order would be reversed.
Bruce Gould

I regard England as my wife and America as my mistress.
Cedric Hardwicke

The European traveler in America—at least if I may judge by myself—is struck by two peculiarities: first, the extreme similarity of outlook in all parts of the United States (except the Old South), and secondly, the passionate desire of each locality to prove that it is peculiar and different from every other. The second of these is, of course, caused by the first.
Bertrand Russell

Because I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.
Unidentified Indian immigrant when asked why he wants to come to America

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.
Frank Zappa

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
Oscar Wilde

America is not what's wrong with the world.
Donald Rumsfeld

America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.
Alexis de Tocqueville (Attributed)

I'll start to worry about America's standing in the world when people from all corners of the earth cease to want to come here.
Attributed to Paul Johnson

America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.
Bernard Lewis

The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.
Winston Churchill (Attributed)

We have learned one lesson in the last half-century: the well-being of the world depends, above all, on the sensible pursuit of common aims by the United States and the free European peoples. That the Japanese are rapidly transforming this relationship into a triangular one goes without saying. But the U.S.-European axis remains the fulcrum of stability, and the Europeans know it: it is the one fixed point in their geopolitics. For this reason they are remarkably dependent on the workings of the American system, and the character of the man it places in the White House.
Paul Johnson

I wonder if the word "American" will one day have the same connotation as the word "byzantine."
Author unidentified

America is now a land that rewards failure—at the personal, corporate, and state level.
Mark Steyn

The later chapters of "The Decline and Fall of the United States" will make interesting reading.
Charles C. W. Cooke

I want no criticism of America at my table. The Americans criticize themselves more than enough.
Winston Churchill

Europe is the product of history. America is the product of philosophy.
Margaret Thatcher (paraphrased)

Anyone, in any walk of life, who is content with mediocrity is untrue to himself and to American tradition.
George S. Patton, Jr.

America will never be an ordinary country; it's always going to be extraordinary.
Paul Johnson

Anyone who travels to every part of the United States, as I do, becomes aware that the notion of America oppressing humanity is absurd. To a great extent, America is humanity.
Paul Johnson

In the 1770s, surveying the immensity and diversity of London, Dr. Samuel Johnson laid down: "Sir, a man who is tired of London is tired of life." The saying could be rephrased today. A man who hates America hates humanity.
Paul Johnson

In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not: the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

‥ how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?
Samuel Johnson

American


No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
H. L. Mencken

The American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goosesteppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages.
H. L. Mencken

The Americans are the illegitimate children of the English.
H. L. Mencken

Americans are very smart about the things they care about, and ignorant about the things they don't.
Jonah Goldberg

We [Americans] are fat, overgrown lab rats, and we get too many reward pellets for too little effort.
Graeme Wood

There are no people in the world who are so slow to develop hostile feelings against a foreign country as the Americans and there are no people who once estranged, are more difficult to win back.
Winston Churchill

I am not a Virginian but an American.
Patrick Henry

They [Americans] are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.
Samuel Johnson

I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.
Samuel Johnson

See what it is to have a nation to take its place among civilized states before it has either gentlemen or scholars. They have in the course of 20 years acquired a distinct national character for low, lying knavery.
Robert Southey

I have traveled more than four thousand miles about this country; and I never met one single insolent or rude … American.
Thomas Holme

[An American is] an Anglo-Saxon relapsed into semi-barbarism.
Bayard Taylor

The American is nomadic in religion, in ideas, in morals.
James Russell Lowell

God looks after drunks, children, and Americans.
Author unidentified

American Fanaticism


Sometimes it [the witch-hunt] is launched from one end of the ideological spectrum, sometimes from the other, but its characteristics remain the same: fanaticism, self-righteousness, abuse of the legal forms, contempt for justice.
Paul Johnson

American Language


It is remarkable how very debased the language has become in a short period in America.
Frederick Marryat

When I speak my native tongue in its utmost purity in England, and Englishman can't understand me at all.
Mark Twain

Ammianus Marcellinus


Ammianus is so eloquent, that he writes nonsense.
Edward Gibbon

Anarchist


The following classes of aliens shall be excluded from admission into the United States: … anarchists, or persons who believe in or advocate the overthrow by force or violence of the government of the United States, or of all government, or of all forms of law, or the assassination of public officials.
Act of Congress, Feb. 20, 1907

