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Cool Quotes - L
Labor
In a state of nature, it is an invariable law, that a man's acquisitions are in proportion to his labours.
Edmund Burke
The labor we delight in physics (alleviates) pain.
Shakespeare
Labor is no disgrace.
Hesiod
What is there illustrious that is not attended by labor?
Cicero
Life gives nothing to man without labor.
Horace
Labor is a powerful medicine.
St. John Chrysostom
God sells us all things at the price of labor.
Leonardo da Vinci
Labor, as well as fasting, serves to mortify and subdue the flesh. Provided the labor you undertake contributes to the glory of God and your own welfare, I would prefer that you should suffer the pain of labor rather than that of fasting.
St. Francis de Sales
To labor is the lot of man below;
And when Jove gave us life, he gave us woe.
Alexander Pope, Tr. of Homer
Nature recompenses men for their sufferings; it renders them laborious, because to the greatest toils it attaches the greatest rewards. But if arbitrary power take away the rewards of nature, man resumes his disgust for labor, and inactivity appears to be the only good.
C. L. de Montesquieu
When I go into my garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.
R. W. Emerson
A truly American sentiment recognizes the dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in honest toil.
Grover Cleveland
There is no boon in nature. All the blessings we enjoy are the fruits of labor, toil, self-denial, and study.
W. G. Sumner
Labor, even the most humble and the most obscure, if it is well done, tends to beautify and embellish the world.
Gabrielle D'Annunzio
No form of labor is a disgrace. Labor is, on the contrary, the highest degree of nobility for anyone who faithfully coöperates through it and with it in constructing the life of the community and in preserving the nation.
Adolf Hitler
No man, unless his body or mind be totally disabled, has need to suffer the mortification of seeing himself useless or burthensome to the community: he that will diligently labour, in whatever occupation, will deserve the sustenance which he obtains, and the protection which he enjoys; and may lie down every night with the pleasing consciousness of having contributed something to the happiness of life.
Samuel Johnson
Labor Union
The bad workmen, who form the majority of the operatives in many branches of industry, are decidedly of opinion that bad workmen ought to receive the same wages as good.
J. S. Mill
The methods by which a trade union can alone act are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.
Henry George
Trade unions are the only means by which workmen can protect themselves from the tyranny of those who employ them. But the moment that trade unions become tyrants in their turn they are engines for evil: they have no right to prevent people from working on any terms that they choose.
Mr. Justice Lindley
Facts show that politically independent trade unions do not exist anywhere. There have never been any. Experience and theory say that there never will be any.
Leon Trotsky
There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.
Calvin Coolidge
The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn't do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn't do a thing for them.
Milton Friedman
Lady
Ladies set no value on the moral character of men who pay their addresses to them: the greatest profligate will be as well received as the man of the greatest virtue, and this by a very good woman, by a woman who says her prayers three times a day.
Samuel Johnson
Laissez-faire
Liberty of action and liberty of movement. (Laissez faire et laissez passer.)
Ascribed to J. C. M. V. de Gournay
Land
Still, it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in.
Winston Churchill
If a man own land, the land owns him.
R. W. Emerson
The possession of land involves and carries with it the duty of cultivating that land.
Charles Bradlauch
He is not a full man who does not own a piece of land.
Hebrew Proverb
Buy land. They ain't making any more of the stuff.
Will Rogers
Language
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
George Orwell
I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations.
Samuel Johnson
Language [is] the leading principle which unites or separates the tribes of mankind.
Edward Gibbon
[Greek is] doubtless the most perfect [language] that has been contrived by the art of man.
Edward Gibbon
Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.
Mark Twain
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
George Orwell
[Greek is] a musical and prolific language, that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of philosophy.
Edward Gibbon
He [Churchill] mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.
Edward R. Murrow
Don't swear, boy. It shows a lack of vocabulary.
Alan Bennett
If Miss means respectably unmarried, and Mrs respectably married, then Ms means nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Angela Carter
They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.
Mark Twain
Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill.
Flann O'Brien
When I survey the Plan [of a Dictionary of the English Language] which I have laid before you, I cannot, my Lord, but confess, that I am frightened at its extent, and, like the soldiers of Caesar, look on Britain as a new world, which it is almost madness to invade. But I hope, that though I should not complete the conquest, I shall at least discover the coast, civilize part of the inhabitants, and make it easy for some other adventurer to proceed farther, to reduce them wholly to subjection, and settle them under laws.
Samuel Johnson
For language is the framework of reason; unless it is ordered and related to truth, reason cannot express itself.
Paul Johnson
A man who deliberately inflicts violence on the language will almost certainly inflict violence on human beings if he acquires the power. Those who treasure the meaning of words will treasure truth, and those who bend words to their purposes are very likely in pursuit of anti-social ones.
Paul Johnson
We are trying to unravel the Mighty Infinite using a language which was designed to tell one another where the fresh fruit was.
Terry Pratchett
To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horse —German.
Charles V
The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.
Galen
Man has great power of speech, but the greater part thereof is empty and deceitful. The animals have little, but that little is useful and true; and better is a small and certain thing than a great falsehood.
Leonardo da Vinci
The Italian is pleasant, but without sinews, as a still reflecting water; the French delicate, but even nice as a woman, scarce daring to open her lips for fear of marring her countenance; the Spanish majestical but fulsome, running too much on the o, and terrible like the Devil in a play; the Dutch manlike, but withal very harsh, as one ready at every word to pick a quarrel.
Richard Carew
Every living language, like the perspiring bodies of living creatures, is in perpetual motion and lateration; some words go off, and become obsolete; others are taken in, and by degrees grow into common use; or the same word is inverted to a new sense and notion, which in tract of time makes as observable a change in the air and features of a language as age makes in the lines and mien of a face.
Richard Bentley
It is with language as with manners: they are both established by the usage of people of fashion; it must be imitated, it must be com plied with.
Lord Chesterfield
No grammatical rules have sufficient authority to control the firm and established usage of language. Established custom, in speaking and writing, is the standard to which we must at last resort for determining every controverted point in language and style.
Hugh Blair
The tedious time we moderns employ in acquiring the language of the ancient Greeks and Romans, which cost them nothing, is the principal reason why we cannot arrive at that grandeur of soul and perfection of knowledge that was in them.
C. C. Colton
Language, as well as the faculty of speech, was the immediate gift of God.
Noah Webster
Language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius.
R. W. Emerson
The phraseology of every nation has a taint of drollery about it to the ears of every nation speaking a different tongue.
E. A. Poe
Language is no artificial product, contained in books and dictionaries and governed by the strict rules of impersonal grammarians. It is the living expression of the mind and spirit of a people, ever changing and shifting, whose sole standard of correctness is custom and the common usage of the community.
A. H. Sayce
Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool. Such men have the quaint habit of discovering things fifty years after all the world knows about them—because they read only their own language.
Martin H. Fischer
Spanish is the language for lovers, Italian for singers, French for diplomats, German for horses, and English for geese.
Spanish Proverb
In language, the ignorant have prescribed laws to the learned.
Richard Duppa
We are are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.
Penelope Lively
There are no half-formed languages, no underdeveloped or inferior languages. Everywhere a development has taken place into structures of great complexity. People who have failed to achieve the wheel will not have failed to invent & develop a highly wrought grammar.
Jerome Rothenberg
Las Vegas
What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.
Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority
Last Words
Let us cross over the river and sit under the shade of the trees.
T. J. "Stonewall" Jackson, last words, 1863.
Late
Good that comes too late is good as nothing.
H. G. Bohn
A little too late is much too late.
German Proverb
Five minutes! Zounds! I have been five minutes too late all my life-time!
Hannah Cowley
Do not shorten the morning by getting up late; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Laughter
But let me laugh awhile, I've mickle time to grieve.
John Keats
Life does not cease to be funny when people die, any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
George Bernard Shaw
I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me to be the most civilised music in the world.
Peter Ustinov
If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.
Joseph Addison
In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal and so ill-bred, as audible laughter.
Lord Chesterfield
Sayings designed to raise a laugh are generally untrue and never complimentary. Laughter is never far removed from derision.
Quintilian
Laughter does not seem to be a sin, but it leads to sin.
St. John Chrysostom
He who laughs at everything is as big a fool as he who weeps at everything.
Baltasar Gracián
In laughter there is always a kind of joyousness that is incompatible with contempt or indignation.
Voltaire
I am neither of a melancholy nor a cynical disposition, and am as willing and as apt to be pleased as anybody; but I am sure that, since I have had the full use of my reason, nobody has ever heard me laugh.
Lord Chesterfield
He who laugheth too much hath the nature of a fool; he that laugheth not at all hath the nature of an old cat.
Thomas Fuller
That frolic which shakes one man with laughter will convulse another with indignation.
Samuel Johnson
No one is sadder than the man who laughs too much.
Jean Paul Richter
Man alone suffers so excruciatingly in the world that he was compelled to invent laughter.
F. W. Nietzsche
He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
Rafael Sabatini
One who is always laughing is a fool; and one who never laughs a knave.
Spanish Proverb
Laughter and Tears
I laugh at everything, for fear of being obliged to weep.
Caron de Beaumarchais
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has troubles enough of its own.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.
