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Cool Quotes - S
Sadness
The sadness will last forever.
Vincent van Gogh, among his last words
Safety
The forces of safety are afoot in the land. I, for one, believe it is a conspiracy—a conspiracy of Safety Nazis shouting "Sieg Health" and seeking to trammel freedom, liberty, and large noisy parties. The Safety Nazis advocate gun control, vigorous exercise, and health foods. The result can only be a disarmed, exhausted, and half-starved population ready to acquiesce to dictatorship of some kind.
P. J. O'Rourke
The worst of all public dangers is the committee of public safety.
C. S. Lewis
The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.
Tacitus
Said
The more said, the less done.
Scottish Proverb
Least said, soonest mended.
Proverb
Sailor
Seamen are the nearest to death and the farthest from God.
Thomas Fuller
The life of a sailor is very unhealthy.
Francis Galton
Saint
Many of the insights of the saint stem from his experience as a sinner.
Eric Hoffer
Saint, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.
Ambrose Bierce
Saint and Martyr rule from the tomb.
T. S. Eliot
All are not saints that go to church.
Anonymous
The history of the saints is mainly the history of insane people.
Benito Mussolini
The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.
Alexander Pope
Salary
If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
Author unidentified
Salesmanship
Don’t sell the steak; sell the sizzle. It is the sizzle that sells the steak and not the cow, although the cow is, of course, mighty important.
Elmer Wheeler
Saloon
The saloon is the poor man's club.
Bishop Charles D. Williams
Salt
Salt is white and pure,—there is something holy in salt.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Meat without salt is fit only for dogs.
Hebrew Proverb
Salutation
Hail, Emperor, those who are about to die salute you. (Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant).
Author unidentified, (reportedly said before a mock naval battle in AD 52)
Samuel Johnson
I observed he [Samuel Johnson] poured a large quantity of it [wine] into a glass, and swallowed it greedily. Everything about his character and manners was forcible and violent; there never was any moderation; many a day did he fast, many a year did he refrain from wine; but when he did eat, it was voraciously; when he did drink wine, it was copiously. He could practise abstinence, but not temperance.
James Boswell
[Samuel Johnson] was unsentimental about the past, disturbed by the present, and apprehensive for the future.
John Cannon
The vacuity of life had so struck upon the mind of Mr Johnson that it became by repeated impression his favourite hypothesis, and the general tenor of his reasonings commonly ended in that.
Hester Thrale
He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. [Samuel] Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next best:—there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.
William Gerard Hamilton
His [Samuel Johnson's] person was large, robust, I may say approaching to the gigantic, and grown unwieldy from corpulency.
James Boswell
There is no arguing with Johnson: for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.
Oliver Goldsmith
[To Dr. Johnson:] If you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales.
Oliver Goldsmith
The freedom with which Dr Johnson condemns whatever he disapproves is astonishing.
Fanny Burney
Pomposo, insolent and loud,
Vain idol of a scribbling crowd,
Whose cursory flattery is the tool
Of every fawning, flattering fool;
Who wit with jealous eye surveys,
And sickens at another's praise; …
Who to increase his native strength
Draws words six syllables in length,
With which, assisted with a frown,
By way of club, he knocks us down.
Charles Churchill
I can now look back upon threescore and four years, in which little has been done, and little has been enjoyed; a life diversified by misery, spent part in the sluggishness of penury, and part under the violence of pain, in gloomy discontent or importunate distress.
Samuel Johnson
Johnson deals so much in tribal tautology, or, the fault of repeating the same sense in three different phrases, that I believe it would be possible, taking the ground-work for all three, to make one of his Ramblers into three different papers, that should all have exactly the same purport and meaning, but in different phrases.
Horace Walpole
Here lies poor Johnson. Reader! have a care,
Tread light, lest you rouse a sleeping bear.
Religious, moral, gen'rous and humane,
He was, but self-conceited, rude, and vain:
Ill-bred, and overbearing in dispute,
A scholar and a Christian, yet a brute.
Soame Jenyns
All his [Johnson's] books are written in a learned language, in a language which nobody hears from his mother or his nurse, in a language in which nobody ever quarrels, or drives bargains, or makes love, in a language in which nobody ever thinks.
T. B. Macaulay
I have always considered him (Johnson) to be, by nature, one of our great English souls. A strong and noble man; so much left undeveloped in him to the last: in a kindlier element what might he not have been, —poet, priest, sovereign, ruler!
Thomas Carlyle
San Diego
San Diego didn't look like the kind of town where people get born.
Steve Ellman
San Francisco
The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.
Mark Twain
San Francisco is a mad city—inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people, whose women are of a remarkable beauty.
Rudyard Kipling
Sanctions
Sanctions rarely work: they damage, infuriate and embitter but they do not deter or frustrate an act of aggression.
Paul Johnson
Sarcasm
Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.
Thomas Carlyle
Sarcasm [is] the language of the Devil.
Thomas Carlyle
Never laugh when you're being sarcastic. It will ruin the effect.
Scott Adams
Satan
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.
Isaac Watts
Satire
Satire should, like a polished razor keen,
Wound with a touch that's scarcely felt or seen.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
In the present state of the world it is difficult not to write satire.
Juvenal
Satire will always be unpleasant to those that deserve it.
Thomas Shadwell
I love not the satiric Muse:
No man on earth would I abuse;
Nor with empoison'd verses grieve
The most offending son of Eve.
It hardens man to see his name
Exposed to public mirth or shame;
And rouses, as it spoils his rest,
The baser passions of his breast.
George Crabbe
The finest satire is the one in which ridicule is combined with so little malice and so much conviction that it forces a laugh even from those it hits.
G. C. Lichtenberg
The satirist holds a place half-way between the preacher and the wit. He has the purpose of the first and uses the weapons of the second. He must both hate and love.
Humbert Wolfe
Satisfaction
I die without remorse, as I have lived without guilt.
Julian, Emperor of Rome
So long as the great majority of men are not deprived of either property or honour, they are satisfied. (Qualunque volta alle universalità degli nomini non si toglie nè roba nè onore, vivono contenti.)
Niccolò Machiavelli
God alone is satisfied with what He is and can proclaim: "I am what I am." Unlike God, man strives with all his might to be what he is not. He incessantly proclaims: "I am what I am not."
Eric Hoffer
Savage
When all is said and done our resemblances to the savage are still far more numerous than our differences from him.
Sir James George Frazer
Scandal
Scandal is but amusing ourselves with the faults, foibles, follies and reputations of our friends.
Royall Tyler
It must be that scandals come, but woe to him by whom the scandal cometh.
Author unidentified
Scapegoat
What country in the world today engages in the most extreme anti-Semitic persecution? The Soviet Union. It’s not an accident, because if you have a society with concentrated power, if you have a collectivist society, it’s going to be in a position to exercise the preferences and prejudices of its rulers. Moreover, it’s going to have an incentive to do so, because it’s going to need a scapegoat and it will choose some group like the Jews or the blacks to be the scapegoat.
Milton Friedman
Scar
The defects and faults in the mind are like wounds in the body. After all imaginable care has been taken to heal them up, still there will be a scar left behind.
(Les défauts de l'âme sont comme les blessures du corps: quelque soin qu'on prenne de les guérir, la cicatrice paraît toujours, et elles sont à tout moment en danger de se rouvrir.)
François de La Rochefoucauld
He jests at scars that never felt a wound.
Shakespeare
Schadenfreude
Never find your delight in another's misfortune.
Publilius
I am convinced that we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others.
Edmund Burke
Scholar
Thus the man of learning is often resigned, almost by his own consent, to languor and pain; and while in the prosecution of his studies he suffers the weariness of labour, is subject by his course of life to the maladies of idleness.
Samuel Johnson
We must distinguish between a man of polite learning and a mere scholar: the first is a gentleman and what a gentleman should be; the last is a mere book-case, a bundle of letters, a head stuffed with the jargon of languages, a man that understands every body but is understood by no body.
Daniel Defoe
There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.
Samuel Johnson
The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next 25 or 50 years. And the thing that I will really be proud of is if some of the work I have done is still cited in the text books long after I am gone.
Milton Friedman
A mere scholar, who knows nothing but books, must be ignorant even of them.
William Hazlitt
Every scholar is surrounded by wiser men than he.
R. W. Emerson
School
But this interlude of school makes a sombre grey patch upon the chart of my journey. It was an unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, of toil uncheered by fruition; a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony.
Winston Churchill
All my contemporaries and even younger boys seemed in every way better adapted to the conditions of our little world [in school]. They were far better both at the games and at the lessons. It is not pleasant to feel oneself so completely outclassed and left behind at the very beginning of the race.
Winston Churchill
Good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school.
Saki
School Segregation
Sailer’s Law of School Segregation and Diversity: Some schools have too high of a percentage of blacks and thus the blacks suffer from segregation which causes them to suffer low test scores and high suspension rates, while some schools have too low of a percentage of blacks and thus the blacks suffer from lack of diversity which causes them to suffer low test scores and high suspension rates. No school has exactly the right percentage to keep blacks from suffering low test scores and high suspension rates.
Steve Sailer
Schoolmaster
One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters.
George Herbert
Schubert, Franz
My compositions spring from my sorrows. Those that give the world the greatest delight were born of my deepest griefs.
Franz Schubert
Science
An old Jewish man reads about Einstein's theory of relativity in the newspaper and asks his scientist grandson to explain it to him.
"Well, Zayda, it's sort of like this. Einstein says that if you're having your teeth drilled without Novocain, a minute seems like an hour. But if you're sitting with a beautiful woman on your lap, an hour seems like a minute."
The old man considers this profound bit of thinking for a moment and says, "And from this he makes a living?"
Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"
Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work.
Thomas A. Edison
I can't believe that God plays dice with the universe.
Albert Einstein
If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German, and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.
Albert Einstein
Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein
Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.
Albert Einstein
Science is built of facts the way a house is built of bricks; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a pile of bricks is a house.
Henri Poincaré
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein (Attributed)
There's a mighty big difference between good, sound reasons and reasons that sound good.
Burton Hillis
No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.
Albert Einstein
If I have been able to see farther than others, it was because I stood on the shoulders of giants.
Sir Isaac Newton
Perfection [in design] is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Donald Knuth
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Mark Twain
The great tragedy of Science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Thomas H. Huxley
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
Albert Einstein
The answer to unethical science is not to give up on ethics, but rather to pursue ethical science.
Author unidentified
Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.
Bertrand Russell
Post-Normal Science is where facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent.
Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
Stephen Jay Gould
This isn't right. This isn't even wrong.
Wolfgang Pauli
[In] the post-Enlightenment world, science [has] taken the place of magic, miracles, and superstition.
