Cool Quotes - L

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

The labor we delight in physics (alleviates) pain.

Labor is no disgrace.

What is there illustrious that is not attended by labor?

Life gives nothing to man without labor.

Labor is a powerful medicine.

God sells us all things at the price of labor.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Liberty of action and liberty of movement. (Laissez faire et laissez passer.)

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

If a man own land, the land owns him.

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

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

Buy land. They ain't making any more of the stuff.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

Let us cross over the river and sit under the shade of the trees.

Good that comes too late is good as nothing.

A little too late is much too late.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He laughs best who laughs last.

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

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.

Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.

We can't all be happy, we can't all be rich, we can't all be lucky—and it would be so much less fun if we were … Some must cry so that others may be able to laugh the more heartily.

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.

Justice delayed is justice denied.

This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.

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

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

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

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.

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.

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

[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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wherever Law ends,
Tyranny begins.

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.

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.

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

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.

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

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

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.

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

Whatever is not forbidden is permitted.

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

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

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.

Good law means good order.

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

The law follows custom.

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

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.

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

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

Good men need no laws, and bad men are not made better by them.

Lawmakers ought not to be law-breakers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Law cannot persuade where it cannot punish.

Much law, but little justice.

The more laws, the more offenders.

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

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

Just to the windward of the law.

Laws should be made by legislators, not by judges.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The more laws the less justice.

Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.

Great cases like hard cases make bad law.

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.

General rules based on individual victims are unwise.

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.)

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You might as well try to employ a boa constrictor as a tape-measure as to go to a lawyer for legal advice.

The best way to get the better of temptation is just to yield to it.

The lawyer sets his tongue to sale for the bolstering out of unjust causes.

Lawyers are … the High Priests of America.

Laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him.

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.

Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth.

That indolent but agreeable condition of doing nothing.

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.

Laziness is often mistaken for patience.

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

Lazy youth makes lousy age.

God does not listen to the prayer of the lazy.

All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.

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

The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.

The most important skill for any leader is the ability to take credit for things that happen on their own.

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

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

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

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

"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.

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

I must follow them. I am their leader.

You have lost a useful commander, and you have made a very wretched emperor.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Volumes have been written only to enumerate the miseries of the learned, and relate their unhappy lives, and untimely deaths.

The easily embarrassed are unable to learn.

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.

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

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

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

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

A man of learning is never bored.

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

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

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

Much learning, much sorrow.

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

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

Learning makes the wise wiser and the fool more foolish.

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

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

Much learning shows how little mortals know.

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.

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

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

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

But study is laborious, and not always satisfactory … we are willing to learn, but not willing to be taught.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

A decrease in the quantity of legislation generally means an increase in the quality of life.

It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.

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

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.

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.

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

Say not, When I have leisure I will study; perchance thou wilt never have leisure.

There was a time, in our country's history, when we believed that leisure meant opportunity. But educated people soon found that opportunity lay not in leisure but in effort; so they went to work. The ideal for rich and poor alike is that any one, through honest effort, may assume and secure any position for which he is fitted.

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

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

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

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

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

Lend your money and lose your friend.

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.

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

The Medici created and destroyed me.

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.

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.

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.

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.)

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

A liar is always lavish of oaths.

The greatest fools are the greatest liars.

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

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

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.)

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.

A known liar should be outlawed in a well-ordered government.

A liar ought to have a good memory.

Not being a liberal, I have very little grasp of things that I know nothing about.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

Liberals can understand everything but people who don’t understand them.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The only way liberals win national elections is by pretending they're not liberals.

Liberals attempt through judicial activism what they cannot win at the ballot box.

Liberals measure compassion by how many people are given welfare. Conservatives measure compassion by how many people no longer need it.

Liberality is not giving much but giving wisely.

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.

[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.

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

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.

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.

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.

There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Liberty too must be limited in order to be possessed.

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

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

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

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

Liberty is the power that we have over ourselves.

Lean liberty is better than fat slavery.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

O Liberty! what crimes are committed in thy name!

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

Mankind is tired of liberty.

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

When the people contend for their liberty, they seldom get anything by their victory but new masters.

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.