Luke 6:25
Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Law
When I came back to Dublin I was court-martialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in by absence.
Brendan Behan
Justice delayed is justice denied.
William Ewart Gladstone
This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Courtroom, n. A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with betting odds in favor of Judas.
H. L. Mencken
The people can change Congress but only God can change the Supreme Court.
George W. Norris
A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
Robert Frost
Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
Adam Smith
I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.
Michel Eyquem, seigneur de Montaigne
It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judiciary to say what the law is, not what the law should be.
Author unidentified
[Whenever] the offense inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigor of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind.
Edward Gibbon
[The] operation of the wisest laws is imperfect and precarious. They seldom inspire virtue, they cannot always restrain vice.
Edward Gibbon
There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.
Alexis de Tocqueville
But the wisdom and authority of the legislator are seldom victorious in a contest with the vigilant dexterity of private interest.
Edward Gibbon
Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made.
Otto von Bismarck
[It] is the interest as well as duty of a sovereign to maintain the authority of the laws.
Edward Gibbon
A Locrian, who proposed any new law, stood forth in the assembly of the people with a cord round his neck, and if the law was rejected, the innovator was instantly strangled.
Edward Gibbon
A jurisdiction thus vague and arbitrary was exposed to the most dangerous abuse: the substance, as well as the form, of justice were often sacrificed to the prejudices of virtue, the bias of laudable affection, and the grosser seductions of interest or resentment.
Edward Gibbon
With the utmost deference for these excellent civilians, I cannot but consider this confusion of the judicial and legislative authority as a very perilous constitutional precedent.
Rev. H. H. Milman
The science of the laws is the slow growth of time and experience.
Edward Gibbon
The books of jurisprudence were interesting to few, and entertaining to none: their value was connected with present use, and they sunk forever as soon as that use was superseded by the innovations of fashion, superior merit, or public authority.
Edward Gibbon
Whatever is secret must be doubtful, and our natural horror of vice may be abused as an engine of tyranny.
Attributed by Gibbon to Montesquieu
A sentence of death and infamy was often founded on the slight and suspicious evidence of a child or a servant: the guilt [of the defendant] was presumed by the judges [due to the nature of the charge], and paederasty became the crime of those to whom no crime could be imputed.
Edward Gibbon
The discretion of the judge is the first engine of tyranny.
Edward Gibbon
But a law, however venerable be the sanction, cannot suddenly transform the temper of the times.
Edward Gibbon
[A] thousand quarrels must arise under a law, and among men, whose sole umpire [is] the sword.
Edward Gibbon
Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.
Bertrand Russell
The law functions as formal embodiment of a moral code, not as free-standing substitute for it.
Mark Steyn
To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Others are hardened, obstinate, stiff-necked, rebel-hearted; these must be affrighted by the law, by examples of God's wrath: as the fires of Elijah, the deluge, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the downfall of Jerusalem.
Martin Luther
People crushed by law, have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous.
Edmund Burke
In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.
Abigail Adams
We must not make a scarecrow of the law,
Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,
And let it keep one shape, till custom make it
Their perch and not their terror.
Shakespeare
It is the function of a judge not to make but to declare the law, according to the golden mete-wand of the law and not by the crooked cord of discretion.
Edmund Burke
Written laws are like spiders' webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.
Anacharsis
Wherever Law ends,
Tyranny begins.
John Locke
The strange American ardor for passing laws, the insane belief in regulation and punishment, plays into the hands of the reformers, most of them quacks themselves. Their efforts, even when honest, seldom accomplish any appreciable good.
H. L. Mencken
One of the main purposes of laws in a democratic society is to put burdens upon intelligence and reduce it to impotence. Ostensibly, their aim is to penalize anti-social acts; actually their aim is to penalize heretical opinions.
H. L. Mencken
Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.
Jonathan Swift
Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner.
H. L. Mencken
Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
Oliver Goldsmith
There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity—the law of nature, and of nations.
Edmund Burke
Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
Edmund Burke
Whatever is not forbidden is permitted.
Johann [Christoph] Friedrich von Schiller
How long soever it hath continued, if it be against reason, it is of no force in law.
Edward Coke
The more mandates and laws are enacted, the more there will be thieves and robbers.
Lao-Tsze
It makes no difference whether a good man has defrauded a bad man or a bad man defrauded a good man, or whether a good or a bad man has committed adultery: the law can look only to the amount of damage done.
Aristotle
Good law means good order.
Aristotle
It is best that laws should be so constructed as to leave as little as possible to the decision of those who judge.
Aristotle
The law follows custom.
Plautus
Law is nothing else but right reason, calling us imperiously to our duty, and prohibiting every violation of it.
Cicero
No law perfectly suits the convenience of every member of the community; the only consideration is, whether upon the whole it be profitable to the greater part.
Livy
What a slight foundation for virtue it is to be good only from fear of the law!
Seneca
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
Tacitus
Good men need no laws, and bad men are not made better by them.
Ascribed to Demonax of Cyprus
Lawmakers ought not to be law-breakers.
English Proverb
There is nothing more difficult to undertake, more uncertain to succeed, and more dangerous to manage, than to prescribe new laws. Because he who innovates in that manner has for his enemies all those who made any advantage by the old laws; and those who expect to benefit by the new will be but cool and lukewarm in his defence.
Niccolò Machiavelli
No man is so exquisitely honest or upright but he brings his actions and thoughts within compass and danger of the laws, and that ten times in his life might not lawfully be hanged.
Michel de Montaigne
That law may be set down as good which is certain in meaning, just in precept, convenient in execution, agreeable to the form of government, and productive of virtue in those that live under it.
Francis Bacon
Here the great art lies, to discern in which the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
John Milton
A good law is that which is needful for the good of the people, and withal perspicuous.
Thomas Hobbes
Unnecessary laws are not good laws, but traps for money.
Thomas Hobbes
The law, being made, is but words and paper swords of men.
James Harrington
Too many matters have been regulated by laws, which nature, long custom and general consent ought only to have governed.
William Petty
No written laws can be so plain, so pure,
But wit may gloss and malice may obscure.
John Dryden
Law cannot persuade where it cannot punish.
Thomas Fuller
Much law, but little justice.
Thomas Fuller
The more laws, the more offenders.
Thomas Fuller
Laws too gentle are seldom obeyed; too severe, seldom executed.
Benjamin Franklin
The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket.
Charles Macklin
Just to the windward of the law.
Charles Churchill
Laws should be made by legislators, not by judges.
C. B. Beccaria
Laws are generally nets of such a texture as the little creep through, the great break through, and the middle-sized alone are entangled in.
William Shenstone
Let all the laws be clear, uniform and precise: to interpret laws is almost always to corrupt them.
Voltaire
The law is to us precisely what I am in my barnyard, a bridle and check to prevent the strong and greedy from oppressing the timid and weak.
St. John de Crèvecoeur
The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.
Samuel Johnson
Ignorance of the law is no excuse in any country. If it were, the laws would lose their effect, because it can be always pretended.
Thomas Jefferson
It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow.
Alexander Hamilton
When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces upon me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool.
Sydney Smith
Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding, and should therefore be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties, which may make anything mean everything or nothing, at pleasure.
Thomas Jefferson
Good men must not obey the laws too well.
R. W. Emerson
The law is for the protection of the weak more than the strong.
Mr. Justice Erle
We bury men when they are dead, but we try to embalm the dead body of laws, keeping the corpse in sight long after the vitality has gone. It usually takes a hundred years to make a law; and then, after it has done its work, it usually takes a hundred years to get rid of it.
H. W. Beecher
No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober.
Samuel Smiles
Laws never would be improved if there were not numerous persons whose moral sentiments are better than the existing laws.
J. S. Mill
I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.
U. S. Grant
We know how laws are made—we who have been behind the scenes. They are the products of selfishness, deception and party prejudice. True justice is not in them, and cannot be in them.
Lyof N. Tolstoy
It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best laws, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.
Theodore Roosevelt
While there still is doubt, while opposite convictions still keep a battlefront against each other, the time for law has not come.
O. W. Holmes II
The more laws the less justice.
German Proverb
Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.
Lord Halifax
Great cases like hard cases make bad law.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
For my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part …. If the existing code does not permit district attorneys to have a hand in such dirty business [wiretapping], it does not permit the judge to allow such iniquities to succeed.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
General rules based on individual victims are unwise.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
There is no man, good as he may be, who, if all his thoughts and actions were submitted to the scrutiny of the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life. (Il n'est si homme de bien, qu'il mette à l'examen des lois toutes ses actions et pensées, qui ne soit pendable dix fois en sa vie.)
Montaigne
The law is not a “light” for you or any man to see by; the law is not an instrument of any kind. The law is a causeway upon which, so long as he keeps to it, a citizen may walk safely.
Robert Bolt
Law and Order
Rape and violence occur not because of patriarchal conditioning but because of the opposite, a breakdown of social controls.
Camille Paglia
Law-Abiding
Fear God, and offend not the prince nor his laws,
And keep thyself out of the magistrate's claws.
Thomas Tusser
The observance of the law is the greatest solvent of public ills.
Calvin Coolidge
It is the duty of a citizen not only to observe the law but to let it be known that he is opposed to its violation.