Jonah Goldberg
Modern science and industry [can] turn the luxuries of one generation into the necessities of the next.
Paul Johnson
There is no democracy in physics. We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi.
Luis Walter Alvarez
Even those to whom Providence hath allotted greater strength of understanding, can expect only to improve a single science. In every other part of learning, they must be content to follow opinions, which they are not able to examine; and, even in that which they claim as peculiarly their own, can seldom add more than some small particle of knowledge, to the hereditary stock devolved to them from ancient times, the collective labour of a thousand intellects.
Samuel Johnson
The Dark Ages may return, the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of Science, and what might now shower immeasurable material blessings upon mankind, may even bring about its total destruction. Beware, I say; time may be short.
Winston Churchill
As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
Noam Chomsky
In science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.
Marie Curie
In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
Francis Darwin
When Columbus promised a new hemisphere, he was told that this hemisphere could not exist; & when he discovered it, it was claimed that it had been known for a long time.
(Lorsque Colombo avait promis un nouvel hémisphère, on lui avait soutenu que cet hémisphère ne pouvait exister; & quand il l’eut découvert, on prétendit qu’il avait été connu depuis long-temps.)
Voltaire
Science is one thing, wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers.
Arthur Eddington
The grand aim of all science [is] to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest possible number of hypotheses or axioms.
Albert Einstein
With five free parameters, a theorist could fit the profile of an elephant.
George Gamow
Science has lost its virgin purity, has become dogmatic instead of seeking for enlightenment and has gradually fallen into the hands of the traders.
Robert Graves
The importance of a scientific work can be measured by the number of previous publications it makes it superfluous to read.
David Hilbert
In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.
Louis Pasteur
Men who have excessive faith in their theories or ideas are not only ill-prepared for making discoveries; they also make very poor observations. Of necessity, they observe with a preconceived idea, and when they devise an experiment, they can see, in its results, only a confirmation of their theory. In this way, they distort observation and often neglect very important facts because they do not further their aim.
Claude Bernard
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
Ernest Rutherford
It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.
Konrad Lorenz
In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.
Karl Popper
The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.
Richard P. Feynman
I shall certainly admit a system as empirical or scientific only if it is capable of being tested by experience. These considerations suggest that not the verifiability but the falsifiability of a system is to be taken as a criterion of demarcation It must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience.
Karl Popper
If science produces no better fruits than tyranny, murder, rapine and destitution of national morality, I would rather wish our country to be ignorant, honest and estimable, as our neighboring savages are.
Thomas Jefferson
Science moves, but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to point.
Alfred Tennyson
In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances.
Claude Bernard
Science has promised us truth—an understanding of such relationships as our minds can grasp; it has never promised us either peace or happiness.
Gustave Lebon
What is called science today consists of a haphazard heap of information, united by nothing, often utterly unnecessary, and not only failing to present one unquestionable truth, but as often as not containing the grossest errors, today put forward as truths, and tomorrow overthrown.
Lyof N. Tolstoy
I hate and fear science because of my conviction that, for long to come if not for ever, it will be the remorseless enemy of mankind. I see it destroying all simplicity and gentleness of life, all the beauty of the world; I see it restoring barbarism under a mask of civilization: I see it darkening men's minds and hardening their hearts.
George Gissing
The extraordinary development of modern science may be her undoing. Specialism, now a necessity, has fragmented the specialities themselves in a way that makes the outlook hazardous. The workers lose all sense of proportion in a maze of minutiae.
William Osler
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
John Dewey
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
Adam Smith
Through seas of knowledge we our course advance,
Discov'ring still new worlds of ignorance;
And these discov'ries make us all confess
That sublunary science is but guess.
Denham
Science Fiction
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
Isaac Asimov
The function of science fiction is not only to predict the future, but to prevent it.
Ray Bradbury
Science and Religion
We should endow neither [science nor religion]; we should treat them as we treat conservatism and liberalism, encouraging both, so that they may keep watch upon one another, and letting them go in and out of power with the popular vote concerning them.
Samuel Butler
Scientist
Mark all mathematical heads which be only and wholly bent on these sciences, how solitary they be themselves, how unfit to live with others, and how unapt to serve the world.
Roger Ascham
The priest persuades humble people to endure their hard lot; the politician urges them to rebel against it; and the scientist thinks of a method that does away with the hard lot altogether.
Max Perutz
Professors in every branch of the sciences prefer their own theories to truth: the reason is that their theories are private property, but the truth is common stock.
C. C. Colton
It is in the darker areas of science that great men win recognition; they are distinguished by ideas which light up phenomena hitherto obscure, and so carry science forward.
Claude Bernard
Scold
A frank scold is a devil of the feminine gender; a serpent perpetually hissing, and spitting of venom; a composition of ill-nature and clamor. You may call her animated gunpowder, a walking Mount Etna that is always belching forth flames of sulphur, or a real Purgatory, more to be dreaded in this world than the pope's imaginary hothouse in the next.
Anonymous
Scorn
We shall find no fiend in Hell can match the fury of a disappointed woman,—scorned, slighted, dismissed without a parting pang.
Colley Cibber
Scotchman
The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!
Samuel Johnson
Scotland
A land of meanness, sophistry, and mist.
Lord Byron, of Scotland
I wonder'd not when I was told
The venal Scot his country sold:
I rather very much admire
How he could ever find a buyer.
Author unidentified
Scotsman
Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.
Samuel Johnson
I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair. … Is he orthodox—he has no doubts. Is he an infidel—he has none either. Between the affirmative and the negative there is no borderland with him. His taste never fluctuates. His morality never abates. He cannot compromise, or understand middle actions. There can be but a right and a wrong.
Charles Lamb
Scratching
Scratching is bad, because it begins with pleasure and ends with pain.
Thomas Fuller
Scripture
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
William Shakespeare
He had been earnestly exhorting them to come and listen to the Word of God: "Well," they said, "if you will tap a good barrel of beer for us, we'll come with all our hearts and hear you."
Martin Luther
I am so great an enemy to the second book of the Maccabees, and to Esther, that I wish they had not come to us at all, for they have too many heathen unnaturalities. The Jews much more esteemed the book of Esther than any of the prophets; though they were forbidden to read it before they had attained the age of thirty, by reason of the mystic matters it contains.
Martin Luther
You cannot name any example in any heathen author but I will better it in Scripture.
James I
Scrutamini scripturas [Let us look at the scriptures]. These two words have undone the world.
John Selden
Sea
There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.
James Russell Lowell
He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea.
George Herbert
I find the sea-life an acquired taste, like that for tomatoes and olives. The confinement, cold, motion, noise, and odor are not to be dispensed with.
R. W. Emerson
Seasickness
The only cure for seasickness is to sit on the shady side of an old brick church in the country.
English Sailors' Proverb
Season
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
George Santayana
Spring is the season of gaiety, and winter of terrour.
Samuel Johnson
This distinction of seasons is produced only by imagination operating on luxury. To temperance every day is bright, and every hour is propitious to diligence. He that shall resolutely excite his faculties, or exert his virtues, will soon make himself superior to the seasons, and may set at defiance the morning mist, and the evening damp, the blasts of the east, and the clouds of the south.
Samuel Johnson
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land.
T. S. Eliot
If the parts of time were not variously coloured, we should never discern their departure or succession, but should live thoughtless of the past, and careless of the future, without will, and perhaps without power, to compute the periods of life, or to compare the time which is already lost with that which may probably remain.
Samuel Johnson
Second Coming
It is clear from the New Testament that they all expected the Second Coming in their own lifetime. And, worse still, they had a reason, and one which you will find very embarrassing. Their Master had told them so. He shared, and indeed created, their delusion. He said in so many words, "this generation shall not pass till all these things be done." And he was wrong. He clearly knew no more about the end of the world than anyone else. It is certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible.
C. S. Lewis
Secret
It is wise not to seek a Secret, and Honest not to reveal it.
Author unidentified
To tell our own secrets is generally folly, but that folly is without guilt; to communicate those with which we are intrusted is always treachery, and treachery for the most part combined with folly.
Samuel Johnson
Without this limitation [on keeping a secret] confidence must run on without end, the second person may tell the secret to the third, upon the same principle as he received it from the first, and a third may hand it forward to a fourth, till at last it is told in the round of friendship to them from whom it was the first intention to conceal it.
Samuel Johnson
The whole doctrine, as well as practice of secrecy, is so perplexing and dangerous, that next to him who is compelled to trust, I think him unhappy who is chosen to be trusted; for he is often involved in scruples without the liberty of calling in the help of any other understanding.
Samuel Johnson
As every one is pleased with imagining that he knows something not yet commonly divulged, secret history easily gains credit; but it is for the most part believed only while it circulates in whispers; and when once it is openly told, is openly confuted.
Samuel Johnson
I know that's a secret, for it's whispered every where.
William Congreve
Secrets with girls, like loaded guns with boys,
Are never valued till they make a noise.
George Crabbe
For secrets are edged tools,
And must be kept from children and from fools.
John Dryden
How can we expect others to keep our secrets if we cannot keep them ourselves? (Comment prétendons-nous qu'un autre puisse garder notre secret, si nous ne pouvons le garder nous-mêmes?)
François de La Rochefoucauld
If you would wish another to keep your secret, first keep it yourself.
Seneca
I have play'd the fool, the gross fool, to believe
The bosom of a friend would hold a secret
Mine own could not contain.
Philip Massinger
A man keeps a secret of another better than he keeps his own. A woman, on the contrary, keeps her own better than that of another.
Jean de la Bruyère
If you would keep your secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend.
Benjamin Franklin
The only secret a woman can keep is the one she doesn't know.
Arab Proverb
Everyone has his secrets.
Italian Proverb
Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
Proverb
Sect
In America the taint of sectarianism lies broad upon the land. The nation is sectarian, rather than Christian.
J. Fenimore Cooper
Security
Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature.
Helen Keller
Seduction
But seduction … isn't making someone do what they don't want to do. Seduction is enticing someone into doing what they secretly want to do already.
Waiter Rant Weblog (2005-11-29)
Be cautious in listening to the addresses of men. Art thou pleased with smiles and flattering words? Remember that man often smiles and flatters most when he would betray thee.
Noah Webster
Self
There is nothing noble about being superior to some other men. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.
Hindustani proverb
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
Aldous Huxley
To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
Albert Camus
There is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.
Schopenhauer
Only the shallow know themselves.
Oscar Wilde
There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.
Salvador Dali
We run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.
Eric Hoffer
My life is one long escape from myself.
Samuel Johnson (Attributed)
Man can never escape from himself.
J. W. Goethe
Self-Absorption
There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good.
Samuel Johnson
Self-Accusation
The thorns which I have reap'd are of the tree
I planted; they have torn me, and I bleed.
