Cool Quotes - W

Wages should be left to the fair and free competition of the market, and should never be controlled by the interference of the legislature.

Wagner had some wonderful moments but awful half hours.

One cannot judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin from a first hearing, and I certainly do not intend to hear it a second time.

Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Everything comes to him who waits.

All wisdom may be reduced to two words—wait and hope.

People count up the faults of those who keep them waiting.

The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.

I nauseate walking; ’tis a country diversion, I loathe the country.

Of all exercises walking is the best.

Walking makes for a long life.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.

It is impossible to supply wants as fast as an idle imagination may be able to form them, or to remove all inconveniences by which elegance refined into impatience may be offended.

So have I loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

I dropped an aerial torpedo right in the center, and the group opened up like a flowering rose. It was most entertaining.

War hath no fury like a non-combatant.

A general and a bit of shooting makes you forget your troubles … it takes your mind off the cost of living.

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master.

It takes in reality only one to make a quarrel. It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion.

There must be some good in the life of battle, for so many good men have enjoyed being soldiers.

In war, truth is the first casualty.

I reverence the field of battle, stained with their blood, and the blood of the Barbarians. Those honorable marks have been already washed away by the rains; but the lofty monuments of their bones, the bones of generals, of centurions, and of valiant warriors, claim a longer period of duration.

If you are a god, we shall not be harmed by you, for we have done no wrong; but if you are a man, you may meet with a stronger man than yourself.

If we win one more such victory over the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.

Carthage must be destroyed! (Carthago delenda est!)

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

I have already given two cousins to the war and I stand ready to sacrifice my wife's brother.

Not those alone who make the war must feel the war!

For what fortress, what city, in the wide extent of the Roman empire, can hope to exist, secure and impregnable, if it is our pleasure that it should be erased from the earth?

The conflict was obstinate; the slaughter was mutual.

We make war that we may live in peace.

Whole generations may be swept away by the madness of kings in the space of a single hour.

A bloody and complete victory has sometimes yielded no more than the possession of the field and the loss of ten thousand men has sometimes been sufficient to destroy, in a single day, the work of ages.

Every age, however destitute of science or virtue, sufficiently abounds with acts of blood and military renown.

[To] the vanquished, death [is] a relief, life a burden, and infamy the only object of terror.

[It is a melancholy truth] that the first and most cruel sufferings [in war] must be the lot of the innocent and helpless.

The events by which the fate of nations is not materially changed, leave a faint impression on the page of history, and the patience of the reader would be exhausted by the repetition of the same hostilities [between Rome and Persia], undertaken without cause, prosecuted without glory, and terminated without effect.

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.

Don't Delay: The best is the enemy of the good [emphasis added]. By this I mean that a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week. War is a very simple thing, and the determining characteristics are self-confidence, speed, and audacity. None of these things can ever be perfect, but they can be good.

[In] the national and religious conflict of the [Byzantine and Saracen] empires, peace was without confidence, and war without mercy.

So familiar, and as it were so natural to man, is the practice of violence, that our indulgence allows the slightest provocation, the most disputable right, as a sufficient ground of national hostility.

[Every] hour of delay abates the fame and force of the invader, and multiplies the resources of defensive war.

War kills men, and men deplore the loss; but war also crushes bad principles and tyrants, and so saves societies.

The single combats of the heroes of history or fable amuse our fancy and engage our affections: the skillful evolutions of war may inform the mind, and improve a necessary, though pernicious, science. But in the uniform and odious pictures of a general assault, all is blood, and horror, and confusion.

Weakness is a provocation.

[Much] as war attracts me and fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations, I feel more deeply every year … what vile and wicked folly and barbarism it all is.

The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.

It is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated … that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.

For Christ's sake men—come on! Do you want to live forever?

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

If we clear the air of the fog of catchwords which surround the conduct of war, and grasp that in the human will lies the source and mainspring of all conflict, as of all other activities of man's life, it becomes clear that our object in war can only be attained by the subjugation of the opposing will. All acts, such as defeat in the field, propaganda, blockade, diplomacy, or attack on the centres of government and population, are seen to be but means to that end.

War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has become cruel and squalid.

Don't give up the ship!

I believe in fighting until lack of supplies forces you to stop—then digging in.

I maintained my contention that it is better to attack with a small force at once, and attain surprise, than it is to wait and lose it.

One continues to learn about war by practicing war.

It always made me mad to have to beg for opportunities to win battles.

The acid test of battle brings out the pure metal.

In war, the only sure defense is offense, and the efficiency of offense depends on the warlike souls of those conducting it.

When we got to the far side [of the Rhine], I also deliberately stubbed my toe and fell, picking up a handful of German soil, in emulation of Scipio Africanus and William the Conqueror, who both stumbled and both made a joke of it, saying, "I see in my hands the soil of Africa" or "… the soil of England." I saw in my hands the soil of Germany.

Here again we took advantage of a theory of our own, that the impossible place is usually the least well defended.

It is an unfortunate fact that few commanders, and no politicians, realize the individuality of units and the necessity of playing on human emotion.

It is an unfortunate and, to me, tragic fact that, in our attempts to prevent war, we have taught our people to belittle the heroic qualities of the soldier.

If you want to know when a war might be coming, you just watch the United States and see when it starts cutting down on its defenses. It's the surest barometer in the world.

The best armor (and the best defense) is a rapid and well-directed fire.

When soldiers are caught in a barrage, either from mortars, rockets, or artillery, the surest way to get out of it is to go forward fast, because it is almost the invariable practice of the enemy to increase rather than decrease his range.