Calvin Coolidge
Lawsuit
To go to law is for two persons to kindle a fire, at their own cost, to warm others and singe themselves to cinders.
Owen Felltham
If you've a good case, try to compromise; if a bad one, take it into court.
French Proverb
Lawyer
I don't want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do; I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do.
J. Pierpont Morgan
Every Federal Judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizen has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mahjong factory, we'd all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by half.
H. L. Mencken
A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.
Benjamin Franklin
A man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client.
Author unidentified
Lawyers use the law as shoemakers use leather; rubbing it, pressing it, and stretching it with their teeth, all to the end of making it fit their purposes.
Ascribed to Louis XII of France
Adversaries … in law
Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends.
Shakespeare
A man may as well open an oyster without a knife as a lawyer's mouth without a fee.
Barten Holyday
Your pettifoggers damn their souls,
To share with knaves in cheating fools.
Samuel Butler
A man without money needs no more fear a crowd of lawyers than a crowd of pickpockets.
William Wycherley
Of lawyers and physicians I shall say nothing, because this country [Pennsylvania in the late 17th century] is very peaceable and healthy. Long may it so continue, and never have occasion for the tongue of the one nor the pen of the other, both equally destructive of men's estates and lives.
Gabriel Thomas
God has not given laws to make out of right wrong, and out of wrong right, as the unchristianlike lawyers do, who study law only for the sake of gain and profit.
Martin Luther
Sometimes a man who deserves to be looked down upon because he is a fool is despised only because he is a lawyer.
C. L. de Montesquieu
Laws are best explained, interpreted and applied by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding and eluding them.
Jonathan Swift
God works wonders now and then;
Behold! a lawyer, an honest man.
Benjamin Franklin
The fell [cruel, savage] attorney prowls for prey.
Samuel Johnson
I would be loth to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.
Samuel Johnson
Yes, Jamie, he was a bad man, but he might have been worse; he was an Irishman, but he might have been a Scotchman; he was a priest, but he might have been a lawyer.
Samuel Parr
I question not but there are many attorneys born with open and honest hearts: but I know not one that has had the least practice who is not selfish, trickish, and disingenuous.
William Shenstone
A lawyer's opinion is worth nothing unless paid for.
English Proverb
By law's dark by-ways he had stored his mind
With wicked knowledge how to cheat mankind.
George Crabbe
Who calls a lawyer rogue, may find, too late,
On one of these depends his whole estate.
George Crabbe
I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.
John Keats
He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.
Charles Lamb
Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.
H. G. Bohn
I will not counsel or maintain any suit or proceeding which shall appear to me to be unjust, nor any defense except such as I believe to be honestly debatable under the law of the land.
Model oath for candidates for admission to the bar
A lawyer has no business with the justice or injustice of the cause which he undertakes unless his client asks his opinion, and then he is bound to give it honestly. The justice or injustice of the cause is to be decided by the judge.
Samuel Johnson
I know you lawyers can, with ease,
Twist words and meanings as you please;
That language, by your skill made pliant,
Will bend to favour ev'ry client.
John Gay
All of us here know there's no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.
Jean Giraudoux
You might as well try to employ a boa constrictor as a tape-measure as to go to a lawyer for legal advice.
Oliver St John Gogarty
The best way to get the better of temptation is just to yield to it.
Clementina Stirling Graham
The lawyer sets his tongue to sale for the bolstering out of unjust causes.
Hakewell
Lawyers are … the High Priests of America.
Tony Kushner
Laziness
Laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him.
Author unidentified
A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest—
and poverty will come on you like a bandit
and scarcity like an armed man.
Proverbs 6:10,11
Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth.
Proverbs 10:4
That indolent but agreeable condition of doing nothing.
Pliny the Younger
I understand there's a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons and old movies. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy.
Anthony Bourdain
Laziness is often mistaken for patience.
French Proverb
It is always holiday to the lazy. (Ignavis semper feriae sunt.)
Latin Proverb
Lazy youth makes lousy age.
Scottish Proverb
Leader
All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.
Eric Hoffer
You have to learn to be a follower before you become a leader.
Charlie Munger
The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
Walter Lippmann
Leadership
It is hard to look up to a leader who keeps his ear to the ground.
James H. Boren
It is frequently a misfortune to have very brilliant men in charge of affairs; they expect too much of ordinary men.
Thucydides
There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.
Alexandre Ledru-Rollin
He who thinks he leads, and has no one following him is only taking a walk.
Author unidentified
"Cheshire-Puss," she began, "would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't care much where—" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
Lewis Carroll
When I want to know what France thinks, I ask myself.
Charles de Gaulle
I must follow them. I am their leader.
Andrew Bonar Law
You have lost a useful commander, and you have made a very wretched emperor.
Saturninus, when his troops put him forward as a contender to the Roman Emperor.
For my part, I would rather be the chief man in this [poor] village than the second man in Rome.
Julius Caesar
The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes.
Tony Blair
If human progress had been merely a matter of leadership we should be in Utopia today.
Thomas B. Reed
I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too; and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm.
Elizabeth I
Lean
Men of a lean habit of body are commonly a long time healthy, having good appetites and strong stomachs for digestion.
Tobias Venner
As the lean people are the most active, unquiet, and ambitious, they everywhere govern the world, and may certainly oppress their antagonists whenever they please.
David Hume
A goose, a woman, and a goat are bad things lean.
Portuguese Proverb
Learned
Volumes have been written only to enumerate the miseries of the learned, and relate their unhappy lives, and untimely deaths.
Samuel Johnson
Learning
The easily embarrassed are unable to learn.
Author unidentified
Such is often the folly of men, whom nature has enabled to obtain skill and knowledge, on terms so easy, that they have no sense of the value of the acquisition; they are qualified to make such speedy progress in learning, that they think themselves at liberty to loiter in the way, and by turning aside after every new object, lose the race, like Atalanta, to slower competitors, who press diligently forward, and whose force is directed to a single point.
Samuel Johnson
What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.
Henry Brooks Adams
The mind is slow to unlearn what it has been long in learning.
Seneca
Men learn while they teach. (Homines, dum docent, discunt.)
Seneca
A man without learning grows old like an ox; his flesh grows, but not his wisdom.
The Dhammapada
A man of learning is never bored.
Jean Paul Richter
Bees are sometimes drowned (or suffocated) in the honey which they collect. So some writers are lost in their collected learning.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.
George Bernard Shaw
Learning without wisdom is a load of books on an ass's back.
Japanese Proverb
Much learning, much sorrow.
John Clarke
A handful of good life is better than a bushel of learning.
George Herbert
The love of learning and the love of money rarely meet.
George Herbert
Learning makes the wise wiser and the fool more foolish.
John Ray
Learning makes a good man better, and an ill man worse.
Thomas Fuller
Of learned fools I have seen ten times ten; of unlearned wise men, I have seen a hundred.
Benjamin Franklin
Much learning shows how little mortals know.
Edward Young
Learning is acquired by reading books; but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading men, and studying all the various editions of them.
Lord Chesterfield
When we are young we learn much because we are universally ignorant; we observe everything because everything is new.
Samuel Johnson
Skill comes so slow, and life so fast doth fly,
We learn so little and forget so much.
John Davies
There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring.
Ernest Hemingway
But study is laborious, and not always satisfactory … we are willing to learn, but not willing to be taught.
Samuel Johnson
The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
Eric Hoffer
Left Wing
The left-wing movement … has pretty well killed intelligent criticism in this country. Books are judged not by their worth as works of art, but by their political content.
H. L. Mencken
Legacy
Unless one is a moron, one always dies unsure of one's own value and that of one's works. Virgil himself, as he lay dying, wanted the Aeneid burned.
Gustave Flaubert
He that compares what he has done with what he has left undone, will feel the effect which must always follow the comparison of imagination with reality; he will look with contempt on his own unimportance, and wonder to what purpose he came into the world; he will repine that he shall leave behind him no evidence of his having been, that he has added nothing to the system of life, but has glided from youth to age among the crowd, without any effort for distinction.
Samuel Johnson
Legislation
No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are rare in the history of the world.
H. D. Thoreau
One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.
Thomas B. Reed
Blundering experiments in legislation cannot be simply abandoned if they do not work well; even if they are set aside, they leave their effects behind; and they create vested interests which make it difficult to set them aside.
W. G. Sumner
A decrease in the quantity of legislation generally means an increase in the quality of life.
George F. Will
Legislator
It has been sagaciously conjectured, that the artful legislator indulged the stubborn prejudices of his countrymen.
Edward Gibbon
Leisure
It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents.
H. D. Thoreau
The advantage of leisure is mainly that we may have the power of choosing our own work, not certainly that it confers any privilege of idleness.
John Lubbock (Lord Avebury)
Better give a shilling than lend and lose half a crown.
Thomas Fuller
Say not, When I have leisure I will study; perchance thou wilt never have leisure.
Hillel The Elder
Lending
If you lend you either lose the money or gain an enemy.
Albanian Proverb
Money lent to a friend must be recovered from an enemy.
German Proverb
It is better to give one lire than to lend twenty.
Italian Proverb
Never lend a horse, a razor, or your wife.