Byron
Self-Awareness
To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.
Eric Hoffer
Self-Command
No one is free who commands not himself.
Epictetus
In vain he seeketh others to suppress
Who hath not learned himself first to subdue.
Edmund Spenser
Self-Confidence
Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.
Samuel Johnson
Some men are just as firmly convinced of what they think as others are of what they know.
Aristotle
Self-Control
Every observer, however superficial, has remarked that in many men the love of pleasures is the Ruling Passion of their youth, and the love of money that of their advanced years. However this be, it is not proper to dwell too long on the resistless power and despotic authority of this tyrant of the soul, lest the reader should, as it is very natural, take the present inclination, however destructive to society or himself, for the Ruling Passion, and forbear to struggle when he despairs to conquer.
Samuel Johnson
Self-Criticism
There is another man within me that's angry with me, rebukes, commands, and dastards me.
Sir Thomas Browne
Self-Deception
But, however we may labour for our own deception, truth, though unwelcome, will sometimes intrude upon the mind.
Samuel Johnson
And now employ the remnant of my wit
To make myself believe that all is well,
While with a feeling skill I paint my hell.
Sir Philip Sydney
Nothing is so easy as to deceive one's self.
Demosthenes
Self-Defense
The life of a state is like that of a man. A man has the right to kill in self-defense, and a state has the right to make war for self-preservation.
C. L. de Montesquieu
Self-Delusion
When we have once obtained an acknowledged superiority over our acquaintances, imagination and desire easily extend it over the rest of mankind, and if no accident forces us into new emulations, we grow old, and die in admiration of ourselves.
Samuel Johnson
Self-Denial
Self-denial is not a virtue; it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.
George Bernard Shaw
Self-Deprecation
He who blames himself takes a by-road to praise; and, like the rower, turns his back to the place whither he desires to go.
Ascribed to St. Francis de Sales
Self-Destruction
When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.
John Cheever
Self-Discipline
He that would govern others, first should be
The master of himself.
Philip Massinger
Great numbers who quarrel with their condition, have wanted not the power but the will to obtain a better state.
Samuel Johnson
Those who cannot govern themselves, must be governed.
Samuel Johnson
No man, whose appetites are his masters, can perform the duties of his nature with strictness and regularity; he that would be superior to external influences must first become superior to his own passions.
Samuel Johnson
It is time to get back to basics: to self-discipline and respect for the law, to consideration for others, to accepting responsibility for yourself and your family, and not shuffling it off on the state.
John Major
Self-Discovery
The nearer we approach to the goal of life, the better we begin to understand the true value of our existence, and the real weight of our opinions.
Edmund Burke
Self-Dispraise
A man should be careful never to tell tales of himself to his own disadvantage. People may be amused and laugh at the time, but they will be remembered and brought against him upon some subsequent occasion.
Samuel Johnson
Self-Esteem
I think high self-esteem is overrated. A little low self-esteem is actually quite good … Maybe you're not the best, so you should work a little harder.
Jay Leno
He that is pleased with himself, easily imagines that he shall please others.
Samuel Johnson
The individual on his own is stable only so long as he is possessed of self-esteem. The maintenance of self-esteem is a continuous task which taxes all of the individual's powers and inner resources. We have to prove our worth and justify our existence anew each day.
Eric Hoffer
Self-Government
There are very few so foolish that they had not rather govern themselves than be governed by others.
Thomas Hobbes
Self-Hatred
The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.
It is not love of self but hatred of self which is at the root of the troubles that afflict our world.
Eric Hoffer
Self-Help
God lends a helping hand to the man who tries hard.
Aeschylus
The gods help him who helps himself.
Euripides
We are told what fine things would happen if every one of us would go and do something for the welfare of somebody else; but why not contemplate also the immense gain which would ensue if everybody would do something for himself?
W. G. Sumner
God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.
German Proverb
Self-Importance
Self-importance is our greatest enemy. Think about it—what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellowmen. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone.
Carlos Castaneda
Self-Improvement
Be at war with your vices,
At peace with your neighbors,
And let every New Year,
find you a better man.
Benjamin Franklin
When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. But I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my country. When I found I couldn't change my country, I began to focus on my town. However, I discovered that I couldn't change the town, and so as I grew older, I tried to change my family. Now, as an old man, I realize the only one I can change is myself, but I've come to recognize that if long ago I had started with myself, then I could have made an impact on my family. And my family and I could have made an impact on our town. And that, in turn, could have changed the country and we could all, indeed, have changed the world.
Rabbi Israel Salanter
Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.
Émile Coué
Self-Interest
Look round the habitable world! how few
Know their own good; or knowing it, pursue.
John Dryden, translation of Juvenal
Self-interest speaks all sorts of tongues and plays all sorts of characters, even that of disinterestedness. (L'intérêt parle toutes sortes de langues, et joue toutes sortes de personnages, même celui de désintéressé.)
François de La Rochefoucauld
I conceive that when a man deliberates whether he shall do a thing or not do it, he does nothing else but consider whether it be better for himself to do it or not to do it.
Thomas Hobbes
'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.
David Hume
The world is governed by self-interest only.
J. C. F. Schiller
Self-Knowledge
I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[Every] errour in human conduct must arise from ignorance in ourselves, either perpetual or temporary; and happen either because we do not know what is best and fittest, or because our knowledge is at the time of action not present to the mind.
Samuel Johnson
He knows the universe, and himself he does not know.
Jean de La Fontaine
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Alexander Pope
This counsel [to know oneself] has been often given with serious dignity, and often received with appearance of conviction; but, as very few can search deep into their own minds without meeting what they wish to hide from themselves, scarcely any man persists in cultivating such disagreeable acquaintance, but draws the veil again between his eyes and his heart, leaves his passions and appetites as he found them, and advises others to look into themselves.
Samuel Johnson
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
Henry David Thoreau
I frankly admit to not knowing who I am. This is why I refuse to buy clothes that will tell people who I want them to think I am.
Russell Baker
There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.
W. Somerset Maugham
Know thyself.
Inscription on the Temple to Apollo at Delphi
Thales was asked what was most difficult to man; he answered: "To know one's self."
Diogenes Laertius
Retire into thyself, and thou wilt blush to find how little is there.
Persius
Although men are accused for not knowing their own weakness, yet, perhaps, as few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.
Jonathan Swift
The first step to self-knowledge is self-distrust.
J. C. and A. W. Hare
Man is a darkened being; he knows not whence he comes, nor whither he goes; he knows little of the world, and least of himself. I know not myself, and God forbid I should!
J. W. Goethe
He who knows himself best esteems himself least.
H. G. Bohn
Self-Loathing
The dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.
William Hazlitt
Self-Love
Self-love is the greatest of all flatterers. (L'amour-propre est le plus grand de tous les flatteurs.)
La Rochefoucauld
Self-love is often rather arrogant than blind; it does not hide our faults from ourselves, but persuades us that they escape the notice of others, and disposes us to resent censures lest we should confess them to be just.
Samuel Johnson
He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
He fell in love with himself at first sight and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful.
Anthony Powell
Self-love seems so often unrequited.
Anthony Powell
Self-love is not so vile a sin
As self-neglecting.
Shakespeare
Self-Made
He is a self-made man, and worships his creator.
John Bright, said of Benjamin Disraeli
Self-Perception
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Sir Isaac Newton
Self-Pity
I never saw a wild thing
Sorry for itself.
D. H. Lawrence
I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
D. H. Lawrence
Self-Preservation
Self-preservation is the first law of nature.
English Proverb
Self-Reflection
Must I hold a candle to my shames?
Shakespeare
For such is the inequality of our corporeal to our intellectual faculties, that we contrive in minutes what we execute in years, and the soul often stands an idle spectator of the labour of the hands, and expedition of the feet.
Samuel Johnson
It [self-reflection] is, indeed, of so great use, that without it we should always be to begin life, be seduced for ever by the same allurements, and misled by the same fallacies.
Samuel Johnson
Let not sleep fall upon thy eyes till thou hast thrice reviewed the transactions of the past day. Where have I turned aside from rectitude? What have I been doing? What have I left undone, which I ought to have done?
Pythagoras
One should look long and carefully at oneself before one considers judging others.
(On doit se regarder soi-même, un fort long temps,
Avant que de songer à condamner les gens.)
Molière
Self-Reliance
Goe not for every griefe to the physitian, nor for every quarrell to the lawyer, nor for every thirst to the pot.
George Herbert
Whate'er your lot may be,
Paddle your own canoe.
Edward P. Philpots
Self-Respect
No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.
George Bernard Shaw
Self-Revelation
When a man is attempting to describe another person's character, he may be right or he may be wrong; but in one thing he will always succeed, that is, in describing himself.
S. T. Coleridge
Self-Righteousness
We do not make people humble and meek when we show them their guilt and cause them to be ashamed of themselves. We are more likely to stir their arrogance and rouse in them a reckless aggressiveness. Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.
Eric Hoffer
Self-Satisfaction
While all complain of our ignorance and error, everyone exempts himself.
Joseph Glanvill
Fortunate people never correct themselves. They always fancy they are in the right as long as fortune supports their ill conduct.
La Rochefoucauld
No one is ever satisfied with his fortune or dissatisfied with his understanding.
Antoinette Deshoulières
Only madmen and fools are pleased with themselves; no wise man is good enough for his own satisfaction.
Benjamin Whichcote
Self-Taught
He that was only taught by himself had a fool to his master.
Ben Jonson
Selfie
They [selfies] are this horrible thing where you are distorted. The chin is too big, the head is too small. No, this is electronic masturbation.
Karl Lagerfeld
Selfishness
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Oscar Wilde
I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.
Jane Austen
Next to the very young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Sensation
O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!
John Keats
Sense
Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.
Lewis Carroll
Where sense is wanting,
Everything is wanting.
Benjamin Franklin
We rarely find that people have good sense unless they agree with us.
La Rochefoucauld
We hardly find any persons of good sense save those who agree with us. (Nous ne trouvons guère de gens de bon sens, que ceux qui sont de notre avis.)
François de La Rochefoucauld
He is a man of sense who does not grieve for what he has not, but rejoices in what he has.
Epictetus
It is a dangerous thing for a man to have more sense than his fellow-citizens.
C. M. Wieland
Good sense is at the bottom of everything: virtue, genius, wit, talent and taste.
M. J. de Chénier
Sentimentalist
A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.
Oscar Wilde
Separation
In every parting there is an image of death.
George Eliot
Serenity
Serenity of mind and calmness of thought are a better enjoyment than anything without us.
Benjamin Whichcote
Serfdom
Better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait till it begins to abolish itself from below.