In small operations, as in large, speed is the essential element of success.

It is much better to go over difficult ground where you are not expected than it is over good ground where you are expected.

The Americans, as a race, are the foremost mechanics in the world. America, as a nation, has the greatest ability for mass production of machines. It therefore behooves us to devise methods of war which exploit our inherent superiority.

In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war …

As war is one of the heaviest of national evils, a calamity in which every species of misery is involved; as it sets the general safety to hazard, suspends commerce, and desolates the country; as it exposes great numbers to hardships, dangers, captivity, and death; no man, who desires public prosperity, will inflame general resentment.

History shows that trade wars have a depressing tendency to erupt into fighting wars.

The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.

The corpse of an enemy always smells sweet.

Don't cheer, boys; the poor devils are dying.

War spares not the brave, but the cowardly.

In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.

We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples?

"War," says Machiavel, "ought to be the only study of a prince;" and by a prince he means every sort of state, however constituted. "He ought," says this great political doctor, "to consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans." A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state of nature.

After each war there is a little less democracy to save.

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier."

What your soldier wants—really, really wants—is no-one shooting back at him.

There never has been a war yet which, if the facts had been put calmly before the ordinary folk, could not have been prevented … The common man, I think, is the great protection against war.

To be always ready for war, said Mentor, is the surest way to avoid it.

But now … when the resources of science and civilisation sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury, a European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors.

The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.

Unless Germany is beaten in a manner which leaves no room for doubt or dispute, unless she is convinced by the terrible logic of events that the glory of her people can never be achieved by violent means, unless her war-making capacity after the war is sensibly diminished, a renewal of the conflict, after an uneasy and malevolent truce, seems unavoidable.

I think a curse should rest on me—because I love this war. I know it's smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment—and yet—I can't help it—I enjoy every second of it.

We cannot, in any circumstances acquiesce to the non-utilisation of any weapons which are available to procure a speedy termination of the disorder which prevails on the frontier.

Is this the end? Is it to be merely a chapter in a cruel and senseless story? Will a new generation in their turn be immolated to square the black accounts of the Teuton and Gaul? Will our children bleed and gasp again in devastated lands? Or will there spring from the very fires of conflict that reconciliation of the three giant combatants, which would unite their genius and secure to each in safety and freedom a share in rebuilding the glory of Europe.

I can with truth assure you, I heard Bulletts whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.

We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die.

Always remember, however sure you are that you could easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.

War, in its fairest form, implies a perpetual violation of humanity and justice.

Except for a few handfuls of ferocious romanticists, or sordid would-be profiteers, war spells nothing but toil, waste, sorrow and torment to the vast mass of ordinary folk in every land.

We were told that the old wars of religion had ended, but that is not much comfort if the wars of various kinds of secular religions or non-God religions are to begin and are to make Europe the arena of their hideous conflict, and if all that makes life worth living to the mass of the people is to be destroyed in the process.

Whensoever hostile aggressions … require a resort to war, we must meet our duty and convince the world that we are just friends and brave enemies.

It is magnificent, but it is not war. (C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre.)

The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.

War always finds a way.

War is horrible, but slavery is worse, and you may be sure that the British people would rather go down fighting than live in servitude.

You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.

But be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy—we shall ask for none.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

The hour has come; kill the Hun.

Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt: Put your confidence in us. … We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools and we will finish the job.

There is no one exercise that enableth the body more for the wars than hunting, by teaching you to endure heat, cold, hunger, thirst, to rise early, watch late, lie and fare badly.

How many wars have been precipitated by firebrands! How many misunderstandings which led to wars could have been removed by temporizing! How often have countries fought cruel wars and then after a few years found themselves not only friends but allies!

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

No one can guarantee success in war, but only deserve it.

War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.

War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.

But what they fought each other for, I could not well make out.

But war's a game, which, were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at.

Put your trust in God, my boys, and keep your powder dry!

War is the most exciting and dramatic thing in life. In fighting to the death you feel terribly relaxed when you manage to come through.

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for ones country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.

An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.

Perpetual peace is a dream, and it is not even a beautiful dream. War is an element in the order of the world ordained by God. In it the noblest virtues of mankind are developed; courage and the abnegation of self, faithfulness to duty, and a spirit of sacrifice: the soldier gives his life. Without war the world would stagnate, and lose itself in materialism.

All delays are dangerous in war.

I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like victory.

You can't say that civilization don't advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.

I renounce war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatred it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracy, for the starvation that stalks after it.

You think you are dying for your country; you die for the industrialists.

I believed that all one did about a war was go to it, as a gesture of solidarity, and get killed, or survive if lucky until the war was over … I had no idea you could be what I became, an unscathed tourist of wars.

I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the years to come than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war.

All gave some. Some gave all.

The world is full enough of hurts and mischances without wars to multiply them.

All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.

War is hell, and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peace-time.

War is at best barbarism … Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.

Hang yourself, brave Crillon; we fought at Arques and you were not there.

War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.

The war has used up words.

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school—
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, 'Our casualties were low.'

My factories may make an end of war sooner than your congresses. The day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations, it is to be hoped, will recoil from war and discharge their troops.

I have never met anyone who wasn't against war. Even Hitler and Mussolini were, according to themselves.

He knew that the essence of war is violence, and that moderation in war is imbecility.

Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow, and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.

Accurst be he that first invented war.

Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.

War is the health of the state. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.

Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent—not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?

In war, three-quarters turns on personal character and relations; the balance of manpower and materials counts only for the remaining quarter.