Polish Proverb
If you have had enough of your friend, lend him some money.
Russian Proverb
Lenin
Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.
Winston Churchill
Lent
Marry in Lent, and you'll live to repent.
English Proverb
Leonardo da Vinci
The Medici created and destroyed me.
Leonardo da Vinci
Lese-Majesty
The slander of majesty shall not be punished, for if it proceed from levity it is to be despised; if from madness, to be pitied; if from malice, forgiven.
Codex Theodosianus
Lesson
We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.
Joan Didion
Letter
A short letter to a distant friend is, in my opinion, an insult like that of a slight bow or cursory salutation;—a proof of unwillingness to do much, even where there is a necessity of doing something.
Samuel Johnson
I have made this [letter] longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter. (Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.)
Blaise Pascal
Levee
There is nothing but that frail breastwork of earth between the people and destruction.
Mark Twain
Lexicographer
It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward.
Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries; whom mankind have considered, not as the pupil, but the slave of science, the pioneer of literature, doomed only to remove rubbish and clear obstructions from the paths of Learning and Genius, who press forward to conquest and glory, without bestowing a smile on the humble drudge that facilitates their progress. Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach and even this negative recompense has been yet granted to very few.
Samuel Johnson
Lexicographer, n. A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.
Samuel Johnson
But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer.
Samuel Johnson
Liar
The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilised being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company.
Oscar Wilde
A liar's way leads to disgrace, and his shame is ever with him.
Ecclesiasticus 20:26
A liar is far worse, and does greater mischief, than a murderer on the highway; for a liar and false teacher deceives people, seduces souls, and destroys them under the color of God's Word.
Martin Luther
A liar is always lavish of oaths.
Pierre Corneille
The greatest fools are the greatest liars.
Lord Chesterfield
Even a liar tells a hundred truths to one lie; he has to, to make the lie good for anything.
H. W. Beecher
The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society.
Oscar Wilde
The wretch that often has deceiv’d,
Though truth he speaks, is ne’er believ’d.
(Quicunque turpi fraude semel innotuit,
Etiamsi verum dicit, amittit fidem.)
Phaedrus
The liar, and only the liar, is invariably and universally despised, abandoned, and disowned: he has no domestick consolations, which he can oppose to the censure of mankind; he can retire to no fraternity, where his crimes may stand in the place of virtues; but is given up to the hisses of the multitude, without friend and without apologist.
Samuel Johnson
A known liar should be outlawed in a well-ordered government.
Lord Halifax
Liberal
Not being a liberal, I have very little grasp of things that I know nothing about.
P. J. O'Rourke
Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
I consider it a great homage to public opinion to find every scoundrel nowadays professing himself a liberal.
Benjamin Disraeli
Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots and announce—yes, announce—that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by … liberals.
George F. Will
When liberals' presidential nominees consistently fail to carry Kansas, liberals do not rush to read a book titled "What's the Matter With Liberals' Nominees?" No, the book they turned into a bestseller is titled "What's the Matter With Kansas?" Notice a pattern here?
George F. Will
They [liberals] are men and women who tend to believe that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable, and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason; that truths are transitory and empirically determined; that equality is desirable and attainable through the action of state power; that social and individual differences, if they are not rational, are objectionable, and should be scientifically eliminated; that all people and societies strive to organize themselves upon a rationalist and scientific paradigm.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
Liberals can understand everything but people who don’t understand them.
Lenny Bruce
Liberalism
So much of contemporary liberalism seems to be never having grown up.
Jay Nordlinger
[Liberalism] is hostile to law [and has a preference for] policy without law.
Theodore Lowi
The search for a moral equivalent of war continues to define American liberalism to this day.
Jonah Goldberg
You can't go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal.
Robert Downey Jr.
The tone and tendency of liberalism … is to attack the institutions of the country under the name of reform and to make war on the manners and customs of the people under the pretext of progress.
Benjamin Disraeli
At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child—miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.
P. J. O'Rourke
The principal feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things—war and hunger and date rape—liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things. … It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal.
P. J. O'Rourke
Liberality
Liberality is not giving much but giving wisely.
Author unidentified
Libertarian
One of the more pretentious political self-descriptions is "libertarian." People think it puts them above the fray. It sounds fashionable and, to the uninitiated, faintly dangerous. Actually, it's just one more bullshit political philosophy.
George Carlin
Libertarianism and Liberalism
[Libertarianism] is about curbing state power to let people be and do what they want. Liberalism is about using state power to make people do and be what liberals want. And that makes all the difference in the world.
Jonah Goldberg
Liberty
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin
The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.
Edmund Burke
The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.
Alexis de Tocqueville
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Thomas Jefferson, et al.
There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.
Margaret Thatcher
There's only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
P. J. O'Rourke
You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
Charles Austin Beard
It is in the township that the strength of free peoples resides. Municipal institutions are for liberty what primary schools are for science; they place it within reach of the people … Without municipal institutions, a nation is able to give itself a free government, but it lacks the spirit of liberty.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Thomas Jefferson
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Patrick Henry
Liberty is, to the lowest rank of every nation, little more than the choice of working or starving; and this choice is, I suppose, equally allowed in every country.
Samuel Johnson
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites,—in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity,—in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption,—in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.
Edmund Burke
Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.
Edmund Burke
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
Lord Acton
But the true danger is, when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.
Edmund Burke
For liberty is a good to be improved, and not an evil to be lessened.
Edmund Burke
The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
Edmund Burke
Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
Edmund Burke
It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty.
Francis Bacon
Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open.
Clive Bell
Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.
Isaiah Berlin
It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty—and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.
H. L. Mencken
Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
H. L. Mencken
They [classical Liberals] themselves, as a practical matter, advocate only certain narrow kinds of liberty—liberty, that is, for the persons they happen to favor. The rights of other persons do not seem to interest them.
H. L. Mencken
I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say.
H. L. Mencken
The freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.
George Mason
The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.
John Philpot Curran
Liberty too must be limited in order to be possessed.
Edmund Burke
A love of liberty is planted by nature in the breasts of all men.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus
No favor produces less permanent gratitude than the gift of liberty, especially among people who are ready to make a bad use of it.
Livy
Only in states in which the power of the people is supreme has liberty any abode.
Cicero
Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own.
Shakespeare
Liberty is the power that we have over ourselves.
Hugo Grotius
Lean liberty is better than fat slavery.
John Ray
In those few places where men enjoy what they call liberty, it is continually in a tottering situation, and makes greater and greater strides to that fault of despotism which at last swallows up every species of government.
Edmund Burke
Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.
J. J. Rousseau
Liberty is not a fruit that grows in all climates, and so it is not within the reach of all people.
J. J. Rousseau
They make a rout about universal liberty without considering that all that is to be valued, or indeed can be enjoyed by individuals, is private liberty. Political liberty is good only so far as it produces private liberty.
Samuel Johnson
'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume;
And we are weeds without it.
William Cowper
But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
Edmund Burke
We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.
Thomas Jefferson
O Liberty! what crimes are committed in thy name!
Ascribed to Mme. Roland, on her way to the guillotine
God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it.
Daniel Webster
While I trust that liberty and free institutions, as we have experienced them, may ultimately spread over the globe, I am by no means sure that all people are fit for them; nor am I desirous of imposing or forcing our peculiar forms upon any other nation that does not wish to embrace them.
Daniel Webster
The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited: he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.
J. S. Mill
Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.
R. W. Emerson
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Abraham Lincoln
If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?
Herbert Spencer
Mankind is tired of liberty.
Benito Mussolini
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Mr. Justice Louis D. Brandeis
When the people contend for their liberty, they seldom get anything by their victory but new masters.
Lord Halifax
In my opinion, a society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty. A society that aims first for liberty will not end up with equality, but it will end up with a closer approach to equality than any other kind of system that has ever been developed.
Milton Friedman
O liberty! O liberty! what crimes are committed in thy name! (Ô liberté! Ô liberté! que de crimes on commet en ton nom!)
Mme Roland, before being guillotined
Liberty is precious—so precious that it must be rationed.
Lenin
I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws, and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.
Learned Hand
If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait for ever.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an ailment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.
James Madison
The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.
Felix Frankfurter
Licence they mean when they cry liberty;
For who loves that, must first be wise and good.
John Milton
If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
George Orwell
Libius Severus
History has scarcely deigned to notice [Libius Severus's] birth, his elevation, his character, or his death.
Edward Gibbon
Library
Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
Saul Bellow
No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.
Samuel Johnson
What a sad want I am in of libraries, of books to gather facts from! Why is there not a Majesty's library in every county town? There is a Majesty's jail and gallows in every one.
Thomas Carlyle
Burn the libraries, for all their value is in the Koran.
The Caliph Omar, on the fall of Alexandria
To desire to have many books, and never to use them, is like a child that will have a candle burning by him all the while he is asleep.
Henry Peacham
That place that does contain
My books, the best companions, is to me
A glorious court, where hourly I converse
With the old sages and philosophers;
And sometimes, for variety, I confer
With kings and emperors, and weight their counsels.
John Fletcher and Philip Massinger
The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Thomas Carlyle
A man's library is a sort of harem, and I observe that tender readers have a great pudency in showing their books to a stranger.