Alexander II
Seriousness
They that [are] serious in ridiculous matters [will] be ridiculous in serious affairs.
Cato the Elder (Marcus Porcius Cato)
I am more and more convinced that taking life over-seriously is a frivolous thing. There is an affected self-dramatizing in the brooding over one's prospects and destiny. The trifling attitude of an Ecclesiastes is essentially sober and serious. It is in closer touch with the so-called eternal truths than are the most penetrating metaphysical probing and the most sensitive poetic insights.
Eric Hoffer
The most important point is—and remains—not to take oneself seriously.
Eric Hoffer
I find we are growing serious, and then we are in great danger of being dull.
William Congreve
Sermon
I would not have preachers torment their hearers, and detain them with long and tedious preaching, for the delight of hearing vanishes therewith, and the preachers hurt themselves.
Martin Luther
Serpent
It was precisely because the serpent, at that time, was the most beautiful of creatures, that Satan selected it for his work, for the devil likes beauty, knowing that beauty attracts men unto evil.
Martin Luther
Servant
I would not tempt my servant to betray me by trusting him too far.
William Congreve
Seventy-five
My diseases are an asthma and a dropsy, and what is less curable, seventy-five.
Samuel Johnson
Sex
The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less.
Brendan Francis
There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection is the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted.
Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
The daughter-in-law of Pythagoras said that a woman who goes to bed with a man ought to lay aside her modesty with her skirt, and put it on again with her petticoat.
Montaigne
Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.
Anatole France
Marriage has many pains but celibacy has no pleasures.
Samuel Johnson
They made love as though they were an endangered species.
Peter De Vries
The physical union of the sexes … only intensifies man's sense of solitude.
Nicolas Berdyaev
As a child of eight Mr. Trout had once kissed a girl of six under the mistletoe at a Christmas party, but there his sex life had come to abrupt halt.
P. G. Wodehouse
Ducking for apples—change one letter and it's the story of my life.
Dorothy Parker
Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way around.
David Lodge
Women can sleep with whoever they want;
Men have to sleep with whoever will let them.
Author unidentified
A man on a date wonders if he'll get lucky. The woman already knows.
Monica Piper
You don't get married to get sex. Getting married to get sex is like buying a 747 to get free peanuts.
Jeff Foxworthy
I know nothing about sex because I was always married.
Zsa Zsa Gabor
Golf and sex are about the only things you can enjoy without being good at.
Jimmy Demaret
Men want sex. If men ruled the world, they could get sex anywhere, anytime. Restaurants would give you sex instead of breath mints on the way out. Gas stations would give sex with every fill-up. Banks would give sex to anyone who opened a checking account.
Scott Adams
Lie back and think of England.
Author unidentified. There is an apocryphal story that Queen Victoria offered this advice on her daughter's wedding night.
After all, [female genital mutilation is] a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure. True, a lot of us hapless western men find we deny women sexual pleasure without even trying, but we don't demand genital mutilation to guarantee it. On such slender distinctions does civilization rest.
Mark Steyn
I'll come and make love to you at five o'clock. If I'm late start without me.
Tallulah Bankhead
You'll have to ask somebody older than me.
Eubie Blake, when asked at the age of 97 at what age the sex drive goes
What men call gallantry, and gods adultery,
Is much more common where the climate's sultry.
Lord Byron
She broke her marriage vows; she tried to sleep with me.
Tom Driberg, a homosexual who had married a widow
He may be the best lover in the world, but what do you do the other twenty-two hours of the day?
Zsa Zsa Gabor, on her boyfriend Porfirio Rubirosa
Women need a reason to have sex, men just need a place.
Lowell Ganz
Men don't realize that if we're sleeping with them on the first date, we're probably not interested in seeing them again either.
Chelsea Handler
I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.
J. Edgar Hoover
What's the worst thing about oral sex? The view.
Maureen Lipman
What's a promiscuous person? It's usually someone who is getting more sex than you are.
Victor Lownes
Many years ago I chased a woman for almost two years, only to discover that her tastes were exactly like mine: we both were crazy about girls.
Groucho Marx
It's so long since I've had sex I've forgotten who ties up whom.
Joan Rivers
Why don't you come up sometime, and see me?
Mae West
Is sex dirty? Only if it's done right.
Woody Allen
A fast word about oral contraception. I asked a girl to go to bed with me and she said 'no'.
Woody Allen
On bisexuality: It immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.
Woody Allen
Every creature is sad after coitus. (Post coitum omne animal triste.)
Author unidentified
Your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.
Shakespeare
The pleasure [of sex] is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.
Lord Chesterfield (Attributed)
I have never yet seen anyone whose desire to build up his moral power was as strong as sexual desire.
Confucius (K'ung Fu-tzu)
The sexual life of adult women is a "dark continent" for psychology.
Sigmund Freud
I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood—sex and the dead.
William Butler Yeats
Very few men and women who have had a conventional upbringing have learnt to feel decently about sex and marriage. Their education has taught them that deceitfulness and lying are considered virtues by parents and teachers; that sexual relations, even within marriage, are more or less disgusting, and that in propagating the species men are yielding to their animal nature while women are submitting to a painful duty.
Bertrand Russell
My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.
W. Somerset Maugham
Women complain about sex more often than men. Their gripes fall into two major categories: (1) Not enough. (2) Too much.
Ann Landers
Shakespeare
We fix our eyes upon his graces, and turn them from his deformities, and endure in him what we should in another loathe or despise.
Samuel Johnson, of Shakespeare
When he describes anything you more than see it; you feel it.
John Dryden
It was most injudicious in [Samuel] Johnson to select Shakespeare as one of his principal authorities [for his Dictionary]. Play-writers, in describing low scenes and vulgar characters, use low language, language unfit for decent company; and their ribaldry has corrupted our speech, as well as the public morals.
Noah Webster
If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may study his commentators.
William Hazlitt
I believe Shakespeare was not a whit more intelligible in his own day than he is now to an educated man, except for a few local allusions of no consequence. He is of no age nor of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind: his observation and reading, which was considerable, supplied him with the drapery of his figures.
S. T. Coleridge
Shame
Shame, above any other passion, propagates itself.
Samuel Johnson
Life is easy to a man who has no shame.
The Dhammapada
In shame there is no comfort, but to be beyond all bounds of shame.
Philip Sydney
I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
Jonathan Swift
Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart.
Edmund Burke
So long as there is shame there is hope for virtue.
German Proverb
Shelley, P. B.
He [Shelley] had a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic.
William Hazlitt
Sheridan, Richard
Sherry is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, Sir, is not in Nature.
Samuel Johnson
Ship
No man will be a sailor who has contrivance to get himself into a jail …. There is, in a gaol, better air, better company, better conveniency of every kind; and a ship has the additional disadvantage of being in danger …. Being in a ship is being in a jail with the chance of being drowned.
Samuel Johnson
Shopkeeping
A man who finds it painful to smile should not open a shop.
Chinese Proverb
Shrew
Every man can rule a shrew save he that hath her.
John Heywood
Shy
Once bitten, twice shy.
Proverb
Shyness
Shy and proud men are more liable than any others to fall into the hands of parasites and creatures of low character. For in the intimacies which are formed by shy men, they do not choose, but are chosen.
Henry Taylor
Sickness
The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.
Eric Hoffer
Siesta
Mad dogs and Englishmen
Go out in the midday sun.
The Japanese don't care to,
The Chinese wouldn't dare to,
The Hindus and Argentines
Sleep firmly from twelve to one,
But Englishmen detest a siesta.
Noël Coward
Sigh
Words may be false and full of art,
Sighs are the natural language of the heart.
Thomas Shadwell
Sight
'Tis always better to see with one's own eyes than with those of other people.
Martin Luther
Sign
By this sign thou wilt conquer. (In hoc signo vinces.)
Constantine I
Silence
Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
Beckett
Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent,
and discerning if he holds his tongue.
Proverbs 17:28
I think the first virtue is to restrain the tongue; he approaches nearest to gods who knows how to be silent, even though he is in the right.
Cato the Elder (Marcus Porcius Cato)
Silence is the perfectest herald of joy:
I were but little happy, if I could say how much.
Shakespeare
It is always observable that silence propagates itself, and that the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find any thing to say.
Samuel Johnson
Silence is the virtue of fools. (Silentium, stultorum virtus.)
Francis Bacon
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.
Blaise Pascal
Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.
Thomas Carlyle
I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Silence is golden.
Proverb
Silence means consent.
Proverb
Speech is silver, but silence is golden.
Proverb
I regret often that I have spoken; never that I have been silent.
Publilius Syrus
God has given to man a cloak whereby he can, conceal his ignorance, and in this cloak he can enwrap himself at any moment, for it always lies near his hand. This cloak is silence.
Bhartrihari
More have repented speech than silence.
George Herbert
He that hears much and speaks not at all shall be welcome both in bower and hall.
John Ray
Silent people are dangerous.
Jean de la Fontaine
The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.
Baruch Spinoza
Great souls endure silently.
J. C. F. Schiller
Thought works in silence, so does virtue. One might erect statues to silence.
Thomas Carlyle
He who knows nothing else knows enough if he knows when to be silent.
Italian Proverb
Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher.
Latin Proverb
Silk
Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.
Robert Herrick
Simplicity
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Leonardo da Vinci
Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
Alan Perlis
All the greatest things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: Freedom; Justice; Honour; Duty; Mercy; Hope.
Winston Churchill
In products of the human mind, simplicity marks the end of a process of refining, while complexity marks a primitive stage. Michelangelo's definition of art as the purgation of superfluities suggests that the creative effort consists largely in the elimination of that which complicates and confuses a pattern
Eric Hoffer
There is a certain majesty in simplicity which is far above all the quaintness of wit.
Alexander Pope
A refined simplicity is the characteristic of all high bred deportment, in every country.
J. Fenimore Cooper
Sin
Despair is a sin.
Author unidentified
Few love to hear the sins they love to act.
Shakespeare
All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.
W. H. Auden
With love for mankind and hatred of sins. [Often quoted as 'Love the sinner but hate the sin.']
(Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum.)
St. Augustine
"Sins," he said. "Well, what did he say about sin?"
"He was against it."
Calvin Coolidge, perhaps apocryphal
As creeping ivy clings to wood or stone,
And hides the ruin that it feeds upon,
So sophistry, cleaves close to, and protects
Sin's rotten trunk, concealing its defects.
William Cowper
You think sin in the beginning full sweet,
Which in the end causeth the soul to weep,
When the body lieth in clay.
Everyman
Old sins cast long shadows.
Proverb
Sins become more subtle as you grow older. You commit sins of despair rather than lust.
Piers Paul Read
If Jupiter were to hurl a thunderbolt as often as men sin, he would soon have no thunderbolts left to hurl.