What they could do with round here is a good war. What else can you expect with peace running wild all over the place? You know what the trouble with peace is? No organization.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

For the mangled bodies that had been the flower of the English nobility and youth covered the ground as far as the eye could see.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

Let there be no more war or bloodshed between Arabs and Israelis. Let there be no more suffering or denial of rights. Let there be no more despair or loss of faith.

Look at an infantryman’s eyes and you can tell how much war he has seen.

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori. [It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.]

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.

All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.

Slavery is as ancient as war, and war as human nature.

When the rich wage war it's the poor who die. (Quand les riches se font la guerre ce sont les pauvres qui meurent.)

Wars arise from underlying and proximate causes. The underlying causes are the tinder composed of the belligerents’ mutually exclusive objectives, while the proximate causes serve as the lit match of immediate grievances setting off the conflagration.

Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side, come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines, with a monarch's voice
Cry, 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war.

There is many a boy here to-day who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell. (Often paraphrased as, "War is hell").

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

But no country can assume the luxury that it will determine when war starts.

Waste of Blood, and waste of Tears,
Waste of youth's most precious years,
Waste of ways the saints have trod,
Waste of Glory, waste of God,
War!

The god of war hates those who hesitate.

In war there is never any chance for a second mistake.

In war we must always leave room for strokes of fortune, and accidents that cannot be foreseen.

In war trivial causes produce momentous events.

The fortunes of war are always doubtful.

War is sweet to those who don't know it.

The same reasons that make us quarrel with a neighbor cause war between two princes.

O war! thou son of Hell!

Few wage honorable war.

When war begins, then Hell openeth.

War is the trade of kings.

I have loved war too well.

It is wonderful with what coolness and indifference the greater part of mankind see war commenced.

You don't mind dying for Queen and country, but you certainly don't want to die for politicians.

During the war, Americans did not feel angst over the enemy civilian death toll from the air war or even from the atomic bombs. They had lost too many of their own children and wanted a victory that minimized their own children’s deaths. Only from the security of a postwar world, no longer under threat of imperial Japanese or Nazi German aggression, have subsequent generations criticized the air war.

I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.

With men, the state of nature (status naturalis) is not a state of peace, but of war; if not of open war, then at least ever ready to break out.

What millions died that Cæsar might be great!

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.

It is not probable that war will ever absolutely cease until science discovers some destroying force so simple in its administration, so horrible in its effects, that all art, all gallantry, will be at an end, and battles will be massacres which the feelings of mankind will be unable to endure.

Eternal peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful one. War is a part of God's world order. In it are developed the noblest virtues of man: courage and abnegation, dutifulness and self-sacrifice. Without war the world would sink into materialism.

War is the usual condition of Europe. A thirty years' supply of causes of war is always on hand.

War and revolution never produce what is wanted, but only some mixture of the old evils with new ones.

Till the world comes to an end the ultimate decision will rest with the sword.

The appalling thing about war is that it kills all love of truth.

Many return from the war who can't give an account of the battle.

The greatest wars have the most trivial causes. (Maxima bella ex levissimis causis.)

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip and Germans, no less than other peoples, prepare for the last war.

What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war.

All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called 'guessing what was at the other side of the hill'.

Home from Troy refined by fire
Sends back to friends the dust
That is heavy with tears, stowing
A man's worth of ashes
In an easily handled jar.

The aim of war is to be able to live unhurt in peace.

A bad peace is even worse than war.

In times of peace the people look most to their representatives; but in war, to the executive solely.

Better an egg in peace than an ox in war.

War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention.

Two contrary laws seem to be wrestling with each other nowadays; the one, a law of blood and of death, ever imagining new means of destruction and forcing nations to be constantly ready for the battlefield—the other, a law of peace, work and health, ever evolving new means of delivering man from the scourges which beset him.

War makes rattling good history, but peace is poor reading.

It takes at least two to make a peace, but one can make a war.

It is wise statesmanship that suggests that in time of peace we for war, and it is no less a wise benevolence must prepare that makes preparation in the hour of peace for assuaging the ills that are sure to accompany war.

It takes twenty years or more of peace to make a man, it takes only twenty seconds of war to destroy him.

If the people [of Georgia] raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity-seeking. If they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war.

[The Civil War] was a fearful lesson, and should teach us the necessity of avoiding wars in the future.

There is nothing unhappier than a civil war, for the conquered are destroyed by, and the conquerors destroy, their friends.

The proudest capitals of Western Europe have streamed with civil blood.

A foreign war is a scratch on the arm; a civil war is an ulcer which devours the vitals of a nation.

Base in object, atrocious in beginning, immoral in all its influence, vainly prodigal of treasure and life, it is a war of infamy, which must blot the pages of our history.

To this day [I] regard the war as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.

This war, like the next war, is a war to end war.

In military affairs, and all others of like nature, the study of the sciences does more soften and enervate the courage of men than fortify and incite it. … Rome was more valiant before she grew so learned; and the most warlike nations of our time are the most ignorant.

Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he
That every man in arms should wish to be?

The strongest of all warriors are these two—Time and Patience.

Somebody once said that Washington was a city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency.

By any precise definition, Washington is a city of advanced depravity.

Outside of the killings, [Washington, D.C.] has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.

Yet we see men that waste their patrimony in luxury, destroy their health with debauchery, and enervate their minds with idleness.

Waste not, want not.

Wilful waste makes woeful want.

The people of England drink no water save at certain times for penance.

Water is a very good servant, but it is a cruel master.

Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

Drinking water neither makes a man sick, nor in debt, nor his wife a widow.

Watergate left Washington a city ravaged by honesty.

Feeble and timid minds … consider the use of dilatory and ambiguous measures as the most admirable efforts of consummate prudence.

It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness.

Virtue has a greater enemy in weakness than in vice.

I've been rich and I've been poor; rich is better.

I have no complex about wealth. I have worked hard for my money, producing things people need. I believe that the able industrial leader who creates wealth and employment is more worthy of historical notice than politicians or soldiers.

It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.

[We've] been guided by a Republican administration who believes in the simplistic notion that people who have wealth are entitled to keep it and they have an antipathy towards the means of redistributing wealth.

He does not possess wealth, it possesses him.

The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned in it,) are the natural securities for this transmission.

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

A mere madness, to live like a wretch and die rich.

All this [wealth] excludes but one evil,—poverty.

Riches are for spending.

With respect to the mind, it has rarely been observed, that wealth contributes much to quicken the discernment, enlarge the capacity, or elevate the imagination; but may, by hiring flattery, or laying diligence asleep, confirm errour, and harden stupidity.

When therefore the desire of wealth is taking hold of the heart, let us look round and see how it operates upon those whose industry or fortune has obtained it.

Little wealth, little care.

Get place and wealth, if possible with grace;
If not, by any means get wealth and place.

I noted this almost universal respect for wealth early in life, and have put it to profitable use ever since. That is, I have always pretended to be a great deal better heeled than I am in fact. It has got me deference in quarters where, otherwise, I might have been scorned, and materially eased my days.

It is better to live rich, than to die rich.

I am rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eyes is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.

Retire, and enjoy thy riches in sordid ostentation; thou wast born to be wealthy, but never canst be great.

The lust of wealth can never bear delay. (Dives qui fieri vult, Et cilo vult fieri.)

Of riches, as of every thing else, the hope is more than the enjoyment: while we consider them as the means to be used, at some future time, for the attainment of felicity, we press on our pursuit ardently and vigorously, and that ardour secures us from weariness of ourselves; but no sooner do we sit down to enjoy our acquisitions, than we find them insufficient to fill up the vacuities of life.

I have long sought content, and have not found it; I will from this moment endeavour to be rich.

If you can actually count your money, are not really a rich man.

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans—I would choose—because it contains all the others—the fact that they were the people who created the phrase “to make money.” No other language or nation had ever used these words before … Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.

Surely they accumulate worthless wealth without knowing who will eventually haul it away.

The vast majority of the rich in this country did not inherit their wealth; they earned it. They are the country's achievers, producers, and job creators.

Wealth is the product of industry, ambition, character and untiring effort. In all experience, the accumulation of wealth means the multiplication of schools, the increase of knowledge, the dissemination of intelligence, the encouragement of science, the broadening of outlook, the expansion of liberties, the widening of culture.

The chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches.

The character which results from wealth is that of a prosperous fool.

He does not see, poor wretch, that his life is but a gilded torture, that he is bound fast by his wealth, and that his money owns him rather than he owns it.

Many a man would have been worse if his estate had been better.

Wealth per se I never too much valued, and my acquaintance with its possessors has by no means increased my veneration for it.

Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.

The lawful basis of wealth is, that a man who, works should be paid the fair value of his work, and that if he does not choose to spend it today, he should have free leave to keep it, and spend it tomorrow.

No man is any the worse off because another acquires wealth by trade, or by the exercise of a profession; on the contrary, he cannot have acquired his wealth except by benefiting others to the full extent of what they considered to be its value.

Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures.

It would be too ridiculous to go about seriously to prove that wealth does not consist in money, or in gold and silver; but in what money purchases, and is valuable only for purchasing. Money no doubt, makes always a part of the national capital; but it has already been shown that it generally makes but a small part, and always the most unprofitable part of it.

In public, as well as in private expences, great wealth may, perhaps, frequently be admitted as an apology for great folly.

Rich men's houses are seldom beautiful, rarely comfortable, and never original. It is a constant source of surprise to people of moderate means to observe how little a big fortune contributes to Beauty.

The secret of great fortunes without apparent source is a forgotten crime. (Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié.)

A rich man's joke is always funny.

The rich rob the poor and the poor rob one another.

One of the weaknesses of our age is our apparent inability to distinguish our needs from our greeds.

Not he who has little, but he who wishes more, is poor.

Citizens of rich countries often fret about the occasional harm that corporations do, yet take for granted the prosperity they create. People in developing countries do not have that luxury.

Don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money?

A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.

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

Where Plenty smiles-alas! she smiles for few,
And those who taste not, yet behold her store,
Are as the slaves that dig the golden ore,
The wealth around them makes them doubly poor.

All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil, show it to be evidently a great evil. You never find people labouring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful fortune.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.

Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon—so long as there is no answer to it—gives claws to the weak.

Hence it comes about that all armed Prophets have been victorious, and all unarmed Prophets have been destroyed.

Let none presume to tell me that the pen is preferable to the sword.

Weariness and negligence are perpetually prevailing by silent encroachments, assisted by different causes, and not observed till they cannot, without great difficulty, be opposed.

Ah gits weary
An’ sick of tryin’
Ah’m tired of livin’
An’ skeered of dyin’.

Methinks I have outlived myself, and begin to be weary of the sun.

I have grown weary of dust and decay,
Weary of flinging my heart's wealth away—
Weary of sowing for others to reap;
Rock me to sleep, mother, rock me to sleep.