R. W. Emerson
Lie
We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.
Eric Hoffer
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies.
Shakespeare
Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie.
Rudyard Kipling
The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.
Elena Gorokhova
Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no fibs.
Oliver Goldsmith
One sometimes sees more clearly in the man who lies than in the man who tells the truth. Truth, like the light, blinds. Lying, on the other hand, is a beautiful twilight, which gives to each object its value.
Albert Camus (Attributed)
From all that terror teaches,
From lies of tongue and pen,
From all the easy speeches
That comfort cruel men,
From sale and profanation
Of honour and the sword,
From sleep and from damnation,
Deliver us, good Lord!
G. K. Chesterton
Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.
George Orwell
He said likewise
That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies,
That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright,
But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.
Anatole France
Life
A man said to the Universe, "Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the Universe, "the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."
Stephen Crane
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.
H. L. Mencken
Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness.
André Maurois
[The Forgotten Man] is the clean, quiet, virtuous domestic citizen who pays his debts and his taxes and is never heard of out of his little circle. … [He] works and votes—generally he prays—but his chief business in life is to pay.
William Graham Sumner
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost
There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.
Alfred Korzybski
Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker is sorry.
Mark Twain
Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.
Thomas La Mance
I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)
The first half of our life is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.
Clarence Darrow
The game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as playing a poor hand well.
H. T. Leslie
What the meaning of human life may be I don't know; I incline to suspect that it has none.
H. L. Mencken
Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.
Elbert Hubbard
Do not despair of life. You have no doubt force enough to overcome your obstacles. Think of the fox prowling through wood and field in a winter night for something to satisfy his hunger. Notwithstanding cold and hounds and traps, his race survives. I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide.
Henry David Thoreau
It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
And remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
Author unidentified
What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.
Nietzsche
In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants and the other is getting it.
Oscar Wilde
Never abandon life. There is a way out of everything except death.
Winston Churchill
Fancy living in one of these streets, never seeing anything beautiful, never eating anything savoury, never saying anything clever!
Winston Churchill, when touring the slums
We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed.
Attributed to Thomas Fuller
The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.
Eric Hoffer
Men of thought seldom work well together, whereas between men of action there is usually an easy camaraderie.
Eric Hoffer
How little can we foresee the consequences either of wise or unwise action, of virtue or of malice! Without this measureless and perpetual uncertainty the drama of human life would be destroyed.
Winston Churchill
Men work simply in order to escape the depressing agony of contemplating life—that their work, like their play, is a mumbo-jumbo that serves them by permitting them to escape from reality.
H. L. Mencken
Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband's clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible.
H. L. Mencken
Life is short, but death lasts forever.
Author unidentified
How little it takes to make life unbearable … A pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
H. L. Mencken
The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
Oscar Wilde
Life is a hideous thing.
H. P. Lovecraft
At the door of life, by the gate of breath,
There are worse things waiting for men than death.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Don't believe the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
R. J. Burdette
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
Mark Twain
Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?
Rose Kennedy
I value kindness to human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and old men and women warmer in the winter, and happier in the summer.
Brendan Behan
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
Douglas Adams
Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out—it's the grain of sand in your shoe.
Robert Service
A bad habit never disappears miraculously; it's an undo-it-yourself project.
Abigail Van Buren
Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.
George Santayana
Music is essentially useless, as life is.
George Santayana
If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.
Tallulah Bankhead
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
Robert Frost
I think you should live your life so that the maximum number of people will attend your funeral.
Scott Adams
The Europeans … are less unhappy than we, but they are not happy. Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.
Samuel Johnson, Rasselas
[All] of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon—instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.
Dale Carnegie
If thou wouldst live long, live well;
For folly and wickedness shorten life.
Benjamin Franklin
The unexamined life is not worth living.
Socrates
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
…
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And—which is more—you'll be a Man, my son!
Rudyard Kipling
You can never begin to live
Until you dare to die.
Henry van Dyke
A stout heart, a clear conscience, and never despair.
John Quincy Adams
Life is subject to change without notice.
Author unidentified
Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.
Benjamin Franklin
You thought it was hard? If kindergarten is busting your ass, I got some bad news for you about the rest of life.
Samuel Halpern
No, you can't go getting mad at people because they're shitty. Life will get mad at them, don't worry.
Samuel Halpern
Just worry about living, dying is the easy part.
Samuel Halpern
Life is pain … Anyone who says differently is selling something.
William Goldman (The Princess Bride)
Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all.
William Goldman (The Princess Bride)
Wish not so much to live long as to live well.
Author unidentified
The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men.
Henry David Thoreau
You live and learn. At any rate, you live.
Douglas Adams
Don't be so hard on yourself; don't put pressure on yourself; life is just a chain of experiments and results … you'll be perfect when you're dead.
Dan Harmon
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
National Lampoon's Animal House movie
Life is short. Why make it any shorter by not taking care of yourself?
Author unidentified
So large a part of human life passes in a state contrary to our natural desires that one of the principal topics of moral instruction is the art of bearing calamities. And such is the certainty of evil that it is the duty of every man to furnish his mind with those principles that may enable him to act under it with decency and propriety.
Samuel Johnson
I long ago come [sic] to the conclusion that all life is six to five against.
Damon Runyon
The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.
Rabindranath Tagore
There is a big difference between thinking … "This is a bad chapter" and "This is the last chapter" [of one's life].
Dr. Stephen Viars
Yet hope not Life from Grief or Danger free,
Nor think the Doom of Man revers’d for thee.
Samuel Johnson
Tomorrow is promised to no man.
Author unidentified
When I survey my past life, I discover nothing but a barren waste of time with some disorders of the body, and disturbances of the mind very near to madness.
Samuel Johnson
In our sad condition, our only consolation is the expectation of another life. Here below all is incomprehensible.
Martin Luther
What is the prime of life? May it not be defined as a period of about twenty years in a woman's life, and thirty in a man's?
Plato
We rarely find anyone who can say he has lived a happy life, and who, content with his life, can retire from the world like a satisfied guest.
Horace
My prime of youth is but a frost of cares;
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain;
My crop of corn is but a field of tares;
And all my good is but vain hope of gain:
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun;
And now I live, and now my life is done.
Chidiock Tichborne
You are, my Lord, but just entering into the world; I am going out of it. I have played long enough to be heartily tired of the drama. Whether I have acted my part in it well or ill, posterity will judge with more candour than I, or than the present age, with our present passions, can possibly pretend to. For my part, I quit it without a sigh, and submit to the sovereign order without murmuring.
Edmund Burke
The Answer to the Great Question Of … Life, the Universe and Everything … [is] Forty-two.
Douglas Adams
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Shakespeare
Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.
Samuel Johnson
Life, in which nothing has been done or suffered to distinguish one day from another, is to him that has passed it, as if it had never been, except that he is conscious how ill he has husbanded the great deposit of his Creator.
Samuel Johnson
Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou liv’st
Live well; how long or short permit to Heaven.
John Milton
Life is an incurable disease.
Abraham Cowley
It is natural for every man uninstructed to murmur at his condition, because, in the general infelicity of life, he feels his own miseries, without knowing that they are common to all the rest of the species.
Samuel Johnson
Do not men die fast enough without being destroyed by each other? Can any man be insensible of the brevity of life? and can he who knows it, think life too long?
François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon
Thus, not only in the slumber of sloth, but in the dissipation of ill-directed industry, is the shortness of life generally forgotten.
Samuel Johnson
Few and evil have the days of the years of my life been.
Genesis 47:9 (KJV)
Life is a jest; and all things show it.
I thought so once; but now I know it.
John Gay
Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator.
H. L. Mencken
Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.
Psalms 90:10
To avoid illness eat less: to have a long life worry less.
Chinese Proverb
Men deal with life, as children with their play,
Who first misuse, then cast their toys away.
William Cowper
A little while and I will be gone from among you, whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we came, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
Crowfoot
That's essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.
Woody Allen
The trials of living and the pangs of disease make even the short span of life too long.
Herodotus
Life is long to the miserable, but short to the happy.
Publilius Syrus
Nature has given us life at interest like money, with no day fixed for repayment.
Cicero
We are always beginning to live, but we are never living.
Marcus Manilius
Life, if well used, is long enough.
Seneca
Nature has given man nothing better than the shortness of his life.
Pliny the Elder
Blessed is he that hath a short life.
St. Clement
The utmost span of a man's life is a hundred years. Half of it is spent in night, and of the rest half is lost by childhood and old age. Work, grief, longing and illness make up what remains.
Bhartrihari
My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and they come to an end without hope.
Job 7:6
This life is fickle, frail and vain.
Anonymous
The world's a bubble, and the life of man
Less than a span;
In his conception wretched, from the womb
So to the tomb;
Curst from the cradle, and brought up to years
With cares and fears.
Who then to frail mortality shall trust,
But limns the water, or but writes in dust.
Francis Bacon
The longer life, the greater grief.
Randle Cotcrave
When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat;
Yet, fooled with hope, men favor the deceit.
John Dryden
Why are we so fond of a life that begins with a cry and ends with groan?
Mary, Countess of Warwick, on her deathbed
When life is miserable it is painful to endure it;
when it is happy it is horrible to lose it.