Ancestry


I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.
Abraham Lincoln

Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.
Van Wyck Brooks

It is certainly desirable to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.
Plutarch

He who boasts of his descent praises another.
Seneca

A mule always boasts that its ancestors were horses.
German Proverb

Speak of the moderns without contempt and of the ancients without idolatry; judge them all by their merits and not by their age.
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield

People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.
Edmund Burke

The Queen is not amused.
Queen Victoria

Andrew Jackson


If we had had the cable telegraph in those days, this blood [from the battle of New Orleans] would not have been spilt, those lives would not have been wasted; and better still, Jackson would probably never have been president. We have gotten over the harms done us by the war of 1812, but not over some of those done us by Jackson's presidency.
Mark Twain

Angel


Who does the best his circumstances allows
Does well, acts nobly; angels could do no more.
Edward Young

Anger


The best cure for anger is delay.
Seneca

How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.
Marcus Aurelius

Whate'er's begun in anger ends in shame.
Benjamin Franklin

When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, a hundred.
Thomas Jefferson

Anger is a vulgar passion directed to vulgar ends, and it always sinks to the level of its object.
Ernst Von Feuchtersleben

The size of a man can be measured by the size of the thing that makes him angry.
J. Kenfield Morley

He who is slow to anger is longer getting over it.
Hungarian Proverb

Never forget what a man says to you when he is angry.
Henry Ward Beecher

An angry man [differs] from a madman only in the shorter time which his passion [endures].
Cato the Elder (Marcus Porcius Cato)

"In your anger do not sin": Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.
Ephesians 4:26,27

Anger so clouds the mind, that it cannot perceive the truth.
Cato the Elder (Marcus Porcius Cato)

We are all crazy when we are angry.
Philemon

Women are like wasps in their anger.
Nicholas Breton

The angry man never wanted woe.
Thomas Draxe

Anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one.
Benjamin Franklin

Anger begins with folly, and ends with repentance.
H. G. Bohn

The best answer to anger is silence.
German Proverb

He who restrains his anger overcomes his greatest enemy.
Hungarian Proverb

Anglo-Saxon


The great qualities of the Anglo-Saxon race are industry, intelligence, and self-confidence.
Anthony Trollope

The Anglo-Saxon carries self-government and self-development with him wherever he goes.
H. W. Beecher

Animal


Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you. Give me a pig. He just looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal.
Winston Churchill

A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than you love yourself.
Josh Billings

The pig, if I am not mistaken,
Supplies us sausage, ham, and bacon.
Let others say his heart is big—
I call it stupid of the pig.
Ogden Nash

If you have no trouble, buy a goat.
Persian Proverb

Our toil is lessened, and our wealth is increased, by our dominion over the useful animals …
Edward Gibbon

There be beasts that, at a year old, observe more, and pursue that which is for their good more prudently, than a child can do at ten.
Thomas Hobbes

The lower animals have not the high advantages which we have, but they have some which we lack. They know nothing of our hopes, but they also know nothing of our fears; they are subject to death as we are, but they are not aware of it; most of them are better able to take care of themselves than we are, and they make a less evil use of their passions.
C. L. de Montesquieu

Animals are such agreeable friends—they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.
George Eliot

Animals are such agreeable friends—they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.
George Eliot

Answer


No answer is also an answer.
German Proverb

A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.
Proverbs 15:1

Ant


Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.
Proverbs 6:6-8

As a thinker and a planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage or civilized.
Mark Twain

Antipathy


Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity.
William Hazlitt

Antiquity


Let others praise ancient times; I am glad that I was born in these.
Ovid

Damn the age; I will write for antiquity.
Attributed to Charles Lamb

Antisocial


The antisocial or asocial man is either a beast or a god.
Aristotle

Aphorism


The excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some obvious and useful truth in a few words.
Samuel Johnson

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what other men in whole books—what other men do not say in whole books.
F. W. Nietzsche

Apostasy


If I am asked, Shall I utter the formula of Islam or submit to death? I answer, Utter the formula and live.
Maimonides

Appearance


All is not gold that shines like gold. (Non teneas aurum totum quod splendet ut aurum.)
Other translations:
  1. Everything that glitters is not gold.
  2. Do not hold as gold all that shines as gold.
Alanus De Insulis