Ovid
Other men's sins are before our eyes; our own are behind our back.
Seneca
We sin from two causes: either from not seeing what we ought to do, or from not doing what we see ought to be done.
St. Augustine
Indeed, sometimes I do repent
And pardon do obtain,
But yet, alas, incontinent,
I fall to sin again.
John Carelesse
More and greater sins are committed when people are alone than when they are in society. In solitary places the Devil has opportunity to mislead people. But whosoever is in honest company is ashamed to sin, or at least has no occasion for it.
Martin Luther
He that falls into sin is a man; that grieves at it, is a saint; that boasteth of it, is a devil.
Thomas Fuller
Sin pulled angels out of Heaven, pulls men down to Hell, and overthroweth kingdoms.
John Bunyan
The sin lieth in the scandal.
Aphra Behn
Sins are indispensable to every society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only reliable weapons of power; the priest lives upon sins; it is necessary to him that there be "sinning."
F. W. Nietzsche
Sincerity
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
Oscar Wilde
The shocking truth is that, while insincerity may be fatal to good writing, sincerity, of itself, never taught anyone to write well. It is a moral virtue, not a literary talent.
C. S. Lewis
Sincerity is an openness of heart; we find it in very few people; what we usually see is only an artful dissimulation to win the confidence of others. (La sincérité est une ouverture de coeur. On la trouve en fort peu de gens; et celle que l'on voit d'ordinaire n'est qu'une fine dissimulation pour attirer la confiance des autres.)
François de La Rochefoucauld
The value of an idea has nothing whatever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.
Oscar Wilde
Singing
The singing of a man cast away on a desolate island, might be as appropriately considered an evidence of his contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave. Sorrow and desolation have their songs, as well as joy and peace. Slaves sing more to make themselves happy, than to express their happiness.
Frederick Douglass
The exercises of singing is delightful to nature, and good to preserve the health of man. It doth strengthen all parts of the breast, and doth open the pipes.
William Byrd
Singularity
Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult is it to bring it home.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Sinner
Every one of us is a sinner. We are men, not gods.
Petronius Arbiter
Sir Isaac Newton
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
Alexander Pope
I am persuaded that, had Sir Isaac Newton applied to poetry, he would have made a very fine epic poem.
Samuel Johnson
Sister
Never praise a sister to a sister, in the hope of your compliments reaching the proper ears, and so preparing the way for you later on. Sisters are women first, and sisters afterwards; and you will find that you do yourself harm.
Rudyard Kipling
Never praise a sister to a sister, in the hope of your compliments reaching the proper ears.
Rudyard Kipling
Sixty
What tutor shall we find for a child of sixty years old?
Thomas Fuller
After a man passes sixty, his mischief is mainly in his head.
E. W. Howe
Skeptic
At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.
Russell Baker
I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything.
T. H. Huxley
A skeptic has no notion of conscience, no relish for virtue, nor is under any moral restraints from hope or fear. Such a one has nothing to do but to consult his ease, and gratify his vanity, and fill his pocket.
Jeremy Collier
Hume, and other skeptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expense. Truth will not afford sufficient food for their vanity, so they have betaken themselves to error. Truth is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.
Samuel Johnson
Skepticism
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
George Santayana
The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties, blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
T. H. Huxley
With most people, doubt about one thing is simply blind belief in another.
G. C. Lichtenberg
Skepticism means, not intellectual doubt alone, but moral doubt.
Thomas Carlyle
While it is the summit of human wisdom to learn the limit of our faculties, it may be wise to recollect that we have no more right to make denials than to put forth affirmatives about what lies beyond that limit.
T. H. Huxley
Skill
Whatever is done skilfully appears to be done with ease.
Samuel Johnson
Sky
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is remarkable how few people seem to derive any pleasure from the beauty of the sky.
John Lubbock
Slander
Slander injures three: the slanderer, the person who hears the slander, and the person slandered.
The Talmud
Slander rends in pieces the very heart and vital. parts of charity: it makes an evil man party, and witness, and judge, and executioner of the innocent.
Jeremy Taylor
Whoever robs a woman of her reputation despoils a poor defenseless creature of all that makes her valuable, turns her beauty into loathsomeness, and leaves her friendless, abandoned and undone.
Richard Steele
Slang
Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
Carl Sandburg
Slave
I am tired of ruling over slaves.
Frederick the Great
Slave-trade
It is to be hoped that by expressing a national disapprobation of this trade we may destroy it, and make ourselves free from reproaches, and our posterity from the imbecility ever attendant on a country filled with slaves.
James Madison
Slavery
Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils.
Benjamin Franklin
When … you have succeeded in dehumanizing the Negro; when you have put him down and made it forever impossible for him to be but as the beasts of the field; when you have extinguished his soul and placed him where the ray of hope is blown out in darkness like that which broods over the spirits of the damned, are you quite sure that the demon you have roused will not turn and rend you?
Abraham Lincoln
Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.
Edmund Burke
Slavery is now no where more patiently endured, than in countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty.
Samuel Johnson
It must be agreed that in most ages many countries have had part of their inhabitants in a state of slavery; yet it may be doubted whether slavery can ever be supposed the natural condition of man. It is impossible not to conceive that men in their original state were equal; and very difficult to imagine how one would be subjected to another but by violent compulsion. An individual may, indeed, forfeit his liberty by a crime; but he cannot by that crime forfeit the liberty of his children.
Samuel Johnson
That execrable sum of all villainies, commonly called the Slave Trade.
John Wesley
I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly those who desire it for others. Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
Abraham Lincoln
No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
Frederick Douglass
We have the wolf by the ears; and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.
Thomas Jefferson, on slavery
Slavery is as ancient as war, and war as human nature.
Voltaire
I never mean, unless some particular circumstance should compel me to it, to possess another slave by purchase, it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this country may be abolished by law.
George Washington
If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.
R. W. Emerson
If the Negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that "all men are created equal," and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another.
Abraham Lincoln
This is a world of compensations, and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, they cannot long retain it.
Abraham Lincoln
By the law of slavery, man, created in the image of God, is divested of the human character, and declared to be a mere chattel.
Charles Sumner
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
Abraham Lincoln
I never knew a man who wished himself to be a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself.
Abraham Lincoln
I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.
Abraham Lincoln
Sleep
Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit.
Shakespeare
Whilst Adam slept, Eve from his side arose:
Strange his first sleep should be his last repose.
Anonymous
Sleep is sweet to the labouring man.
John Bunyan
He that would thrive
Must rise at five;
He that hath thriven
May lie till seven.
John Clarke
In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
Aeschylus
Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep—that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Untroubled night they say gives counsell best.
Edmund Spencer
Up, lad: when the journey's over
There'll be time enough to sleep.
A. E. Housman
I never sleep ‘cause sleep is the cousin of death.
Nas
Alas, what pleasure can two lovers find in sleep?
John Webster
Six hours sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool.
Proverb
What is sleep but the image of cold death?
Ovid
O sleep, thou ape of death!
Shakespeare
Immoderate sleep is rust to the soul.
Thomas Overbury
Sleep's but a short death; death's but a longer sleep.
Phineas Fletcher
If you sleep till noon you have no right to complain that the days are short.
Thomas Fuller
Thou hast been called, O sleep! the friend of woe;
But 'tis the happy who have called thee so.
Robert Southey
There is only one thing people like that is good for them: a good night's sleep.
E. W. Howe
The slothful man is the beggar's brother.
James Kelly
Sloth
Diligence overcomes Difficulties, Sloth makes them.
Author unidentified
Almost every occupation, however inconvenient or formidable, is happier and safer than a life of sloth.
Samuel Johnson
I am overcome by my own amazing sloth … Can you please forgive me and believe that it is really because I want to do something well that I don't do it at all?
Elizabeth Bishop
Thus Belial with words clothed in reason's garb
Counselled ignoble ease, and peaceful sloth,
Not peace.
John Milton
We make a pretext of difficulty to excuse our sloth.
Quintilian
Small
Small minds are hurt by the smallest things. (Les petits esprits sont blessés des plus petites choses.)
François de La Rochefoucauld
Smoking
I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time.
Mark Twain
To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know because I've done it a thousand times.
Mark Twain
A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.
James I
Snail
How ingenious an animal is a snail. When it encounters a bad neighbor it takes up its house and moves away.
Philemon: Fragment
Sober
And he that will go to bed sober,
Falls with the leaf still in October.
John Fletcher
No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.
(Nulla placere diu nec vivere carmina possunt
Quae scribuntur aquae potoribus.)
Horace
Sobriety
The gods love the sober-minded.
Sophocles
Soccer
The nice aspect about football is that, if things go wrong, it's the manager who gets the blame.
Gary Lineker, before his first match as captain of England's team
To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink. For a shilling the Bruddersford United AFC offered you Conflict and Art.
J. B. Priestley
Social Darwinism
[Social Darwinism] is the most influential misconception in history, since it produced the Marxism of Capital, the imperialism of Joe Chamberlain, and the racialism of Adolf Hitler.
Paul Johnson
Darwin's notion of the survival of the fittest was a key element both in the Marxist concept of class warfare and of the racial philosophies which shaped Hitlerism.
Paul Johnson
Social Engineering
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area—crime, education, housing, race relations—the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.
Thomas Sowell
My point is that you cannot force social change at a speed that it cannot go. Social change is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Deep social change takes time.
Camille Paglia
Social engineering has been the salient delusion and the greatest curse of the modern age.
Paul Johnson
Social engineering is the creation of millenarian intellectuals who believe they can refashion the universe by the light of their unaided reason.
Paul Johnson
[The man of system] seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.
Adam Smith
Social Justice
I am certain, however, that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
Friedrich von Hayek
Social Science
If any student of social science comes to appreciate the case of the Forgotten Man, he will become an unflinching advocate of strict scientific thinking in sociology, and a hard-hearted skeptic as regards any scheme of social amelioration. He will always want to know, Who and where is the Forgotten Man in this case, who will have to pay for it all?
William Graham Sumner
Social Security
I say we scrap the current [Social Security] system and replace it with a system wherein you add your name to the bottom of a list, and the you send some money to the person at the top of the list, and then you … Oh, wait that IS our current system.
Dave Barry
Social Security is a combination of a bad tax system with a bad way of distributing welfare.
Milton Friedman
The difference between Social Security and earlier arrangements is that Social Security is compulsory and impersonal—earlier arrangements were voluntary and personal. Moral responsibility is an individual matter, not a social matter. Children helped their parents out of love or duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else’s parents out of compulsion and fear. The earlier transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken them.
Milton Friedman
Socialism
To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukemia with leeches.
Margaret Thatcher
Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of Opinion—how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history.
