Cool Quotes - B

A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.

A baby is an alimentary canal with a loud voice at one end and no responsibility at the other.

A bachelor is a selfish, undeserving guy who has cheated some woman out of a divorce.

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't, they'd be married too.

Cock's bones! now again I stand
The jolliest bachelor i' th' land.

A single man has not nearly the value he would have in [a] state of union. He is an incomplete animal. He resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors.

An old bachelor is a poor critter.

A bachelor is one who enjoys the chase but does not eat the game.

Praise all wives, but remain a bachelor.

So long as a man is without a wife he is only half a man.

For 'tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard …

No man becomes bad all at once.

One who is serious all day will never have a good time, while one who is frivolous all day will never establish a household.

There is nothing more contemptible than a bald man who pretends to have hair.

Honest men grow gray; others grow bald.

[The Balkans] produce more history than they can consume.

Where the banana grows man is sensual and cruel.

A banker is a man who lends you an umbrella when the weather is fair, and takes it away from you when it rains.

[The Gauls] derided the hairy and gigantic savages of the North; their rustic manners, dissonant joy, voracious appetite, and their horrid appearance, equally disgusting to the sight and to the smell.

Think! How the hell are you gonna think and hit at the same time?

Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal.

To get thine ends, lay bashfulness aside;
Who fears to ask doth teach to be deny'd.

Though modesty be a virtue, yet bashfulness is a vice.

The bashful always lose.

Those born of sinful intercourse are not counted as children.

Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.

If your bayonet breaks, strike with the stock; if the stock gives way, hit with your fists; if your fists are hurt, bite with your teeth.

To extraordinary circumstance we must apply extraordinary remedies.

Well, well, General, bury these poor men, and let us say no more about it.

A spaniel, a woman, and a walnut tree,
The more they're beaten the better they be.

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies, for instance.

Why is it that beautiful women never seem to have any curiosity?

Is it because they know they're classical? With classical things the Lord finished the job. Ordinary ugly people know they're deficient and they go on looking for the pieces.

Beauty and wisdom are seldom found together.

A holy woman may be beautiful by the gift of nature, but she must not give occasion to lust. If beauty be hers, so far from setting it off she ought rather to obscure it.

Had she deigned to remove her veil, God Himself would have fallen in love with her.

A poor beauty finds more lovers than husbands.

Beauty and sadness always go together.

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.

It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.

It is the beautiful bird which gets caged.

Beauty is a good letter of introduction.

Beauty and chastity are always quarreling.

[Beauty is] an outward gift which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.

Loath to bed, and loath to rise.

No bed is big enough to hold three.

A husband and wife who have separate bedrooms have either drifted apart—or found happiness.

Beefsteaks and porter are gude belly mortar.

He that drinks strong beer,
And goes to bed mellow,
Lives as he ought to live,
And dies a hearty fellow.

I wish to see this beverage become common instead of the whisky which kills one-third of our citizens, and ruins their families.

Here
With my beer
I sit,
While golden moments flit:
Alas!
They pass
Unheeded by:
And as they fly,
I,
Being dry,
Sit, idly sipping here
My beer.

There is no bad beer: some kinds are better than others.

Come and let me cheer your spirits,
Make you sing the songs of wisdom,
That with honor ye may praise me,
Sing the songs of beer immortal!

Thus was brewed the beer of Northland,
At the hands of Osmo's daughter;
This the origin of brewing
Beer from Kalew-hops and barley;
Great indeed the reputation
Of the ancient beer of Kalew,
Said to make the feeble hardy,
Famed to dry the tears of women,
Make the aged young and supple,
Make the brave men ever braver,
Fill the heart with joy and gladness,
Fill the mind with wisdom-sayings,
Fill the tongue with ancient legends,
Only makes the fool more foolish.

Beethoven can write music, thank God—but he can do nothing else on earth.

Beggars should be abolished. It annoys one to give to them, and it annoys one not to give to them.

It is a beggar's pride that he is not a thief.

The beginning is half of the whole.

Every beginning is hard.

I believe it because it is absurd.

We believe nothing so firmly as what we least know.

He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.

Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear.

Never tell all that you know, or do all that you can, or believe all that you hear.

Belief forms behavior.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

The spectator and historian of [Belisarius's] exploits has observed, that amidst the perils of war, he was daring without rashness, prudent without fear, slow or rapid according to the exigencies of the moment; that in the deepest distress he was animated by real or apparent hope, but that he was modest and humble in the most prosperous fortune.