Three-tenths of a good appearance are due to nature; seven-tenths to dress.
Chinese Proverb

A good exterior is a silent recommendation
Publilius Syrus

Appearances are very deceitful.
Tobias Smollett

Men are valued, not for what they are, but for what they seem to be.
E. G. Bulwer-Lytton

Do not praise individuals for their good looks, or loathe anyone because of appearance alone.
Ecclesiasticus 11:2

Appeasement


I … smell the stench of appeasement in the air.
Margaret Thatcher

I think that if I give him [Stalin] everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

My good friends this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace in our time.
Neville Chamberlain

We seem to be very near the bleak choice between war and shame. My feeling is that we shall choose shame and then have war thrown in a little later on even more adverse terms than at present.
Winston Churchill

Appetite


All man's efforts are for his mouth, yet his appetite is never satisfied.
Ecclesiastes 6:7

Subdue your appetites, and you've conquered human nature.
Charles Dickens

Appetite comes with eating … but the thirst goes away with drinking.
François Rabelais

Let appetite obey reason.
Cicero

Leave with an appetite.
William Bullein

If thou rise with an appetite thou art sure never to sit down without one.
William Penn

The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves.
Joseph Addison

Applause


When most the world applauds you, most beware:
'Tis often less a blessing than a snare.
Edward Young

Do not trust to the cheering, for those very persons would shout as much if you and I were going to be hanged.
Oliver Cromwell

When you applaud me at the start [of my speech], that's faith; midway through, that's hope. But, ah, my dear friends, if you applaud me at the end, that will be charity!
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen

Arab


Better the oppression of Turks than the justice of Arabs.
Arab Proverb

The life of a wandering Arab [in the time of Gibbon] is a life of danger and distress; and though sometimes, by rapine or exchange, he may appropriate the fruits of industry, a private citizen in Europe is in the possession of more solid and pleasing luxury than the proudest emir, who marches in the field at the head of ten thousand horse.
Edward Gibbon

[The] noblest of [Arabs] united the love of arms with the profession of merchandise.
Edward Gibbon

[Arabs are] a people, whom it is dangerous to provoke, and fruitless to attack.
Edward Gibbon

But [the Arabs'] friendship was venal, their faith inconstant, their enmity capricious: it was an easier task to excite than to disarm these roving barbarians; and, in the familiar intercourse of war, they learned to see, and to despise, the splendid weakness both of Rome and of Persia.
Edward Gibbon

The character of Hatem is the perfect model of Arabian virtue: he was brave and liberal, an eloquent poet, and a successful robber …
Edward Gibbon

Arabic


He was swearing audibly, and when he found that the infirmities of the English tongue hemmed in his rage, he sought consolation in Arabic, which is expressly designed for the use of the afflicted.
Rudyard Kipling

Archbishop


Scanavius relates that he knew an archbishop who was so old that he could remember a time when he did not deserve hanging.
Ambrose Bierce

Architect


Architect, n. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Architecture


I have found a paper of mine in which I call architecture frozen music [erstarrte Musik]. Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In architecture the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will to power, assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Arctic


This gloomy region [the Arctic], where the year is divided into one day and one night, lies entirely outside the stream of history.
W. Winwood Reade

Argument


When we wish to reprove with profit, and show another that he is mistaken, we must observe on what side he looks at the thing, for it is usually true on that side, and to admit to him that truth, but to discover to him the side whereon it is false. He is pleased with this, for he perceives that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to look on all sides.
Blaise Pascal

It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
Caron de Beaumarchais

To attempt to argue any great question upon facts only is absurd; you cannot state any fact before a mixed audience which an opponent as clever as yourself cannot with ease twist towards another bearing, or at least meet by a contrary fact, as it is called.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There is no greater mistake that the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued.
T. H. Huxley

Armenian


If you can make a good bargain with an Armenian you can make a good bargain with the Devil.
Persian Proverb

Arms


The principal foundations of all states are good laws and good arms; and there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms.
Niccolò Machiavelli

Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.
Aristotle

All the armed prophet conquered; all the unarmed ones perished.
Niccolò Machiavelli

The principal foundations of all states are good laws and good arms; and there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms.
Niccolò Machiavelli

I do not wish to see guns in the hands of all the world, for there are other ferae naturae besides hares and partridges.
Horace Walpole