John Maynard Keynes
[In the Soviet Union,] they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.
Author unidentified
Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor.
Charles Murray
The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples' money.
Margaret Thatcher
[Socialists claim] that we reject fraternity, solidarity, organization, and association; and they brand us with the name of individualists. We can assure them that what we repudiate is not natural organization, but forced organization. It is not free association, but the forms of association that they would impose upon us. It is not spontaneous fraternity, but legal fraternity. It is not providential solidarity, but artificial solidarity, which is only an unjust displacement of responsibility. Socialism … confounds Government and society.
Frédéric Bastiat
Socialism is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals.
Paul Johnson
The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.
H. L. Mencken
Let them [Socialists] abandon the utter fallacy, the grotesque, erroneous, fatal blunder of believing that by limiting the enterprise of man, by riveting the shackles of a false equality … they will increase the well-being of the world.
Winston Churchill
There can be no doubt that Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. It is not alone that property, in all its form, is struck at, but that liberty, in all its form, is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism.
Winston Churchill
You may try to destroy wealth, and find that all you have done is to increase poverty.
Winston Churchill
Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy.
Winston Churchill
[A] society which is socialist cannot also be democratic, in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom.
Milton Friedman
Spending by government currently amounts to about 45 percent of national income. By that test, government owns 45 percent of the means of production that produce the national income. The U.S. is now 45 percent socialist.
Milton Friedman
After the fall of communism, everybody in the world agreed that socialism was a failure. Everybody in the world, more or less, agreed that capitalism was a success. And every capitalist country in the world apparently deduced from that what the West needed was more socialism.
Milton Friedman
We are a poor country and we opted for socialist policies, but to build a socialist society you have to have a developed society.
Julius Nyerere
To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about.
George Orwell
Slavery comes to life again: the state an assemblage of slaves without personal liberty—that is Socialism.
William E. von Ketteler
All Socialism involves slavery.
Herbert Spencer
Socialist
Among our Socialist opponents there is great confusion. Some of them regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Only a handful see it for what it really is—the strong and willing horse that pulls the whole cart along.
Winston Churchill
The typical Socialist is … a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting.
George Orwell
Socialists, Communists, and Nihilists strive to uproot the foundations of civilized society.
Pope Leo XIII
Society
Society in its full sense … is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it.
Ruth Benedict
There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.
Margaret Thatcher
But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for.
Mark Steyn
To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father's has acquires too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily7 the first principle of association—'the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.'
Thomas Jefferson
The form was still the same, but the animating health and vigor were fled.
Edward Gibbon
Stop chasing [Facebook] likes and start doing more likable things.
Peter Shankman
Society cannot subsist but by the power, first of making laws, and then of enforcing them.
Samuel Johnson
'Tis in cells and corners that the wicked wretches, the monks and nuns, lead shameful lives. But openly, and among people, a man must live decently and honestly.
Martin Luther
Society is no comfort
To one not sociable.
Shakespeare
He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
Aristotle
Every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get.
Samuel Johnson
The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man, that … he never conceives himself otherwise than as a member of a body.
John Stuart Mill
The prosperity of a people is proportionate to the number of hands and minds usefully employed. To the community, sedition is a fever, corruption is a gangrene, and idleness an atrophy. Whatever body, and whatever society, wastes more than it acquires, must gradually decay; and every being that continues to be fed, and ceases to labour, takes away something from the publick stock.
Samuel Johnson
Society doesn't have values. People have values.
Milton Friedman
The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.
James Baldwin
Social stability is the product of an equilibrium between a vigorous majority and violent minorities.
Eric Hoffer
In society the man of sense always yields first. Thus the wisest are led by the most foolish and bizarre. We study their foibles, their humors and their caprices. We adapt ourselves to them, and avoid knocking our heads against them.
Jean de la Bruyère
As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it [society] becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
Edmund Burke
There is
One great society alone on earth:
The noble living and the noble dead.
William Wordsworth
It is not from top to bottom that societies die; it is from bottom to top.
Henry George
Society differs from nature in having a definite moral object.
T. H. Huxley
Society has come to be man's dearest possession. Pure air is good, but no one wants to breathe it alone. Independence is good, but isolation is too heavy a price to pay for it.
Benjamin R. Tucker
Society is a madhouse whose wardens are the officials and police.
August Strindberg
Socrates
The character of Socrates does not rise upon me. The more I read about him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him.
T. B. Macaulay
Socratic Method
The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play.
Max Beerbohm
Soldier
The patient and active virtues of a soldier are insensibly nursed in the habits and discipline of a pastoral life.
Edward Gibbon
For a soldier I listed [enlisted], to grow great in fame,
And be shot at for sixpence a-day.
Charles Dibdin
Old soldiers never die,
They simply fade away.
J. Foley
Soldiers fight and die to advance the wealth and luxury of the great, and they are called masters of the world without having a sod to call their own.
Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus
I hate that heady and adventurous crew
That by death only seek to get a living,
Make scars their beauty and count loss of limbs
The commendation of a proper man.
Anonymous, Nero, 1
I know not how, but martial men are given to love. I think it is, but as they are given to wine; for perils commonly ask to be paid in pleasures.
Francis Bacon
If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain in the ranks.
Ascribed to Frederick the Great
In order to have good soldiers, a nation must always be at war.
Napoleon I
A modern general has said that the best troops would be as follows: an Irishman half drunk, a Scotchman half starved, and an Englishman with his belly full.
C. C. Colton
I don't know what effect these men will have on the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.
The Duke of Wellington
The blood of the soldier makes the glory of the general.
H. G. Bohn
A soldier has a hard life, and but little consideration.
Robert E. Lee
A clergyman, or a doctor, or a lawyer feels himself no whit disgraced if he reaches the end of his worldly labors without special note or honor. But to a soldier or a sailor such indifference to his merit is wormwood. It is the bane of the profession. Nine men out of ten who go into it must live discontented, and die disappointed.
Anthony Trollope
I know that there must be soldiers; but as to every separate soldier I regret that he should be one of them.
Anthony Trollope
Soldiers ought to fear their general more than their enemy.
Author unidentified
Solitary
A solitary man is either a brute or an angel.
H. G. Bohn
Solitude
Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all—
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life's gall.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
How did you enjoy yourself with these people? Answer: very much, almost as much as I do when alone.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Man may indeed preserve his existence in solitude, but can enjoy it only in society.
Samuel Johnson
When Eve, in paradise, walked by herself, the devil deceived her. In solitary places are committed murders, robberies, adulteries, etc.; for in solitude the devil has place and occasion to mislead people.
Martin Luther
He forgot, in the vehemence of desire, that solitude and quiet owe their pleasures to those miseries (vexations), which he was so studious to obviate.
Samuel Johnson
I feel like one,
Who treads alone
Some banquet hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed.
Thomas Moore
There are some days when solitude, for a person of my age, is an intoxicating wine that makes you drunk with freedom, other days when it’s a bitter tonic, and still other days when it’s a poison that makes you bang your head on the wall.
Colette
It's so wonderful to shut out the world for a few hours. Rest, peace, silence, solitude. You would think they were luxuries that only the very rich can afford, and yet they cost nothing. Strange that they should be so hard to come by.
W. Somerset Maugham
In solitude
What happiness? who can enjoy alone,
Or all enjoying, what contentment find?
John Milton
Little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal where there is no love.
Francis Bacon
If a man be a coxcomb solitude is his best school, and if he be a fool it is his best sanctuary.
Alexander Pope
The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.
Voltaire
Solitude excludes pleasure, and does not always secure peace.
Samuel Johnson
I could bear sickness better if I were relieved from solitude.
Samuel Johnson
Solitude should teach us how to die.
Byron
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
H. D. Thoreau
The thoughtful soul to solitude retires.
Edward Fitzgerald, Translation of Omar Khayyám
[Solitude is] a good place to visit but a poor place to stay.
H. W. Shaw
Solvency
Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament and not of income.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Somalia
Somalia is so bad that making a mess improves the place.
P. J. O'Rourke
Son
He who causes his father's heart to bleed
Will one day have a son to avenge the deed.
Author unidentified
Beat your son every day; you may not know why, but he will.
Author unidentified
A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Son-in-law
He who is fortunate in a son-in-law finds a son; he who is unfortunate loses a daughter.
Epictetus
Song
The most despairing songs are the loveliest of all, I know immortal ones composed only of tears.
Alfred de Musset
Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.
Andrew Fletcher
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
P. B. Shelley
I cannot sing the old songs sang long years ago,
For heart and voice would fail me, and foolish tears would flow.
Charlotte A. Barnard
Sonnet
A sonnet is a moment’s monument—
Memorial from the soul’s eternity
To one dead deathless hour.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Sorrow
But for sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by accidents irreparable, and dwells upon objects that have lost or changed their existence; it requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should return, or the past should be recalled.
Samuel Johnson
Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away. It is the putrefaction of stagnant life, and is remedied by exercise and motion.
Samuel Johnson
I have much need of entertainment, spiritless, infirm, sleepless, and solitary, looking back with sorrow and forward with terrour.
Samuel Johnson
There is no greater sorrow
Than to be mindful of the happy time
In misery.
Dante Alighieri
Sorrow is properly that state of the mind in which our desires are fixed upon the past, without looking forward to the future, an incessant wish that something were otherwise than it has been, a tormenting and harassing want of some enjoyment or possession which we have lost, and which no endeavours can possibly regain.
Samuel Johnson
An habitual sadness seizes upon the soul …
Samuel Johnson
The safe and general antidote against sorrow is employment.
Samuel Johnson
How oft in vain the son of Theseus said,
The stormy sorrows be with patience laid;
Nor are thy fortunes to be wept alone;
Weigh others’ woes, and learn to bear thy own.
(Quoties flenti Theseius heros
Siste modum, dixit, neque enim fortuna querenda
Sola tua est, similes aliorum respice casus,
Mitius ista feres.)
Ovid, translation by Catcott, from Samuel Johnson's Rambler 52
One acquainted with pain understands how cruel a traveling companion sorrow is for someone with few friends at his side.
The Wanderer
Pleasure of love lasts only a moment, sorrow of love lasts all life long.
Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian
And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
'Tis that I may not weep.
Lord Byron
How small and selfish is sorrow. But it bangs one about until one is senseless.
Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother
The truth is that it is not the sins of the fathers that descend unto the third generation, but the sorrows of the mothers.
Marilyn French
It is wrong to sorrow without ceasing.
Homer
It is good to grow wise by sorrow.
Aeschylus
It is folly to tear one's hair in sorrow, as if grief could be assuaged by baldness.
Cicero
When sorrow is asleep wake it not.
James Howell
Sorrow is a disease in which every patient must treat himself.