Jean de la Bruyère
Who breathes must suffer, and who thinks must mourn;
And he alone is blessed who ne'er was born.
Matthew Prior
Reflect that life, like every other blessing,
Derives its value from its use alone.
Samuel Johnson
Life is tedious.
Samuel Johnson
What is the life of man? Is it not to shift from side to side from sorrow to sorrow—to button up one cause of vexation and unbutton another?
Laurence Sterne
Philosophers there are who try to make themselves believe that this life is happy; but they believe it only while they are saying it, and never yet produced conviction in a single mind.
Samuel Johnson
A painful passage o'er a restless flood,
A vain pursuit of fugitive false good,
A sense of fancied bliss and heartfelt care,
Closing at last in darkness and despair.
William Cowper
A useless life is an early death.
J. W. Goethe
Life to the great majority is only a constant struggle for mere existence, with the certainty of losing it at last.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Short as life is, some find it long enough to outlive their characters, their constitutions and their estates.
C. C. Colton
Between two worlds, life hovers like a star
'Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon's verge,
How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be!
Byron
Do you desire to master the art of prolonging life? Rather apply yourself to the art of enduring it.
Ernst von Feuchtersleben
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
Christina Rossetti
To procure life, to obtain a mate, and to rear offspring: such is the real business of life.
W. Winwood Reade
Life is one long process of getting tired.
Samuel Butler
When a man says he has exhausted life one always knows life has exhausted him.
Oscar Wilde
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
George Santayana
Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.
George Bernard Shaw
Life is simply one damned thing after another.
Author unidentified
Life is like a fire; it begins in smoke, and ends in ashes.
Arab Proverb
The life of man is like a long journey with a heavy load on the back.
Japanese Proverb
Life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.
Ernest Hemingway
I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me.
John Keats
He that embarks in the voyage of life, will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind, than the strokes of the oar; and many founder in the passage, while they lie waiting for the gale that is to waft them to their wish.
Samuel Johnson
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
These three alone lead life to sovereign power.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Life, however short, is made still shorter by waste of time, and its progress towards happiness, though naturally slow, is yet retarded by unnecessary labour.
Samuel Johnson
We are here just for a spell and then pass on. So get a few laughs and do the best you can. Live your life so that whenever you lose it, you are ahead.
Will Rogers
My life is one demd horrid grind.
Charles Dickens
Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause—that it must be lived forward.
Søren Kierkegaard
No devastating or redeeming fires have ever burnt in my life . My life began by flickering out.
Ivan Goncharov
Life isn’t all beer and skittles; but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman’s education.
Thomas Hughes
Life was combat, and victory was not to the lazy, the timid, the slugabed, the drugstore cowboy, the libertine, the mushmouth afraid to tell people exactly what was on his mind whether people liked it or not.
Russell Baker
Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong.
Russell Baker
Life, what is it but a dream?
Lewis Carroll
He thought he saw an Elephant,
That practiced on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
A letter from his wife.
"At length I realize," he said,
"The bitterness of Life!"
Lewis Carroll
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
Life is unfair—there is nothing fair about one man being born blind and another man being born with sight. There is nothing fair about one man being born of a wealthy parent and one of an impecunious parent.
Milton Friedman
In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness.
Sarah Orne Jewett
So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.
Sarah Orne Jewett
Our mission in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in the best of spirits.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Man has but three events in his life: to be born, to live, and to die. He is not conscious of his birth, he suffers at his death and he forgets to live. (Il n'y a pour l'homme que trois événements: naître, vivre et mourir. Il ne sent pas naître, il souffre à mourir, et il oublie de vivre.)
Jean de la Bruyère
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young.
A E Housman
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke.
Francis Thompson
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.
Sir James M. Barrie
Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
O. Henry
In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.
Edith Wharton
There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and, after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.
Logan Pearsall Smith
And life is given to none freehold, but it is leasehold for all. (Vitaque mancipio, nulli datur, omnibus usu.)
Lucretius
Difficult or easy, pleasant or bitter, you are the same you: I cannot live with you—or without you.
(Difficilis facilis, iucundus acerbus es idem:
Nec tecum possum vivere nec sine te.)
Martial
We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.
Menander
Life isn't long enough for love and art.
W. Somerset Maugham
I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me.
W. Somerset Maugham
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
We're all fucked. It helps to remember that.
George Carlin
People who see life as anything more than pure entertainment are missing the point.
George Carlin
Clov: Do you believe in the life to come?
Hamm: Mine was always like that.
Samuel Beckett
Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood. If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts. Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move. Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain’t restful. Avoid running at all times. Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.
Satchel Paige
Life is never as bad nor as good as one thinks.
Sybille Bedford
The whisky was wearing off and I saw myself in a flicker of panic: a middle-aging man lying alone in darkness while life fled by like traffic on the freeway.
Ross Macdonald
There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country … Life is unfair.
John F. Kennedy
Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.
Gabriel García Márquez
I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.
Boris Pasternak
In the beginning God gave to every people a cup of clay, and from this cup they drank their life.
Proverb (Northern Paiute)
We must not expect that our journey through the several stages of this life should be all smooth and even.
Atterbury
Life and Death
Thou canst not judge the life of man until death hath ended it.
Sophocles
The child was born, and cried;
Became a man, after fell sick, and died.
Anonymous
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Shakespeare
Our lives are but our marches to the grave.
John Fletcher
Let one imagine a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death, some of whom, being beheaded every day in the sight of the others, those who remain see their own condition in that of their fellows, and, regarding each other with grief, and without hope, await their turn: this is a picture of the condition of men.
Blaise Pascal
Teach me to live that I may dread
The grave as little as my bed.
Thomas Ken
Born in throes, 'tis fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs.
Herman Melville
We see all this [the uncertainty of life and unexpected death], and yet, instead of living, let year glide after year in preparations to live.
Samuel Johnson
The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.
Thomas Carlyle
I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.
John Keats
Every day above earth is a good day.
Ernest Hemingway
The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
Edgar Allan Poe
Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.
T. E. Lawrence
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Vladimir Nabokov
Let us honor if we can
The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.
W. H. Auden
Linguist
Men who can speak a number of different tongues are notorious for having little to say in any of them.
H. R. Huse
Lion
Do not pluck the beard of a dead lion.
Martial
Liquor
Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.
Ogden Nash
Listening
No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.
Mignon McLaughlin
A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something.
Wilson Mizner
One must listen if one wishes to be listened to. (Il faut écouter ceux qui parlent, si on veut en être écouté.)
François de La Rochefoucauld
Literature
When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder
That such trivial people should muse and thunder
In such a lovely language.
D. H. Lawrence
The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.
Edmund Wilson
H. L. Mencken suffers from the hallucination that he is H. L. Mencken—there is no cure for a disease of that magnitude.
Maxwell Bodenheim
Nobody can read Freud without realizing that he was the scientific equivalent of another nuisance, George Bernard Shaw.
Robert Maynard Hutchins
The trouble with the publishing business is that too many people who have half a mind to write a book do so.
William Targ
No author is a man of genius to his publisher.
Heinrich Heine
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
George Bernard Shaw
When a thing has been said and well said, have no scruple; take it and copy it.
Anatole France
I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
William Faulkner
I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.
Samuel Johnson
When told not to end a sentence with a preposition, Churchill replied, "This is nonsense up with which I will not put."
Winston Churchill
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Mark Twain
I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.
Oscar Wilde
I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
Oscar Wilde
He that I am reading seems always to have the most force.
Michel Eyquem, seigneur de Montaigne
Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be happy to read them.
Saul Bellow
The only reward to be expected from literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.
Voltaire
Thieves cannot destroy it [literature], and it is improved by time; it is the only monument that is proof against death.
Martial
It is after public passion has subsided that our most celebrated writers have produced their chef d'oeuvres; as it is after the eruption of a volcano that the land in its vicinity is the most fertile.
Stanislaus Leszcynski
When literature is the sole business of life it becomes a drudgery; when we are able to resort to it only at certain hours it is a charming relaxation.
Samuel Rogers
There is an intrinsic absurdity in making current literature a subject of academic study, and the student who wants a tutor's assistance in reading the works of his own contemporaries might as well ask for a nurse's assistance in blowing his own nose.
C. S. Lewis
I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story. The good ones last. A waltz which you can like only when you are waltzing is a bad waltz.
C. S. Lewis
A knowledge of different literatures is the best way to free one’s self from the tyranny of any of them.
José Martí
It has rightly been said that all great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one—that they are, in other words, special cases.
Walter Benjamin
Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring, real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. “Imaginative literature,” therefore, is either boring or immoral or a mixture of both.
Simone Weil
Literature, American
The curious have observed that the progress of humane literature (like the sun) is from the East to the West; thus has it traveled thro Asia and Europe, and now is arrived at the eastern shore of America.
Nathaniel Ames
Little
Little strokes fell great oaks.
John Ray
It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Those who apply themselves too much to little things often become incapable of great ones. (Ceux qui s'appliquent trop aux petites choses deviennent ordinairement incapables des grandes.)
François de La Rochefoucauld
Liverpool
Liverpool, though not very delightful as a place of residence, is a most convenient and admirable point to get away from.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Living
It matters not how long you live, but how well.