A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Constitution of the United States of America, Amendment II

Arms are the props of peace. (Arma pacis fulcra.)
Latin Proverb

Army


An army of stags led by a lion is more to be feared than an army of lions led by a stag.
Attributed to Chabrias

That's what an army is—a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.
Mark Twain

A large army is always disorderly.
Euripides

Walled towns, stored arsenals and armories, goodly races of horse, chariots of war, elephants, ordinance, artillery, and the like; all this is but a sheep in lion's skin except the breed and disposition of the people be stout and warlike.
Francis Bacon

The Greeks by their laws, and the Romans by the spirit of their people, took care to put into the hands of their rulers no such engine of oppression as a standing army. Their system was to make every man a soldier, and oblige him to repair to the standard of his country whenever that was reared. This made them invincible; and the same remedy will make us so.
Thomas Jefferson

The army has always been the basis of power, and it is so today. Power is always in the hands of those who command it.
Lyof N. Tolstoy

Arrogance


[Their] minds were not yet humbled to their condition …
Edward Gibbon

Art


Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.
Somerset Maugham

Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.
Hippocrates

Art imitates nature as well as it can, as a pupil follows his master; thus it is a sort of grandchild of God.
Dante Alighieri

You must treat a work of art like a great man: stand before it and wait patiently till it deigns to speak.
Arthur Schopenhauer

No one can explain how the notes of a Mozart melody, or the folds of a piece of Titian's drapery, produce their essential effects. If you do not feel it, no one can by reasoning make you feel it.
John Ruskin

I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like.
American Proverb

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
Edith Wharton

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.
G. K. Chesterton

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
Orson Welles

I don't know what art is, but I do know what it isn't. And it isn't someone walking around with a salmon over his shoulder, or embroidering the name of everyone they have slept with on the inside of a tent.
Brian Sewell

The photographer is like the cod which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.
George Bernard Shaw

I always ask the sitter if they want truth or flattery. They always ask for truth, and I always give them flattery.
Ruskin Spear

Yes—one does like to make one's mummy just as nice as possible!
James McNeill Whistler

All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.
Oscar Wilde

If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility.
Peter Medawar

The joy of conceptual art is that the description is everything. Oh yes, there is real artistry at work here. It just isn't on the walls but in the catalogue descriptions.
Benet Brandreth

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?
Ludwig van Beethoven

The period in which any given people reach their highest power in art is precisely that in which they appear to sign the warrant of their own ruin.
John Ruskin

It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art.
Mark Twain

It is the treating of the commonplace with the feeling of the sublime that gives to art its true power.
Jean-Francois Millet

The struggle against a purpose in art is always a struggle against the moral tendency in art—against its subordination to morality. L'art pour l'art means, Let morality go to the Devil.
F. W. Nietzsche

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.
Theodore Dreiser

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.
Theodore Dreiser

Artery


A man is as old as his arteries.
Thomas Sydenham

Artist


The gods that first taught artists their craft laid a great curse on mankind.
Antiphanes

Artists are on the average less happy than men of science.
Bertrand Russell

The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost—by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.
E. W. Emerson

The great artist is the simplifier.
H. F. Amiel

The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
George Bernard Shaw

Asceticism


There is no virtue in penance and fasting which waste the body; they are only fanatical and monkish.
Immanuel Kant

A dominant religion is never ascetic.
Thomas Babington Macaulay

Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
William James

Asking


He that asketh faintly beggeth a denial.
Thomas Fuller

The man who is afraid of asking is ashamed of learning.
Danish Proverb

Aspiration


Men would be angels, angels would be gods.
Alexander Pope

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's Heaven for?
Robert Browning

The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life:
Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate.
Robert Browning

Hitch your wagon to a star.
R. W. Emerson

If you aspire to the highest place it is no disgrace to stop at the second, or even the third.
Cicero

Assassination


Assassination is the last resource of cowards.
Edward Gibbon

Assembly


The more numerous an assembly may be, of whatever characters composed, the greater is known to be the ascendancy of passion over reason.
Alexander Hamilton

Association


I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself.
Charles Lamb

When a dove begins to associate with crows its feathers remain white but its heart grows black.
German Proverb

Astrology


[Astrology] is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and teachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence.
William Shakespeare

I don't believe in astrology; I'm a Sagittarius and we're sceptical.
Arthur C. Clarke