Voltaire
Our joys as winged dreams do fly,
Why then should sorrow last?
Thomas Percy
The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal, every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open, this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.
Washington Irving
Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and oftentimes we call a man cold when he is only sad.
H. W. Longfellow
O sorrow, wilt thou live with me
No casual mistress, but a wife,
My bosom-friend and half of life?
Alfred Tennyson
Great sorrows are silent.
Italian Proverb
When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions.
William Shakespeare
Soul
Coddle the body and you harm the soul.
Polish proverb
The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold …. The same reason that makes us bicker with a neighbor creates a war between princes.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me?
Psalms 42:5
What can you ever really know of other people's souls—of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him.
C. S. Lewis
You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.
Attributed to George MacDonald
I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul's good to do each day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously; for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed.
W. Somerset Maugham
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
H. W. Longfellow
Not a single one of the many sciences in which we surpass the Blackfoot Indians throws the smallest light on the state of the soul after the animal life is extinct.
T. B. Macaulay
Hang there like fruit, my soul,
Till the tree die.
William Shakespeare
Source
If there is but little water in the stream, it is the fault, not of the channel, but of the source.
Saint Jerome
Sovereign
Such was the unhappy condition of the Roman emperors, that, whatever might be their conduct, their fate was commonly the same. A life of pleasure or virtue, of severity or mildness, of indolence or glory, alike led to an untimely grave; and almost every reign is closed by the same disgusting repetition of treason and murder.
Edward Gibbon
Alas! the republic has lost a useful servant, and the rashness of an hour has destroyed the services of many years. You know not, the misery of sovereign power; a sword is perpetually suspended over our head. We dread our very guards, we distrust our companions. The choice of action or of repose is no longer in our disposition, nor is there any age, or character, or conduct, that can protect us from the censure of envy. In thus exalting me to the throne, you have doomed me to a life of cares, and to an untimely fate.
Saturninus, when his troops put him forward as a contender to the Roman Emperor.
[If] the exercise of justice is the most important duty, the indulgence of mercy is the most exquisite pleasure, of a sovereign.
Theodosius I
The usual disease of princes, grasping covetousness, had made them suspicious and quarrelsome neighbors.
Plutarch
Pyrrhus revived this image [of Alexander the Great] by the fire and vigor of his movements in the field of battle; the rest only mimicked the hero, whose title they assumed, in their demeanor, and in the trappings and state of royalty.
Plutarch
[The] day of his inauguration was the last day of his happiness.
Edward Gibbon
The Romans derided [Marius's] indolence; they soon bewailed his activity.
Edward Gibbon
For my own part, I adhere to the maxim of antiquity, that the throne is a glorious sepulchre.
Theodora
To maintain the harmony of authority and obedience, to chastise the proud, to protect the weak, to reward the deserving, to banish vice and idleness from his dominions, to secure the traveller and merchant, to restrain the depredations of the soldier, to cherish the labors of the husbandman, to encourage industry and learning, and, by an equal and moderate assessment, to increase the revenue, without increasing the taxes, are indeed the duties of a prince.
Edward Gibbon
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
William Shakespeare
To know nor faith, nor love nor law; to be
Omnipotent but friendless is to reign.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Soviet Union
These were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.
P. J. O'Rourke
Space
Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.
Fred Hoyle
Space … is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
Douglas Adams
Spain
Whoever wishes to be well acquainted with the morbid anatomy of governments, whoever wishes to know how great states may be made feeble and wretched, should study the history of Spain.
T. B. Macaulay
Spaniard
Honor to a Spaniard, no matter how dishonest, is as real a thing as water, wine, or olive oil. There is honor among pickpockets and honor among whores. It is simply that the standards differ.
Ernest Hemingway
We Spaniards have no morals. One cannot live without morality! But we do live without it.
Pío Baroja
Sparrow
Once upon a time, there was a non-conforming sparrow who decided not to fly south for the winter. However, soon after the weather turned cold, the sparrow changed his mind and reluctantly started to fly south. After a short time, ice began to form his on his wings and he fell to earth in a barnyard almost frozen. A cow passed by and crapped on this little bird and the sparrow thought it was the end, but the manure warmed him and defrosted his wings. Warm and happy the little sparrow began to sing. Just then, a large Tom cat came by and, hearing the chirping, investigated the sounds. As Old Tom cleared away the manure, he found the chirping bird and promptly ate him.
There are three morals to this story:
- Everyone who shits on you is not necessarily your enemy.
- Everyone who gets you out of shit is not necessarily your friend.
- If you are warm and happy in a pile of shit, keep your mouth shut.
Author unidentified
Speaking
Hear much; speak little.
Robert Burton
When you have nothing to say, say nothing.
Charles Caleb Colton
He cannot speak well that cannot hold his tongue.
Thomas Fuller
Special Interest
The essence of the problem is that once we begin to allow exceptions for special interests, we move from a system of private arrangements to a political system where everyone’s freedom is limited and government becomes a matter of trying to balance those interests. Nobody really wins under these terms.
Milton Friedman
Specialist
No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.
George Bernard Shaw
Species
It is the preservation of the species, not of individuals, which appears to be the design of Deity throughout the whole of nature.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Speech
It is a great misfortune neither to have enough wit to talk well nor enough judgment to be silent.
Jean de la Bruyere
10 persons who speak make more noise than 10,000 who are silent.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
Ambrose Bierce
Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.
Robert Benchley
The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
George Bernard Shaw
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
Publilius Syrus
It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
Mark Twain.
Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent.
Dionysus the Elder
[He] possessed that vehemence of speech, which seldom fails to impart the persuasion of the soul.
Edward Gibbon
Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.
Horace
Most men with any convictions in a confused and complicated age have had the almost uncanny sensation of shouting at people that a mad dog is loose or the house is on fire, to be met merely with puzzled and painfully respectful expressions, as if the remark were a learned citation in Greek or Hebrew.
G. K. Chesterton
Do not praise anyone before he speaks, for this is the way people are tested.
Ecclesiasticus 27:7
More have repented speech then silence.
George Herbert
Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak. But experience more than sufficiently teaches that men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues.
John Locke
The true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them.
Oliver Goldsmith
Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates.
Thomas Mann
Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so he is.
Publilius Syrus
Speech was given to the ordinary sort of men whereby to communicate their mind, but to wise men whereby to conceal it.
Robert South
Write with the learned, but speak [or pronounce] with the vulgar.
Thomas Fuller
I pay attention only to what people say. I have little interest in what they think.
Napoleon I
Spelling
Let all the foreign tongues alone
Till you can spell and read your own.
Isaac Watts
I don't see any use in spelling a word right, and never did. I mean I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all our clothes alike and cook all dishes alike.
Mark Twain
Spendthrift
In squandering wealth was his peculiar art:
Nothing went unrewarded, but desert.
Beggared by fools, whom still he found too late:
He had his jest, and they had his estate.
John Dryden
Spirit
Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?
Shakespeare
Where men are forbidden to honor a king they honor millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead—even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served—deny it food and it will gobble poison.
C. S. Lewis
Spite
I am ignorant, sir, of your motives or provocations; I only know, that you have acted like a man who cuts off his right hand with his left.
Author unidentified
Spitting
A good sailor spits to leeward.
Nautical Proverb
Sport
As I emphatically disbelieve in seeing Harvard or any other college turn out mollycoddles instead of vigorous men, I may add that I do not in the least object to a sport because it is rough.
Theodore Roosevelt
Sports
Some [soccer] players suffer four or five fatal injuries per game. That's how tough they are.
Dave Barry
Rockne wanted nothing but "bad losers." Good losers get into the habit of losing.
George E. Allen
It's never just a game when you're winning.
George Carlin
In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.
Russell Baker
Sportsmanship
What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, and all-embracing tolerance—in brief, what is commonly called sportsmanship.
H. L. Mencken
Spouse
Spouse, n. Someone who'll stand by you through all the trouble you wouldn't have had if you'd stayed single.
Author unidentified
I don't like those men who claim that their wife is their best friend. I think spouses should tolerate each other and occasionally have sex.
Adam Carolla (paraphrased)
I don't like those men who claim that their wife is their best friend. My wife doesn't even crack the top 25.
Adam Carolla (paraphrased)
Spring
The variegated verdure of the fields and woods, the succession of grateful odours, the voice of pleasure pouring out its notes on every side, with the gladness apparently conceived by every animal, from the growth of his food, and the clemency of the weather, throw over the whole earth an air of gaiety, significantly expressed by the smile of nature.
Samuel Johnson
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If winter comes, can spring be far behind?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
In those vernal seasons of the year, when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against nature not to go out, and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing with heaven and earth.
John Milton
When a poet mentions the Spring we know that the zephyrs are about to whisper, that the groves are to recover their verdure, the linnets to warble forth their notes of love, and the flocks and herds to frisk over vales painted with flowers.
Samuel Johnson
Spring makes everything young again, save man.
Jean Paul Richter
Spy
What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing rights and wrongs?
John Le Carré
St. Jerom
The stories of Paul, Hilarion, and Malchus, by [St. Jerom], are admirably told: and the only defect of these pleasing compositions is the want of truth and common sense.
Edward Gibbon
St. Peter
It is a thing not to be believed that St Peter ever was at Rome.
Martin Luther
Stability
There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is 'dead'.
Jack Cohen
Stage
The mimes are our instructors in infamy, and each spectator delights to see repeated on the stage what he has done at home, or to hear what he may do on his return. Adultery is learnt while it is seen.
St. Cyprian of Carthage
Stalinism
Arrest, try, shoot!
Central Committee's response to Stalin's mere mention of internal enemies
Stanley Baldwin
It was the voice of the new England: uncomfortable with greatness, wary of excellence, indifferent to challenges abroad … an appropriate debut for this evangelist of political mediocrity.
William Manchester, on Stanley Baldwin
Star
The stars are golden fruit upon a tree
All out of reach.
George Eliot
Stardom
I don't want to be a star—most of the ones I know are too unhappy.
Vivian Vance
State
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
Edmund Burke
For every state, from the smallest to the largest, the principle of enlargement is the fundamental law of life.
Frederick the Great
The body politic, like the human body, begins to die from its birth, and bears in itself the causes of its destruction.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
States, like men, have their growth, their manhood, their decrepitude, their decay.
Walter Savage Landor
A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.
John Stuart Mill
States are as the men are; they grow out of human characters.
Plato
States are great engines moving slowly.
Francis Bacon
Honest mediocrity is the most suitable condition for states; riches lead to softness and corruption.
Frederick the Great
A thousand years scarce serve to form a state;
An hour may lay it in the dust.
Byron
The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.