O liberty! O liberty! what crimes are committed in thy name! (Ô liberté! Ô liberté! que de crimes on commet en ton nom!)

Liberty is precious—so precious that it must be rationed.

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.

If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait for ever.

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.

The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.

Licence they mean when they cry liberty;
For who loves that, must first be wise and good.

If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

American liberty is dependent on quality in citizenship. Our obligation is to maintain that citizenship at its best. We must have nothing to do with those who would undermine it.

Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty.

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

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

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

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.

Burn the libraries, for all their value is in the Koran.

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.

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.

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

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.

We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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.

Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.

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

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

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

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

[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.

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.

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

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

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

I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.

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

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

Fancy living in one of these streets, never seeing anything beautiful, never eating anything savoury, never saying anything clever!

We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Life is short, but death lasts forever.

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

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

Life is a hideous thing.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Music is essentially useless, as life is.

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

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

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

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.

[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.

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

The unexamined life is not worth living.

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!

You can never begin to live
Until you dare to die.

A stout heart, a clear conscience, and never despair.

Life is subject to change without notice.

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

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

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

Just worry about living, dying is the easy part.

Life is pain … Anyone who says differently is selling something.

Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all.

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

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

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

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.

Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow is promised to no man.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Life is an incurable disease.

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.

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?

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

Few and evil have the days of the years of my life been.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Life, if well used, is long enough.

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

Blessed is he that hath a short life.

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.

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

This life is fickle, frail and vain.

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.

The longer life, the greater grief.

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

Why are we so fond of a life that begins with a cry and ends with groan?

When life is miserable it is painful to endure it;
when it is happy it is horrible to lose it.

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

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

Life is tedious.

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?

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.

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.

A useless life is an early death.

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

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

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!

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

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.

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

Life is one long process of getting tired.

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

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

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.

Life is simply one damned thing after another.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
These three alone lead life to sovereign power.

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.

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.

My life is one demd horrid grind.

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.

No devastating or redeeming fires have ever burnt in my life . My life began by flickering out.

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.

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.

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.

Life, what is it but a dream?

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!"

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

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.

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.

So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.

Our mission in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in the best of spirits.

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.)

Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young.

My days have crackled and gone up in smoke.

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.

Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.

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.

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.

And life is given to none freehold, but it is leasehold for all. (Vitaque mancipio, nulli datur, omnibus usu.)

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.)

We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

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.

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.

We're all fucked. It helps to remember that.

People who see life as anything more than pure entertainment are missing the point.

Clov: Do you believe in the life to come?
Hamm: Mine was always like that.

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.

Life is never as bad nor as good as one thinks.

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.

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.

Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.

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.

In the beginning God gave to every people a cup of clay, and from this cup they drank their life.

We must not expect that our journey through the several stages of this life should be all smooth and even.

Life is made up of desires that seem big and vital one minute and little and absurd the next. I guess we get what's best for us in the end.

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

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

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

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

Our lives are but our marches to the grave.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Every day above earth is a good day.

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?

Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.

Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

Let us honor if we can
The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.

Eternal law has arranged nothing better than this, that it has given us one way in to life, but many ways out. (Nil melius aeterna lex fecit, quam quod unum introitum nobis ad vitam dedit, exitus multos.)

Anyone can stop a man's life, but no one his death; a thousand doors open on to it.

(Eripere vitam nemo non homini potest,
At nemo mortem; mille ad hanc aditus patent.)

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

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

Do not pluck the beard of a dead lion.

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.

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

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

One must listen if one wishes to be listened to. (Il faut écouter ceux qui parlent, si on veut en être écouté.)

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

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

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

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

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

No author is a man of genius to his publisher.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

He that I am reading seems always to have the most force.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

A knowledge of different literatures is the best way to free one’s self from the tyranny of any of them.

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.

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.

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.

Little strokes fell great oaks.

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.

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.)

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

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

They lived long that have lived well.

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

They seldom live well who think they shall live long.

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.

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

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

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

The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.

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

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

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.

London is a modern Babylon.

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

In London we may suffer, but no one has any excuse for being dull.

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

The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.

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.

"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."

The surest sign of age is loneliness.

"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.