Astronomy


[The] sublime science of astronomy … elevates the mind of man to disdain his diminutive planet and momentary existence.
Edward Gibbon

Atheism


It is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what God can do: good Christians content themselves with His will revealed in His Word.
James I

A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth a man's mind about to religion.
Francis Bacon

The three great apostles of practical atheism, that make converts without persecuting, and retain them without preaching, are wealth, health, and power.
C. C. Colton

Practical atheism, seeing no guidance for human affairs but its own limited foresight, endeavors itself to play the god, and decide what will be good for mankind and what bad.
Herbert Spencer

… by cutting the umbilical cord with God, our source of ethical vitality would be gone. Morally, we would be come nothing better than a species of fantastically clever monkeys. Our ultimate fate would be too horrible to contemplate. For the truth is that we humans are all Jekyll and Hyde creatures, and the monster within each of us is always striving to take over.
Paul Johnson

Atheist


The kingdom that is infested by atheists is beset by famine and disease and soon perishes.
The Code of Manu

To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.
Woody Allen

Some are atheists by neglect; others are so by affectation; they that think there is no God at some times do not think so at all times.
Benjamin Whichcote

Attack


Don't fire until you can see the whites of their eyes.
William Prescott

Attention


He that considers how little he dwells upon the condition of others, will learn how little the attention of others is attracted to himself.
Samuel Johnson

Attitude


A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Herm Albright

Audacity


Success is the child of audacity.
Benjamin Disraeli

Audience


The best audience is intelligent, well-educated, and a little drunk.
Alben W. Barkley

The play was a great success, but the audience was a total failure.
Oscar Wilde

Austria


Poor Austria! Two things made her a nation: she was German and she was Catholic, and now she has neither.
Benjamin Disraeli

Austrian


So long as the Austrian has his beer and sausages he will not revolt.
Ludwig van Beethoven

No Italian can hate an Austrian more than I do; unless it is the English, the Austrians seem to me the most obnoxious race under the sky.
Lord Byron

Author


The best part of every author is in general to be found in his book, I assure you.
Samuel Johnson

While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.
Samuel Johnson

An author is like a baker; it is for him to make the sweets, and others to buy and enjoy them.
Leigh Hunt

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.
Charles de Montesquieu

Authors with a mortgage never get writer's block.
Mavis Cheek

An author places himself uncalled before the tribunal of criticism, and solicits fame at the hazard of disgrace.
Samuel Johnson

There are men that will make you books, and turn 'em loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.
Cervantes

Choose an author as you choose a friend.
Wentworth Dillon

The most "popular," the most "successful" writers among us (for a brief period, at least) are, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, persons of mere address, perseverance, effrontery—in a word, busy-bodies, toadies, quacks.
Edgar Allan Poe

The author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
Benjamin Disraeli

A writing man is something of a black sheep, like the village fiddler. Occasionally a fiddler becomes a violinist, and is a credit to his family, but as a rule he would have done better had his tendency been toward industry and saving.
E. W. Howe

I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds. I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquility, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.
Samuel Johnson

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.
Samuel Johnson

Authority


Nothing has been found so mighty
That it has not found a master.
Elias Lonnrot, The Kalevala

Autobiography


Autobiography is now as common as adultery and hardly less reprehensible.
Lord Altrincham (John Grigg)

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
Quentin Crisp

To write one's memoirs is to speak ill of everybody except oneself.
Henri Philippe Pétain

The next thing like living one's life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing.
Benjamin Franklin

To set about writing my own life would be no less than horrible to me; and shall of a certainty never be done. The common impious vulgar of this earth, what has it to do with my life or me?
Thomas Carlyle

Automobile


Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperately? I say that what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down.
Russell Baker

Carriage without horses shall go,
And accidents fill the world with woe.
Anonymous, 1862

Avarice


Avarice and luxury have been the ruin of every great state.
Livy

Avarice has so seized upon mankind that their wealth seems rather to possess them than they to possess their wealth.
Pliny the Younger

Aviation


What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly?
William Law

The birds can fly,
An' why can't I?
J. T. Trowbridge

Award


I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either.
Jack Benny

Awkwardness


Men lose more conquests by their own awkwardness than by any virtue in the woman.
Ninon de Enclos

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Last updated: May 26, 2023