A full belly neither fights nor flies well.

Cui bono? (to whose benefit?)

You also, Brutus? (Et tu, Brute!, though what Caesar said, if anything, and in what language, is uncertain)

The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong—but that's the way to bet.

Biography is one of the new terrors of death.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man—the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

Birth, n. The first and direst of all disasters.

Blame is safer than praise.

Judge none blessed before his death.

May your glass be ever full.
May the roof over your head be always strong.
And may you be in heaven half an hour
Before the Devil knows you're dead.

May you live as long as you want,
And never want as long as you live.

May your neighbors respect you,
Trouble neglect you,
The angels protect you,
And heaven accept you.

May the Good Lord take a liking to you, … but not too soon!

The LORD bless you and keep you;
the LORD make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you;
the LORD turn his face toward you and give you peace.

It may well be a blessing in disguise. At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.

Reading all the good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folk have lent me.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

I never can understand how two men can write a book together; to me that's like three people getting together to have a baby.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or, as it were, fondle them—peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on their shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you will at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances.

May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, or the Phoenicians, or whoever invented books.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing; every one must be an author; some out of vanity, to acquire celebrity and raise up a name, others for the sake of mere gain.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

A great [large] book is a great evil.

I keep to old books, for they teach me something; from the new I learn very little.

My books are friends that never fail me.

Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

I buy books at a geometric rate, but read only arithmetically.

Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?

Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored.

Boredom is an evil that is not to be estimated lightly. It can come in the end to real despair. The public authority takes precautions against it everywhere, as against other universal calamities.

Ennui has made more gamblers than avarice, more drunkards than thirst, and perhaps as many suicides as despair.

Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored.

Borrowing is not much better than begging.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

A boy is, of all wild beasts, the most difficult to manage.

The parent who could see his boy as he really is, would shake his head and say, "Willie is no good; I'll sell him."

One boy is more trouble than a dozen girls.

The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of a remarkable Christian forbearance among men.

A boy is a cross between a god and a goat.

Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

Birth's gude but breeding's better.

I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter.

Do you wish to instruct? Be brief, that the mind may catch thy precepts and the more easily retain them.

In order to speak short upon any subject, think long.

That which is brief, if it be good, is good twice over.

It is not the burden but the overburden that kills the beast.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

A bridegroom is a guy who has lost his liberty in the pursuit of happiness.

In Britain, everything is policed except crime.

For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ's Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.

Socialism has been preached for so long, the British people no longer have any sense of personal responsibility.

Build and borrow,
A sackful of sorrow.
(Bauen und Borgen,
Ein Sack voll Sorgen.)

Light burdens, long borne, grow heavy.

I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life.

[I]n time every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties … Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.

The basic concept of the Dilbert Principle is that the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.

If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.

Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon.

Businessmen are notable for a peculiarly stalwart character, which enables them to enjoy without loss of self-reliance the benefits of tariffs, franchises, and even outright government subsidies.

The egalitarianism of the present tax structure is thought to be seriously dampening individual effort, initiative, and inspiration … [it] destroys ambition, penalizes success, discourages investment to create new jobs, and may well turn a nation of risk-taking entrepreneurs into a nation of softies.

It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses.

Planned Economy: Where everything is included in the plans except economy.

No matter what you think your job is, your job is to make your boss's life easier.

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

A man's work is his dilemma: his job is his bondage, but it also gives him a fair share of his identity and keeps him from being a bystander in somebody else's world.

Committee: A group of the unfit appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary.

It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job, it's a depression when you lose your own.

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

He had talents equal to business, and aspired no higher.

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.

If you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem.

[The] clamour and sophistry of merchants and manufacturers easily persuade [the people], that the private interest of a part, and of a subordinate part, of the society, is the general interest of the whole.

None are so busy as the fool and knave.

He that is busy is tempted by but one devil; he that is idle, by a legion.

The busiest men have the most leisure.

The busy have no time for tears.

It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

For A to sit down and think, What shall I do? is commonplace; but to think what B ought to do is interesting, romantic, moral, self-flattering, and public-spirited all at once. It satisfies a great number of human weaknesses at once. To go on and plan what a whole class of people ought to do is to feel one's self a power on earth, to win a public position, to clothe one's self in dignity. Hence we have an unlimited supply of reformers, philanthropists, humanitarians, and would-be managers-in-general of society.

Let the buyer beware. (Caveat emptor.)