Cool Quotes - N

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

Is dishwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent.

In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments—there are consequences.

In such condition [Nature with every man against every man], there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently … no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

But the works of man are impotent against the assaults of nature …

The law of nature instructs most animals to cherish and educate their infant progeny. The law of reason inculcates to the human species the returns of filial piety.

I am at two with nature.

Charlie Allnut: A man takes a drop too much once in a while, it's only human nature.
Rose Sayer: Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.

Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.

The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

There is no such thing as a necessary man.

Very few of us are irreplaceable in our professional lives, but all of us are irreplaceable to those who love us.

[Yet] the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention. [Often quoted as "necessity is the mother of invention"].

A little neglect may breed great mischief … for the want of a nail the shoe was lost; for the want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for the want of a horse the rider was lost.

Have you told them it bothers you? … Are they bigger than you? … Are you afraid of getting your ass kicked? … Ah, okay, I probably should have asked that question first, woulda saved time. Yeah, you're just gonna have to deal with the noise, son.

Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order. When one goes from the levee or the business streets [of New Orleans] to it, to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those people down there would live as neatly while they are alive as they do after they are dead, they would find many advantages in it; and besides, their quarter would be the wonder and admiration of the business world.

A car is useless in New York, essential everywhere else. The same with good manners.

I tell people that if it's in the news, don't worry about it. The very definition of "news" is "something that hardly ever happens." It's when something isn't in the news, when it's so common that it's no longer news—car crashes, domestic violence—that you should start worrying.

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standards of nonconformity.

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Wouldn't this nucleus of [nuclear holocaust] survivors be so grief-stricken and anguished that they'd, well, envy the dead and not want to go on living?