The fastest way to spot a weasel is to look at a shiny surface. The second-fastest way is to look for people who are certain about the future. When a person conveys a sense of certainty during times of great uncertainty, that is either a sign of mental illness called "leadership" or a sign of a weasel who is trying to get his way.

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.

The weather is a nobler and more interesting subject; it is the present state of the skies, and of the earth, on which plenty and famine are suspended, on which millions depend for the necessaries of life.

Change of weather is the discourse of fools.

No man is in love when he marries. He may have loved before; I have even heard he has sometimes loved after: but at the time never. There is something in the formalities of the matrimonial preparations that drive away all the little cupidons.

O! how short a time does it take to put an end to a woman's liberty!

(A comment on weddings:) How foolish people are—bury one person and they cry; bury two and they dance.

(Vie narish menschen zeinen-bagroben zay aynem, vay—nen zay; bagruben zay tsvay, tantsen zay.)

To church in the morning, and there saw a wedding in the church, which I have not seen many a day; and the young people so merry one with another! and strange to see what delight we married people have to see those poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and woman gazing and smiling at them.

A wedding takes only a day or two, but the misery goes on forever.

The woman cries before the wedding; the man afterward.

Now ’tis the spring, and weeds are shallow-rooted;
Suffer them now and they’ll o’ergrow the garden.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of a sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America.

[Giving welfare to poor people] is the equivalent of the government sending [fat people] a jumbo bag of Bugles in the mail twice a month.

The danger of the kind of welfare state [President] Johnson was creating was that it pushed people out of the productive economy permanently and made them dependents of the state.

Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody has the same dedication to achieving somebody else’s objectives that he displays when he pursues his own. Beyond this, the [welfare] programs have an insidious effect on the moral fiber of both the people who administer the programs and the people who are supposedly benefiting from it. For the people who administer it, it instills in them a feeling of almost Godlike power. For the people who are supposedly benefiting it instills a feeling of childlike dependence.

What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. In so far as they fail, they receive the money; in so far as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.

The characteristic of a well-bred man is to converse with his inferiors without insolence, and with his superiors with respect and ease.

He is not well-bred that cannot bear ill-breeding in others.

Everything great in western culture has come from the quarrel with nature.

Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands—probably—just as in Istanbul there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate.

A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history triumphalism, the "what do you leave behind" question is more urgent than most of us expected. The Western world, as a concept, is dead and the West, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying.

The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and of course in the United Nations.

Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.

A congressman was once asked his attitude about whiskey. "If you mean the demon drink that poisons the mind, pollutes the body, desecrates family life, and inflames sinners, then I'm against it. But if you mean the elixir of Christmas cheer, the shield against winter chill, the taxable potion that puts needed funds into public coffers to comfort little crippled children, then I'm for it. This is my position, and I will not compromise."

It [Scotch whisky] was strong, but not pungent, and was free from the empyreumatic [burnt] taste or smell. What was the process I had no opportunity of inquiring, nor do I wish to improve the art of making poison pleasant.

I like it: I always did, and that is the reason I never use it.

"There is no peace," says my God, "for the wicked."

It's worse than wicked, my dear, it's vulgar.

If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked!

No one is so wicked that he wants to seem wicked.

God bears with the wicked, but not forever.

If it be true, that men are miserable because they are wicked, it is likewise true, that many are wicked because they are miserable.

Wickedness is always easier than virtue; for it takes the short cut to everything.

Nothing contributes more to the frequency of wickedness, than the representation of it as already frequent.

C. S. Lewis to Arthur C. Clarke: "I'm sure you're very wicked people—but how dull it would be if everyone was good".

All wickedness is weakness.

Human blunders, usually, do more to shape history than human wickedness.

A maid marries to please her parents; a widow to please herself.

After such years of dissension and strife,
Some wonder that Peter should weep for his wife;
But his tears on her grave are nothing surprising,
He's laying her dust, for fear of its rising.

Take my wife … please!

Houses and wealth are inherited from parents,
but a prudent wife is from the LORD.

Better to live on a corner of the roof
than share a house with a quarrelsome wife.

Better to live in a desert
than with a quarrelsome and ill-tempered wife.

A quarrelsome wife is like
a constant dripping on a rainy day;
restraining her is like restraining the wind
or grasping oil with the hand.

Many a man owes his success to his first wife and his second wife to his success.

Here lies my wife; here let her lie!
Now she's at peace and so am I.

The comfortable estate of widowhood, is the only hope that keeps up a wife's spirits.

When you marry your mistress you create a job vacancy.

Only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. One is to let her think she is having her own way, and the other, to let her have it.

Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
She ain't no lady; she's my wife.

Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.

Happy wife, happy life.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

You are my true and honorable wife,
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart.

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

I find my wife hath something in her gizzard, that only waits an opportunity of being provoked to bring up; but I will not, for my content-sake, give it.

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

No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is.

He that will thrive must first ask his wife.

He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the Lord.

Happy is the husband of a good wife; the number of his days will be doubled.

He who has an old, spiteful, quarrelsome, sickly wife, may fairly reckon himself in Purgatory.

Two things doth prolong thy life:
A quiet heart and a loving wife.

There never was a wife that liked her lot.

In the election of a wife, as in
A project of war, to err but once is
To be undone forever.

Man's best possession is a loving wife.

He knows little who will tell his wife all he knows.

Next to no wife, a good wife is best.

Who is the fool who does not wish his wife were dumb?

A cheerful wife is the joy of life.

A good wife and health are man's best wealth.

It's a good horse that never stumbles,
And a good wife that never grumbles.

