Cool Quotes - N

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

I hate the man who builds his name
On ruins of another’s fame.

The rest and the spell of sleep in the middle of the day refresh the human frame far more than a long night.

The common employments or pleasures of life, love or opposition, loss or gain, keep almost every mind in perpetual agitation. If any man would consider how little he dwells upon the condition of others, he would learn how little the attention of others is attracted by himself.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

A Frenchman drinks his native wine,
A German drinks his beer;
An Englishman his 'alf and 'alf,
Because it brings good cheer.
The Scotchman drinks his whiskey straight
Because it brings on dizziness;
An American has no choice at all —
He drinks the whole damn business.

An Englishman thinks it a deadly insult if you say he is no gentleman, or, still worse, a liar; a Frenchman if you call him a coward; a German if you say he is stupid.

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.

Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.

Accuse not Nature, she hath done her part;
Do thou but thine.

Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.

All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but nature more.

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

My dear firstborn is the greatest ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast in the whole world, and I heartily wish he was out of it.

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"].

Would that the Roman people had but one neck! (Utinam populus Romanus unam cervicem haberet!)

Too much wealth is very frequently the occasion of poverty. He whom the wantonness of abundance has once softened, easily sinks into neglect of his affairs; and he that thinks he can afford to be negligent, is not far from being poor.

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 [from the neighbor], son.

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.

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.

It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor rather than a critic.

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.

I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

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?

"If everybody minded their own business," said the Duchess in a hoarse growl, "the world would go round a good deal faster than it does."

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

Corporal sensation is known to depend so much upon novelty, that custom takes away from many things their power of giving pleasure or pain.

The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

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?

The fear of nuclear power is not based upon a rational calculation but on superstitious dread of ray-like emanation, akin to a diabolic force.

The fact is that nudism is not natural, unless you are doing something such as swimming, where clothes are a nuisance. In any other situation, the nudist is a joke, and often an unfunny joke.

A great profusion of things, which are splendid or valuable in themselves, is magnificent. The starry heaven, though it occurs so very frequently to our view, never fails to excite an idea of grandeur. This cannot be owing to the stars themselves, separately considered. The number is certainly the cause.