Max Stirner
The state is force incarnate. Worse, it is the silly parading of force. It never seeks to prevail by persuasion. Whenever it thrusts its finger into anything it does so in the most unfriendly way. Its essence is command and compulsion.
M. A. Bakunin
When all the fine phrases are stripped away, it appears that the state is only a group of men with human interests, passions, and desires, or, worse yet, the state is only an obscure clerk hidden in some corner of a governmental bureau. In either case the assumption of superhuman wisdom and virtue is proved false.
W. G. Sumner
A state from which religion is banished can never be well governed.
Pope Leo XIII
Wherever there is a force in human society the problem is to use it and regulate it; to get the use and prevent the abuse of it. The state is no exception; on the contrary, it is the chief illustration.
W. G. Sumner
Statesman
The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.
Dean Acheson
Woe to the statesman who does not find a reason for war that will hold water when the war is over.
Otto von Bismarck
Statist
The end-game for statists is very obvious. If you expand the bureaucratic class and you expand the dependent class, you can put together a permanent electoral majority.
Mark Steyn
Statistics
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Benjamin Disraeli
Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.
Mark Twain
He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts for support rather than illumination.
Andrew Lang
If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.
Ernest Rutherford
Steele, Richard
A rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.
T. B. Macaulay
Stepmother
A good stepmother is as rare as a white raven.
German Proverb
Stone
We read a good deal about stones in the Scriptures. Monument & stumps of the memorials are set up of stones; men are stoned to death; the figurative seed falls in stony places; and no wonder that stones should so largely figure in the Bible. Judea is one accumulation of stones.
Herman Melville
Story
Never tell a story because it is true: tell it because it is a good story.
John Pentland Mahaffy
No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old—it is the new combinations that make them new.
Salman Rushdie
Stranger
The separation of the Arabs from the rest of mankind has accustomed them to confound the ideas of stranger and enemy.
Edward Gibbon
Listen up, if someone is being nice to you, and you don't know them, run away. No one is nice to you just to be nice to you, and if they are, well, they can go take their pleasant ass somewhere else.
Samuel Halpern
We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know, because they have never deceived us.
Samuel Johnson
Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
Tennessee Williams
Strategy
Short-term thinking drives out long-term strategy.
Herbert Simon
Straw Man
He raises phantoms of absurdity, and then drives them away. He cures diseases that were never felt.
Samuel Johnson
Strength
The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Thucydides
Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.
Winston Churchill
Struggle
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle …. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
Frederick Douglass
The struggle to reach the top is itself enough to fulfill the heart of man. One must believe that Sisyphus is happy.
Albert Camus
I often compare myself to a poor old woman, who, having no bellows, lays herself down on her heart, and with her mouth endeavours to blow up into a faint blaze a little handful of sticks, half green, half dry, in order to warm a mess of pottage, that, after all her pains, hardly keeps life and soul together.
Samuel Richardson
Study
This, she says, is the consequence of female study: girls grow too wise to be advised, and too stubborn to be commanded.
Samuel Johnson
To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor [folly] of a scholar.
Sir Francis Bacon
Stupidity
Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.
Author unidentified
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
Bertrand Russell
Remember, when you are dead, you do not know you are dead. It is painful only for others. The same applies when you are stupid. (La mort, c'est un peu comme la connerie. Le mort, lui, il ne sait pas qu'il est mort. Ce sont les autres qui sont tristes. Le con, c'est pareil.)
Philippe Geluck (paraphrased)
Sherry is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, Sir, is not in Nature.
Samuel Johnson
The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
C. S. Lewis
With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain. (Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.)
Friedrich von Schiller
Style
Every thought can be expressed in a number of different ways: and style is the art of expressing a given thought in the most beautiful words and rhythms of words … thus by the power of style, what was nonsense becomes ineffably beautiful.
C. S. Lewis
Sublime
From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.
Napoleon
The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime, makes the ridiculous; and one step above the ridiculous, makes the sublime again.
Thomas Paine
Subservience
Orders can be benign or malign, but the habit of obeying them can become ingrained.
Theodore Dalrymple
Success
It is not enough to succeed, a friend must fail.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
What is success?
To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty;
To find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived;
That is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Lose as if you like it; win as if you were used to it.
Tommy Hitchcock
Success is a journey, not a destination.
Ben Sweetland
Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success.
Oscar Wilde
Eighty percent of success is showing up.
Woody Allen
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.
Bill Gates
It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year.
Tom Lehrer
Be nice to people on your way up because you'll meet 'em on your way down.
Wilson Mizner
The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit. Try, if you can, to belong to the first class. There's far less competition.
Dwight Morrow
It is difficult to soar like an eagle when you are surrounded by turkeys.
Helen Osborne
It matters not whether you win or lose: what matters is whether I win or lose.
Darin Weinberg (Attributed)
There are two kinds of success: initial and ultimate. To act by half-measures, with a lack of conviction miscalled "caution," is to run the greatest risks and lose the prize.
Winston Churchill
In the real world, very smart people fail and mediocre people rise. Part of what makes people fail or succeed are skills that have nothing to do with IQ.
Camille Paglia
'Tis not in mortals to command success,
But we'll do more, Sempronius; we'll deserve it.
Joseph Addison
It is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done.
Terry Pratchett
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Emily Dickinson
Success is relative: It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.
T. S. Eliot
Success depends on three things: who says it, what he says, how he says it; and of these three things, what he says is the least important.
John, Viscount Morley
The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease.
William James
Now that I’ve grown old, I realize that for most of us it is not enough to have achieved personal success. One’s best friend must also have failed.
W. Somerset Maugham
To succeed in the world we do everything we can to appear successful already. (Pour s'établir dans le monde, on fait tout ce que l'on peut pour y paraître établi.)
François de La Rochefoucauld
Success and Failure
The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of God's chillun, but that as soon as he has any luck he owes it to the Devil.
H. L. Mencken
It's a good habit to trumpet your failures and be quiet about your successes.
Charlie Munger
The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind. Failure makes people bitter and cruel.
W. Somerset Maugham
Suffering
The sufferings that fate inflicts on us should be borne with patience, what enemies inflict with manly courage.
Thucydides
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.
Author unidentified
Great souls suffer in silence.
Johann [Christoph] Friedrich von Schiller
Life isn't finished for us yet! We're going to live! … Maybe, if we wait a little longer, we shall find out why we live, why we suffer.
Anton Chekhov
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.
George Eliot
Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky
It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
W. Somerset Maugham
Rulers have no authority from God to do mischief.
Jonathan Mayhew
We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.
W. Somerset Maugham
Suicide
When we have lost everything, including hope, life becomes a disgrace and death a duty.
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)
Unhappy men! If you are thus weary of your lives, is it so difficult for you to find ropes and precipices?
Antoninus Pius (Attributed), to zealous Christians who apparently provoked the authorities in order to become martyrs
The criminal penalties [for suicide] are the production of a later and darker age.
Edward Gibbon
Yet the civilians have always respected the natural right of a citizen to dispose of his life.
Edward Gibbon
If I had the use of my body I would throw it out of the window.
Samuel Beckett
I don't like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand right back and if possible to get a pillar between me and the train. I don't like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second's action would end everything. A few drops of desperation.
Winston Churchill
The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall.
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours—on the wall—
Are drawing a long breath to shout 'Hurray!'
The strangest whim has seized me … After all
I think I will not hang myself today.
G. K. Chesterton
The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Now, we know that life is only a stage to play the fool upon as long as the part amuses us. There was one more convenience lacking to modern comfort; a decent easy way to quit that stage; the back stairs to liberty; or, as I said this moment, Death’s private door. This … is supplied by the Suicide Club.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Dear World, I am leaving you because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.
George Sanders, Suicide note
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.
Albert Camus
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
Dorothy Parker
It's illegal to kill yourself in a quick and painless way, but if you do it slowly over a few decades—say by not exercising—that's called laziness, not suicide, and it's completely legal. You might even get credit for being jolly or get a job as a TV chef on a cable network.
Scott Adams
We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the book in the fire. (Nous ne pouvons arracher une seule page de notre vie, mais nous pouvons jeter le livre au feu.)
George Sand
Sumptuary Law
It is the highest impertinence and presumption in kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense, either by sumptuary laws or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society.
Adam Smith
Sunday
[Sunday] should be different from another day. People may walk, but not throw stones at birds. There may be relaxation, but there should be no levity.
Samuel Johnson
Superficial
The writers who have undertaken the task of reconciling mankind to their present state, … frequently remind us that we judge too hastily of good and evil, that we view only the superfices of life, and determine of the whole by a very small part; and that in the condition of men it frequently happens, that grief and anxiety lie hid under the golden robes of prosperity, and the gloom of calamity is cheered by secret radiations of hope and comfort; as in the works of nature the bog is sometimes covered with flowers, and the mine concealed in the barren crags.
Samuel Johnson
Superfluity
Whether we can afford it or no, we must have superfluities.
John Gay
Superfluous
The superfluous is very necessary.
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)
Superstition
A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.
George Iles
Fear has been the original parent of superstition, and every new calamity urges trembling mortals to deprecate the wrath of their invisible enemies.
Edward Gibbon
Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
Edmund Burke
Supervision
The ratio between supervisory and producing personnel is always highest where the intellectuals are in power. In a Communist country it takes half the population to supervise the other half.
Eric Hoffer
Supper
For my part now, I consider supper as a turnpike through which one must pass, in order to get to bed.
Oliver Edwards
Suppression
Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.
Saul Bellow
Surprise
Zounds! I was never so bethump'd with words
Since I first call'd my brother's father dad.
William Shakespeare
Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.
Jane Austen
Surroundings
There are animals that borrow their colour from the neighbouring body, and consequently vary their hue as they happen to change their place. In like manner it ought to be the endeavour of every man to derive his reflections from the objects about him; for it is to no purpose that he alters his position, if his attention continues fixed to the same point. The mind should be kept open to the access of every new idea, and so far disengaged from the predominance of particular thoughts, as easily to accommodate itself to occasional entertainment.
Samuel Johnson
Survival
The fox knows many things—the hedgehog one big one.
Archilochus
Suspense
The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
Oscar Wilde
Suspicion
As it is necessary not to invite robbery by supineness, so it is our duty not to suppress tenderness by suspicion; it is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.
Samuel Johnson
There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.
Francis Bacon
Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.
Samuel Johnson
There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies against despots—suspicion.
Demosthenes
Rabid suspicion has nothing in it of skepticism. The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.
Eric Hoffer
Swiss
The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quiet solvent business.
William Faulkner
Switzerland
Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.
Ernest Hemingway
Sword
Whosoever draws his sword against the prince must throw the scabbard away.
Proverb
Sympathy
Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.
Edward Gibbon
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Last updated: May 19, 2025