He lives long that lives till all are weary of him.

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.

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.

We usually see only the things we are looking for—so much so that we sometimes see them where they are not.

Loquacious people seldom have much sense.

Oh,
Rid me of this my torture quickly, there,
My madam with the everlasting voice!

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?

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.

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

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

Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.

You cannot lose what you never had.

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.

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

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

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.

The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom.

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

Let there be spaces in your Togetherness.

I never loved another person the way I loved myself.

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

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

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

The quarrels of lovers are the renewal of love.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.

If you would be loved, love and be lovable.

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

Infatuation is effortless. Love takes work.

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

You've been good to me, baby,
Better than I've been to myself.

For [passionate] love is strong as death; Jealousy is cruel as the grave.

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

The wounds invisible
That love’s keen arrows make.

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

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

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

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.

Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Better a small serving of vegetables with love than a fattened calf with hatred.

An old man in love is like a flower in Winter

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

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

It is commonly a weak man who marries for love.

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

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

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

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

Love and eggs are best when they are fresh.

The course of true love never did run smooth.

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

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

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

Without good eating and drinking love grows cold.

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

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

At the touch of love every one becomes a poet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The heart that loves is always young.

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

Love is perfidious.

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

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

Love and honor make poor companions.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

How miserable is the man who loves.

In love, pain and pleasure are always at war.

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

The sweets of love are mix'd with tears.

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

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

Love conquers all. (Omnia vincit amor.)

Love can do much, but money can do more.

Love demands all, and has a right to all.

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.

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.

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

They love too much that die for love.

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

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.

When we can't get what we love we must love what we have.

And love's the noblest frailty of the mind.

All love is lost but upon God alone.

You never understand anybody that loves you.

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.

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.)

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.

I see friends shaking hands, saying, "How do you do?"
They're really saying, "I love you"

Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves.

Love is a universal migraine.
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.

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?

Love's like the measles—all the worse when it comes late in life.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.

To have known love, how bitter a thing it is.

Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;
But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.

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.

Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love.

Does the imagination dwell the most
Upon a woman won or a woman lost?

How often have I told you, that love seldom dies of hunger, but frequently of satiety?

How alike are the groans of love to those of the dying.

O learn to read what silent love hath writ;
To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.

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.)

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.)

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.)

Love is a medley of endearments, jars,
Suspicions, quarrels, reconcilements, wars;
Then peace again.

But when all was said the important thing was to love rather than to be loved.

After all, my erstwhile dear,
My no longer cherished,
Need we say it was not love,
Now that love is perished?

I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match.

Women are always glad to listen when you discourse upon love …

Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.

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.

Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.

It is not that I love you less
Than when before your feet I lay:
But to prevent the sad increase
Of hopeless love, I keep away.

It is best to be off with the old love before you are on with the new.

But true love is a durable fire,
In the mind ever burning,
Never sick, never old, never dead,
From itself never turning.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.

I pray you, do not fall in love with me,
For I am falser than vows made in wine.

Men hate more steadily than they love.

Hatred is by far the longest pleasure;
Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.

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

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

Love and hatred are natural exaggerators.

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

Any kiddie in school can love like a fool,
But hating, my boy, is an art.

I have loved him too much not to feel any hatred for him. (Je l'ai trop aimé pour ne le point hair!)

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

One reproaches a lover, but can one reproach a husband, when his only fault is that he no longer loves?

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!

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.

Scratch a lover, and find a foe.

Jupiter from on high laughs at lovers' perjuries. (luppiter ex alto periuria ridet amantum.)

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.

Of course not, but I am told it works even if you don't believe in it.

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

Luck is one-half of success.

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

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

Luck never gives; it only lends.

All you know about it [luck] for certain is that it's bound to change.

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.)

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

Every lunatic thinks all other men are crazy.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.

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

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.

Delight of lust is gross and brief
And weariness treads on desire.

(Foeda est in coitu et brevis voluptas
Et taedet Veneris statim peractae.)

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

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

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.

Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessities.

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.

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

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

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

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

Better a lie that soothes than a truth that hurts.

Whoever would lie usefully should lie seldom.

Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.

It is idle to play the lyre for an ass.