Publilius Syrus
They lived long that have lived well.
Thomas Wilson
Where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live.
Thomas Browne
They seldom live well who think they shall live long.
Thomas Fuller
The men who start out with the notion that the world owes them a living generally find that the world pays its debt in the penitentiary or the poorhouse.
W. G. Sumner
No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense.
Thomas Carlyle
Lloyd George
He [Lloyd George] did not seem to care which way he travelled providing he was in the driver's seat.
Lord Beaverbrook
Location
I can't say as ever I was lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.
Daniel Boone
Logic
The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.
Eric Hoffer
Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.
Lord Dunsany
London
When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.
Samuel Johnson
The different departments of life are jumbled together. … Actuated by the demons of profligacy and licentiousness, they are seen everywhere rambling, riding, rolling, rushing, justling, mixing, bouncing, cracking, and crashing, in one vile ferment of stupidity and corruption.
Tobias Smollett, of Charing Cross in the 18th century
London is a modern Babylon.
Benjamin Disraeli
There is fiercer crowded misery
In garret-toil and London loneliness
Than in cruel islands 'mid the far-off sea.
John Forster
In London we may suffer, but no one has any excuse for being dull.
John Lubbock
London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.
Arthur Conan Doyle
The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.
Charles Lamb
London Times
If I desired to leave to remote posterity some memorial of existing British civilization, I would prefer, not our docks, not our railways, not our public buildings, not even the palace in which we now hold our sittings; I would prefer a file of the Times newspaper.
E. G. Bulwer-Lytton
Loneliness
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
Edgar Allan Poe
The surest sign of age is loneliness.
A. Bronson Alcott
Long Life
"Enlarge my life with multitude of days!"
In health, in sickness, thus the suppliant prays:
Hides from himself his state, and shuns to know
That life protracted is protracted woe.
Samuel Johnson
Longevity
He lives long that lives till all are weary of him.
H. G. Bohn
Longing
To be perpetually longing, and impatiently desirous of any thing, so that a man cannot abstain from it, is to lose a man's liberty, and to become a servant of meat and drink, or smoke.
Taylor's Rule of Living Holy
Look
You should have seen her face then. Gratitude? Lord, what do you want with words to express that? Words are only painted fire, a look is the fire itself. She gave that look, and carried it away to the treasury of heaven, where all things that are divine belong.
Mark Twain
We usually see only the things we are looking for—so much so that we sometimes see them where they are not.
Eric Hoffer
Loquacity
Loquacious people seldom have much sense.
Baltasar Gracián
Oh,
Rid me of this my torture quickly, there,
My madam with the everlasting voice!
Ben Jonson
Lord Byron
Lord Byron is an exceedingly interesting person, and as such is it not to be regretted that he is a slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices, and as mad as the winds?
P. B. Shelley
I have a thorough aversion to his [Lord Byron’s] character, and a very moderate admiration of his genius; he is great in so little a way.
Charles Lamb
I never heard a single expression of fondness for him [Lord Byron] fall from the lips of any of those who knew him well.
T. B. Macaulay
Los Angeles
Los Angeles is like San Diego's older, uglier sister that has herpes.
Samuel Halpern
Lost
Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.
Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf
Lottery
A lottery is a taxation
Upon all the fools in creation
And Heaven be praised
It is easily rais'd,
Credulity's always in fashion.
Henry Fielding
Love
The greatest love is a mother's; then comes a dog's; then a sweetheart's.
Polish proverb
It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.
Agnes Repplier
If I'm such a legend, then why am I so lonely? Let me tell you, legends are all very well if you've got somebody around who loves you.
Judy Garland
The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Many a man has fallen in love with a girl in a light so dim he would not have chosen a suit by it.
Maurice Chevalier
Let there be spaces in your Togetherness.
Kahil Gibran
I never loved another person the way I loved myself.
Mae West
As soon as you cannot keep anything from a woman, you love her.
Paul Géraldy
Those who are faithless know the pleasures of love; it is the faithful who know love's tragedies.
Oscar Wilde
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
H. L. Mencken
The quarrels of lovers are the renewal of love.
Terence
The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her.
H. L. Mencken
The most disgusting cad in the world is the man who, on grounds of decorum and morality, avoids the game of love. He is one who puts his own ease and security above the most laudable of philanthropies.
H. L. Mencken
A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness. But after that he begins to bunch them.
H. L. Mencken
To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.
Oscar Wilde
There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.
Oscar Wilde
Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.
Samuel Johnson
It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.
Eric Hoffer
Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.
Peter Ustinov
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:13
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
Bertrand Russell
Then fly betimes, for only they
Conquer love that run away.
Thomas Carew
Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.
William Goldman (The Princess Bride)
If you would be loved, love and be lovable.
Benjamin Franklin
[What] some guys mean when they say "I love you" is what I mean when I say, "I love turkey."
Rabbi Daniel Lapin
Infatuation is effortless. Love takes work.
Chana Levitan
Love is the fart
Of every heart;
It pains a man when ’tis kept close,
And others doth offend when ’tis let loose.
Sir John Suckling
You've been good to me, baby,
Better than I've been to myself.
O'Kelly Isley, Rudolph Isley, and Ronald Isley
For [passionate] love is strong as death; Jealousy is cruel as the grave.
Song of Solomon 8:6 (KJV)
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.
Shakespeare
The wounds invisible
That love’s keen arrows make.
Shakespeare
Love sought is good, but giv’n unsought is better.
Shakespeare
There is no disguise which can for long conceal love where it exists or simulate it where it does not.
La Rochefoucauld
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
Julian Barnes
But say what you will, ’tis better to be left, than never to have been loved. To pass our youth in dull indifference, to refuse the sweets of life because they once must leave us, is as preposterous as to wish to have been born old, because we one day must be old.
William Congreve
Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.
1 Peter 4:8
He who doesn’t see his lover's faults as virtues is not in love.
J. W. Goethe
I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.
Samuel Butler
To live is like to love—all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.
Samuel Butler
Man desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love.
Adam Smith
Alas! the love of women! it is known
To be a lovely and a fearful thing!
Lord Byron
If this be not love, it is madness, and then it is pardonable.
William Congreve
I hold it true, whate'er befall,
I feel it when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all.
Alfred Tennyson
It is with true love as with ghosts. Everyone talks of it, but few have ever seen it.
La Rochefoucauld
Better a small serving of vegetables with love than a fattened calf with hatred.
Proverbs 15:17
An old man in love is like a flower in Winter
Portuguese Proverb
It is easy for them who have never been loved to sneer at love.
Welsh Proverb
In their first passion women are in love with their lovers; in all others they are in love with love.
La Rochefoucauld
It is commonly a weak man who marries for love.
Samuel Johnson
Woman likes to believe that love can achieve anything. It is her peculiar superstition.
F. W. Nietzsche
Men always want to be a woman's first love—women like to be a man's last romance.
Oscar Wilde
When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.
Oscar Wilde
Women in love are less ashamed than men.
They have less to be ashamed of.
Ambrose Bierce
Love and eggs are best when they are fresh.
Russian Proverb
The course of true love never did run smooth.
Shakespeare
Love, like man himself, dies of overeating much oftener than of hunger.
Jean Paul Richter
A man has choice of beginning love, but not to end it.
H. G. Bohn
Love is like war: you begin when you like and leave off when you can.
Spanish Proverb
Without good eating and drinking love grows cold.
Terence
When poverty comes in at doors, love leaps out at windows.
John Clarke
Love is a delightful day's journey. At the farther end kiss your companion and say fare-well.
Ambrose Bierce
At the touch of love every one becomes a poet.
Plato
Love blinds all men alike, both the reasonable and the foolish.
Menander
Even a god, falling in love, could not be wise.
Publilius Syrus
I do love; and it hath taught me to rhyme, and to be melancholy.
Shakespeare
Love is the tyrant of the heart; it darkens
Reason, confounds discretion; deaf to counsel,
It runs a headlong course to desperate madness.
John Ford
No man, at one time, can be wise, and love.
Robert Herrick
All the passions make us commit faults, but love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones.
La Rochefoucauld
When a man is really in love he looks insufferably silly.
John Vanbrugh
Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.
Anna Louise de Staël
Love is the state in which man sees things most decidedly as they are not.
F. W. Nietzsche
The heart that loves is always young.
Greek Proverb
It is more useful to be loved than to be venerated.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Love is perfidious.
Plautus
Love is a fiend, a fire, a heaven, a hell,
Where pleasure, pain, and sad repentance dwell.
Richard Barnfield
Oh, what a Heaven is love! Oh, what a Hell!
Thomas Dekker
Love and honor make poor companions.
Baltasar Gracián
I look upon love as a sort of hostile transaction, very necessary to keep the world going, but by no means a sinecure to the parties concerned.
Byron
True love always involves renunciation of one's personal comfort.
Lyof N. Tolstoy
I have noticed that there are times when every second woman likes you. Is love, then, a magnetism which we sometimes possess and exercise unconsciously, and sometimes do not possess?
George Moore
Love is only half an illusion; the lover, but not his love, is deceived.
George Santayana
We cannot permit love to run riot; we must build fences around it, as we do around pigs.