All other goods by fortune's hand are given:
A wife is the peculiar gift of Heav'n.

Horses (thou sayst) and asses men may try,
And ring suspected vessels ere they buy;
But wives, a random choice, untried they take;
They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake.

All are good lasses, but where come the ill wives?

Why is a handsome wife adored
By every coxcomb but her lord?

Choose a wife rather by your ear than your eye.

The good or ill hap of a good or ill life
Is the good or ill choice of a good or ill wife.

Happy the man who has a good wife; he lives twice as long.

I want (who does not want?) a wife
Affectionate and fair,
To solace all the woes of life
And all its days to share;
Of temper sweet, of yielding will,
Of firm yet placid mind,
With all my faults to love me still,
With sentiments refined.

Of all the expensive hobbies the collection of wives is among the most expensive.

If you want peace in the house, do what your wife wants.

Take a wife for her virtue and a concubine for her beauty.

When a man's vessel is upset and its masts broken he is poor for a time; but when he marries a bad wife he is poor for life.

A mill and a wife are always wanting something.

In buying a horse and taking a wife, shut your eyes and throw yourself on the mercy of God.

Every man can guide an ill wife weel but him that has her.

He that has a wife has a maister.

A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies.

In every port he finds a wife.

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.

There is no such thing as free will. The mind is induced to wish this or that by some cause, and that cause is determined by another cause, and so on back to infinity.

All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it.

It may be true that we can act as we choose, but can we choose? Is not our choice determined for us?

"There's no free will," says the philosopher; "to hang is most unjust."
"There is no free will," assents the officer; "we hang because we must."

You [William F. Buckley] didn’t just part the Red Sea—you rolled it back, dried it up and left exposed, for all the world to see, the naked desert that is statism. And then, as if that weren’t enough, you gave the world something different, something in its weariness it desperately needed, the sound of laughter and the sight of the rich, green uplands of freedom.

The danger to the country, to Europe, to her vast Empire, which is involved in having all these great interests entrusted to the shaking hand of an old, wild, and incomprehensible man of 82, is very great!

A little wind kindles, much puts out the fire.

Take counsel in wine, but resolve afterwards in water.

In wine [there is the] truth. (In vino veritas.)

I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to food.

Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy!

The wine urges me on, the bewitching wine, which sets even a wise man to singing and to laughing gently and rouses him up to dance and brings forth words which were better unspoken.

It is better to hide ignorance, but it is hard to do this when we relax over wine.

O thou invisible spirit of wine! if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil!

Wine makes a man more pleased with himself. I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others.

Bacchus, that first from out the purple grape
Crush’d the sweet poison of misused wine.

From wine what sudden friendship springs!

When the wine goes in, strange things come out.

I rather like bad wine … one gets so bored with good wine.

There is an outcry in the streets for lack of wine; all joy has grown dark; the gladness of the earth is banished.

When the wine is in, the wit is out.

And for to make the merry cheer,
If smirking wine be wanting here,
There's that which drowns all care, stout beer.

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

If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked!

A man cannot make him laugh; but that's no marvel; he drinks no wine.

Come, come; good wine is a good familiar creature if it be well used; exclaim no more against it.

Wine gives strength to weary men.

Wine leads to folly. It makes even the wisest laugh too much. It makes him dance. It makes him say what should have been left unsaid.

When I take wine my cares go to rest.

Where there is no wine, love perishes, and everything else that is pleasant to man.

I like best the wine drunk at the cost of others.

Boys should abstain from all use of wine until their eighteenth year, for it is wrong to add fire to fire.

Wine is a remedy for the moroseness of old age.

Wine brings to light the hidden secrets of the soul, gives being to our hopes, bids the coward fight, drives dull care away, and teaches new means for the accomplishment of our wishes.

Wine is very life to human beings if taken in moderation. What is life to one who is without wine? It has been created to make people happy.

Toward evening, about supper-time, when the serious studies of the day are over, is the time to take wine.

I hear many cry when deplorable excesses happen, "Would there were no wine!" Oh, folly! Oh, madness! Is it the wine that causes this abuse? No. It is the intemperance of those who take an evil delight in it. Cry rather: "Would to God there were no drunkenness, no luxury." If you say, "Would there were no wine" because of the drunkards, then you must say, going on by degrees, "Would there were no steel," because of the murderers, "Would there were no night," because of the thieves, "Would there were no light," because of the informers, and "Would there were no women," because of adultery.

Give me a bowl of wine:
I have not that alacrity of spirit,
Nor cheer of mind, that I was wont to have.

Give me a bowl of wine;
In this I bury all unkindness.

If God forbade drinking would He have made wine so good?

The sweet poison of misused wine.

A friend and a bottle is all my design;
He has no room for treason that's top-full of wine.

Wine whets the wit, improves its native force,
And gives a pleasant flavor to discourse.

Wine is a turn-coat; first a friend, and then an enemy.

Wine gives great pleasure, and every pleasure is of itself a good.

In certain studies there is no harm in doing one's thinking and writing while slightly drunk, and then revising one's work in cold blood. The stimulus of wine is favorable to the play of invention, and to fluency of expression.

A man will be eloquent if you give him good wine.

Drink wine in Winter for cold, and in Summer for heat.

The sword kills many, but wine more.

Wine and youth are fire upon fire.

A feast is made for laughter, wine makes life merry, and money is the answer for everything.

Wine and women lead intelligent men astray.

I may not here omit those two main plagues, and common dotages of human kind, wine and women, which have infatuated and besotted myriads of people. They go commonly together.

Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,
Sermons and soda-water the day after.

Fill ev'ry glass, for wine inspires us,
And fires us
With courage, love and joy.
Women and wine should life employ.
Is there ought else on earth desirous?

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.

Wine and wenches empty men's purses.

A good general rule is to state that the bouquet is better than the taste, and vice versa.

There are more old wine-drinkers than old doctors.

Winning isn't everything, but wanting to win is.

Of course, when you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.

Winning is everything. The only ones who remember you when you come second are your wife and your dog.

He [Winston Churchill] does not talk the language of the 20th century but that of the 18th. He is still fighting Blenheim all over again. His only answer to a difficult situation is send a gun-boat.

I have never accepted what many people have kindly said—namely, that I inspired the nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless and it proved unconquerable. It fell to me to express it and if I found the right word you must remember that I have always earned my living by my pen, and by my tongue.

Historians are apt to judge war ministers less by the victories achieved under their direction than by the political results which flowed from them. Judged by that standard, I am not sure that I shall be held to have done very well.

I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.

He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle to steady his fellow countrymen and hearten those Europeans upon whom the long dark night of tyranny had descended.

Ah woe is me!
Winter is come and gone,
But grief returns with the revolving year.

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.

The sun grew weak, his beams no comfort gave,
While all green things did make the earth their grave.

Cruel as death, and hungry as the grave.

Come, Winter, with thine angry howl,
And raging bend the naked tree:
Thy gloom will soothe my cheerless soul,
When nature all is sad like me.

Every Winter,
When the great sun has turned his face away,
The earth goes down into a vale of grief,
And fasts, and weeps, and shrouds herself in sables.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there, lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief.

I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.

He dares to be a fool, and that is the first step in the direction of wisdom.

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.

Great men are not always wise.

[It is] better [to] be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own.

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

'Tis sometimes the height of wisdom to feign stupidity.

Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise.

The doors of wisdom are never shut.

Wisdom comes from context.

A proud person talks about all he has done, a foolish person talks about all he will do, and a wise man does it, and says nothing.

Wisdom is the accumulation of insights into how the world actually works—as opposed to how we would like it to work.

Wisdom comes through suffering.

A lawyer is wise according to human wisdom, a divine according to God's wisdom.

I consider our fore-fathers as deeper Thinkers than ourselves, because they set an higher Value on good sense than Knowledge in various Sciences, & this good sense was derived very often from as much study & more knowledge, though of another sort.

The French are wiser than they seem, and the Spaniards seem wiser than they are.

Wisdom is supreme—so acquire wisdom, and whatever you acquire, acquire understanding!

Be wise today; ’tis madness to defer.

So learn from this and understand true values.
I who tell you have wintered into wisdom.

Acknowledging what you don't know is the dawning of wisdom.

Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Day by day, and at the end of the day, if you live long enough … you will get out of life what you deserve.

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.

The highest sacrifice is a broken and contrite heart; the highest wisdom is that which is found in the Torah; the noblest of all ornaments is modesty; and the most beautiful thing that man can do, is to forgive a wrong.

There is a wisdom of the head, and … a wisdom of the heart.

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.

I am wise enough to know that there are some perils from which a man must flee.

Wisdom denotes the pursuing of the best ends by the best means.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

It is easier to be wise for others than for oneself. (Il est plus aisé d'être sage pour les autres que de l'être pour soi-même.)

From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.

A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser to-day than he was yesterday.

The collective knowledge and wisdom of seasoned citizens is the most valuable, yet untapped, resource our young-people have.

So wise so young, they say, do never live long.

To be wise, and love,
Exceeds man's might.

Be wise, be wise, and do not try
How he can court, or you be won;
For love is but discovery:
When that is made, the pleasure's done.

Understanding the limitations of human beings is the beginning of wisdom.

Happy is the man who finds wisdom, and the man who gets understanding.

'Tis wisdom sometimes to seem a fool.

Almost all men think they have [wisdom] in a greater degree than the vulgar—that is, than all men but themselves, and a few others, whom by fate, or for concurring with themselves, they approve.

Wisdom in a poor man is a diamond set in lead.

Wisdom is a good purchase, though we pay dear for it.

I love wisdom more than she loves me.

He who thinks wisdom is greater than virtue will lose his wisdom.

All wisdom must be paid for with pain.

Think like a wise man but express yourself like the common people.

No man ever became wise by chance.

No one is wise at all times.

It is not wise to be wiser than is necessary,

The latter part of a wise man's life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions he contracted in the former.

We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow;
Our wiser sons, no doubt, will think us so.

What is it to be wise?
"Tis but to know how little can be known;
To see all others' faults, and feel our own.

He who is only wise lives a sad life.

There needs but one wise man in a company and all are wise, so rapid is the contagion.

He is wise that follows the wise.

We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified.

Like our shadows,
Our wishes lengthen as our sun declines.

Wishers were ever fools.

Always leave something to wish for; otherwise, you will be miserable from your very happiness.

Conquered people tend to be witty.

A thing well said will be wit in all languages.

There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply callisthenics with words.

And wit was his vain frivolous pretence
Of pleasing others at his own expense:
For wits are treated just like common whores,
First they're enjoyed and then kicked out of doors.

Wit is educated insolence.

If it were not for the company of fools, a witty man would often be greatly at a loss.

It is with wits as with razors, which are never so pat to cut those they are employed on as when they have lost their edges.

Wit helps us to play the fool with more confidence.

The hapless wit has his labors always to begin, the call for novelty is never satisfied, and one jest only raises expectation of another.