E. W. Howe
Love is like a well: a good thing to drink out of, but a bad thing to fall into.
Author unidentified
How miserable is the man who loves.
Plautus
In love, pain and pleasure are always at war.
Publilius Syrus
Though the beginning of love bring delight, the end bringeth destruction.
John Lyly
The sweets of love are mix'd with tears.
Robert Herrick
The rose is sweetest washed with morning dew,
And love is loveliest when embalmed in tears.
Walter Scott
He who falls in love has come to the end of happiness.
Japanese Proverb
Love conquers all. (Omnia vincit amor.)
Virgil
Love can do much, but money can do more.
Giovanni Torriano
Love demands all, and has a right to all.
Ludwig van Beethoven
It is hardly an argument against a man's general strength of character that he should be mastered by love. A fine constitution doesn't insure one against smallpox.
George Eliot
I do love her just as a man holds a wolf by the ears: but, for fear of turning upon me and pulling out my throat, I would let her go to the Devil.
John Webster
Follow love and it will flee,
Flee love and it will follow thee.
John Ray
They love too much that die for love.
John Ray
Blue eyes say, "Love me or I die"; black eyes say, "Love me or I kill thee."
Spanish Proverb
Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame.
Song of Songs 8:6
When we can't get what we love we must love what we have.
Roger de Bussy-Rabutin
And love's the noblest frailty of the mind.
John Dryden
All love is lost but upon God alone.
William Dunbar
You never understand anybody that loves you.
Ernest Hemingway
When love grows diseased, the best thing we can do is put it to a violent death; I cannot endure the torture of a lingering and consumptive passion.
George Etherege
Love's pleasure lasts but a moment;
Love's sorrow lasts all through life.
(Plaisir d'amour ne dure qu'un moment,
Chagrin d'amour dure toute la vie.)
Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian
Or love me less, or love me more
And play not with my liberty;
Either take all, or all restore,
Bind me at least, or set me free.
Sidney Godolphin
I see friends shaking hands, saying, "How do you do?"
They're really saying, "I love you"
Bob Thiele and George Weiss
Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves.
Oliver Goldsmith
Love is a universal migraine.
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.
Robert Graves
The end of love should be a big event.
It should involve the hiring of a hall.
Why the hell not? It happens to us all.
Why should it pass without acknowledgement?
Sophie Hannah
Love's like the measles—all the worse when it comes late in life.
Douglas Jerrold
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.
C. S. Lewis
To have known love, how bitter a thing it is.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;
But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.
John Keats
Does the imagination dwell the most
Upon a woman won or a woman lost?
William Butler Yeats
How often have I told you, that love seldom dies of hunger, but frequently of satiety?
Ninon de Lenclos
How alike are the groans of love to those of the dying.
Malcolm Lowry
O learn to read what silent love hath writ;
To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.
Shakespeare
There is no disguise which can hide love for long where it exists, or simulate it where it does not. (Il n’y a point de déguisement qui puisse longtemps cacher l’amour où il est, ni le feindre où il n’est pas.)
François de La Rochefoucauld
If we judge love by the majority of its results, it resembles hatred more than friendship. (Si on juge de l'amour par la plupart de ses effets, il ressemble plus à la haine qu'à l'amitié.)
François de La Rochefoucauld
True love is like the appearance of ghosts: everyone talks about it but few have seen it. (Il est du véritable amour comme de l'apparition des esprits: tout le monde en parle, mais peu de gens en ont vu.)
François de La Rochefoucauld
Love is a medley of endearments, jars,
Suspicions, quarrels, reconcilements, wars;
Then peace again.
Walsh
But when all was said the important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
W. Somerset Maugham
After all, my erstwhile dear,
My no longer cherished,
Need we say it was not love,
Now that love is perished?
Edna St Vincent Millay
I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match.
Arthur Miller
Women are always glad to listen when you discourse upon love …
W. Somerset Maugham
Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
This is similar to people's belief that love can overcome everything, that it has some special power. It doesn't. Except one on one. One on one, love is incredibly powerful. It is a beautiful thing. But if love had any power to change the world, it would have prevailed by now. Love can't change the world. It's nice. It's pleasant. It's better than hate. But it has no special power over things. It just feels good. Love yourself, find another person to love and feel good.
George Carlin
Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.
Boris Pasternak
Love and Hate
Love, friendship, respect do not unite people as much as common hatred for something.
Anton Chekhov
The more we love a woman the nearer we are to hating her.
La Rochefoucauld
Love and hatred are natural exaggerators.
Hebrew Proverb
He who loves you will make you weep, but he who hates you may make you laugh.
Spanish Proverb
Any kiddie in school can love like a fool,
But hating, my boy, is an art.
Ogden Nash
Lover
"You are the greatest lover I have ever had."
"Well, I practice a lot when I'm alone."
Woody Allen
I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.
Edward Gibbon
One minute is a lover high atop a tree, the next minute down among the briars is he, now up, now down, as a bucket in a well.
Geoffrey Chaucer, modern translation
It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason it is more difficult to show a ready wit all day long than to produce an occasional bon mot.
Honoré de Balzac
There was never proud man thought so absurdly well of himself as the lover doth of the person loved; and therefore it was well said that it is impossible to love and to be wise.
Francis Bacon
Lovers complain of their hearts, but the distemper is in their heads.
Thomas Fuller
A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
Balzac
A woman's little affections always fool her lover, and he goes into ecstasies over things which only make her husband shrug his shoulders.
Balzac
The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was Heaven whilst he pursued her as a star; she cannot be Heaven if she stoops to such a one as he.
R. W. Emerson
One reproaches a lover, but can one reproach a husband, when his only fault is that he no longer loves?
Madame de La Fayette
And I would have, now love is over,
An end to all, an end:
I cannot, having been your lover,
Stoop to become your friend!
Arthur Symons
Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy kind delight.
William Butler Yeats
Scratch a lover, and find a foe.
Dorothy Parker
Jupiter from on high laughs at lovers' perjuries. (luppiter ex alto periuria ridet amantum.)
Ovid
Loyalty
There is a great deal of talk about loyalty from the bottom to the top. Loyalty from the top down is even more necessary and much less prevalent.
George S. Patton, Jr.
Luck
Of course not, but I am told it works even if you don't believe in it.
Niels Bohr, when asked if he believed a horseshoe above the door would bring good luck
Luck sometimes visits a fool, but never sits down with him.
German Proverb
Luck is one-half of success.
Hindu Proverb
He who is lucky passes for a wise man, too.
Italian Proverb
To wait for luck is the same as waiting for death.
Japanese Proverb
Luck never gives; it only lends.
Swedish Proverb
All you know about it [luck] for certain is that it's bound to change.
Bret Harte
Fortunate people seldom mend their ways, for when good luck crowns their misdeeds with success they think it is because they are right. (Les gens heureux ne se corrigent guère; ils croient toujours avoir raison quand la fortune soutient leur mauvaise conduite.)
François de La Rochefoucauld
Lukewarm
Lukewarmness I account a sin
As great in love as in religion.
Abraham Cowley
Lunatic
Every lunatic thinks all other men are crazy.
Publilius Syrus
The various admirable movements in which I have been engaged have always developed among their members a large lunatic fringe.
Theodore Roosevelt
Lust
Do not lust in your heart after her beauty or let her captivate you with her eyes.
Proverbs 6:25
Turn away your eyes from a shapely woman, and do not gaze at beauty belonging to another; many have been seduced by a woman's beauty, and by it passion is kindled like a fire.
Ecclesiasticus 9:8
She [Elizabeth I] hath abused her body, against God's laws, to the disgrace of princely majesty and the whole nation's reproach, by unspeakable and incredible variety of lust, which modesty suffereth not to be remembered.
William Cardinal Allen
I'll come no more behind your scenes, David [Garrick]; for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities.
Samuel Johnson
Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.
1 Peter 2:11 KJV
Lust is an appetite of the mind by which temporal goods are preferred to eternal goods.
St. Augustine
The sages figured lust in the form of a satyr; of. shape, part human, part bestial; to signify that the followers of it prostitute the reason of a man to pursue the appetites of a beast.
Richard Steele
Delight of lust is gross and brief
And weariness treads on desire.
(Foeda est in coitu et brevis voluptas
Et taedet Veneris statim peractae.)
Petronius
Luxury
Faint-hearted men are the fruit of luxurious countries. The same soil never produces both delicacies and heroes.
Herodotus
People have declaimed against luxury for 2000 years, in verse and in prose, and people have always delighted in it.
Voltaire
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
H. D. Thoreau
Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessities.
John Lothrop Motley
Man is a luxury-loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational or too serious to be tempted by baubles.
Eric Hoffer
Lying
In time and place a harmless lie is a great deal better than a hurtful truth.
Roger Ascham
Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!
Shakespeare
A man had rather have a hundred lies told of him than one truth which he does not wish should be told.
Samuel Johnson
The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offence.
F. W. Nietzsche
Better a lie that soothes than a truth that hurts.
Czech Proverb
Whoever would lie usefully should lie seldom.
Lord Hervey
Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.
Homer
Lyre
It is idle to play the lyre for an ass.
Saint Jerome
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Last updated: February 18, 2025