Why should we despise those who have no wit? It is not a voluntary evil.

The less wit a man has, the less he knows that he wants it.

The conversation fell upon witches who spoil milk, eggs, and butter in farm yards. Dr. Luther said: "I should have no compassion on these witches; I would burn all of them."

It was asked: Can good Christians and God fearing people also undergo witchcraft? Luther replied: Yes; for our bodies are always exposed to the attacks of Satan. The maladies I suffer are not natural, but devil's spells.

The nations, and the sects, of the Roman world, admitted with equal credulity, and similar abhorrence, the reality of that infernal art [witchcraft], which was able to control the eternal order of the planets, and the voluntary operations of the human mind. … They believed, with the wildest inconsistency, that this preternatural dominion of the air, of earth, and of hell, was exercised, from the vilest motives of malice or gain, by some wrinkled hags and itinerant sorcerers, who passed their obscure lives in penury and contempt.

Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

All these woes shall serve
For sweet discourses in our time to come.

We are all the same—the fools of our own woes!

I beheld once a wolf tearing sheep. When the wolf comes into a sheep-fold, he eats not any until he has killed all, and then he begins to eat, thinking to devour all.

When the old crone frolics, she flirts with death.

In your amours you should prefer old women to young ones. This you call a paradox, and demand my reasons. They are: … 8th and lastly: they are so grateful.

There are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever I knew were to be divided: (1) that dear old soul; (2) that old woman; (3) that old witch.

Leave him with his grief—he has married an old woman.

The great question which I have not been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does woman want?"

If a woman likes another woman, she's cordial. If she doesn't like her, she's very cordial.

Women are like elephants to me. I like to look at 'em, but I wouldn't wanna own one.

If I were asked … to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of [Americans] ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: to the superiority of their women.

When women kiss it always reminds me of prize-fighters shaking hands.

She strode like a grenadier, was strong and upright like an obelisk, had a beautiful face, a candid brow, and not a thought of her own in her head.

When there is an old maid in the house, a watch dog is unnecessary.

She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman.

Most women are not as young as they are painted.

No trust is to be placed in women.

There is no fouler fiend than a woman when her mind is bent to evil.

I trust only one thing in a woman: that she will not come to life again after she is dead. In all other things I distrust her.

In point of morals, the average woman is, even for business, too crooked.

Never trust a woman, even though she has given you ten sons.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

If a woman has "It," she doesn't need anything else; but if she doesn't have "It," it doesn't matter what else she has.

But I'm not here to give you some bullshit talk about women. There are three billion of them, and to generalize that many people with some blanket statement is the definition of being an asshole. Women are all different, so I don't have any advice on them.

Lisa: Um, when a woman talks, she just wants to be heard.

Women complain about premenstrual syndrome, but I think of it as the only time of the month I can be myself.

You know that look women get when they want to have sex? Me neither.

Remember, you're fighting for this woman's honour … which is probably more than she ever did.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

Her mother grieved in secret with the grim, philosophic, almost cheerful hopelessness of women whose lives have taught them always to expect the worst

We're used to saying, "I'm fine," but it's rarely true. I often joke, "If a woman says she's fine, call 911."

Women are like wasps in their anger.

These impossible women! How they do get around us!
The poet was right: can't live with them, or without them!

When the candles are out all women are fair.

That's the nature of women … not to love when we love them, and to love when we love them not.

O tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide!

Do you not know I am a woman? when I think, I must speak.

Frailty, thy name is woman!

[Women] are desirous to hide from themselves the advances of age, and endeavour too frequently to supply the sprightliness and bloom of youth by artificial beauty and forced vivacity.

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

How full of fury woman is!

There's such great nobility in a dog, such great deceit in woman.

After forty a woman has to choose between losing her figure or her face. My advice is to keep your face, and stay sitting down.

And what is bettre than wisedoom? Womman.
And what is bettre than a good womman? Nothyng.

Women can't forgive failure.

A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.

Women are like tricks by sleight of hand,
Which, to admire, we should not understand.

Women never have young minds. They are born three thousand years old.

Women are at once the boldest and most unmanageable revolutionaries.

The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages.

Women like not only to conquer, but to be conquered.

A miss for pleasure, and a wife for breed.

Woman, even more than the working class, is the great unknown quantity of the race.

The world is greatly troubled by women.

Women have, commonly, a very positive moral sense; that which they will, is right; that which they reject, is wrong; and their will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral.

God created woman. And boredom did indeed cease from that moment—but many other things ceased as well! Woman was God’s second mistake.

I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a poem and to be given away by a novel.

Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you’re driving at another.

Woman, a pleasing but a short-lived flower,
Too soft for business and too weak for power:
A wife in bondage, or neglected maid:
Despised, if ugly; if she's fair, betrayed.

Women and elephants never forget an injury.

Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one’s life to women than to postage stamps or old snuff-boxes, even to pictures or statues.

Women do not find it difficult nowadays to behave like men, but they often find it extremely difficult to behave like gentlemen.

We may find women who have never indulged in an intrigue, but it is rare to find those who have intrigued but once. (On peut trouver des femmes qui n'ont jamais eu de galanterie; mais il est rare d'en trouver qui n'en aient jamais eu qu'une.)

I did not then know the besetting sin of woman, the passion to discuss her private affairs with anyone who is willing to listen.

From birth to age eighteen, a girl needs good parents. From eighteen to thirty-five, she needs good looks. From thirty-five to fifty-five, she needs a good personality. From fifty-five on, she needs good cash.

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

The prevailing manners of an age depend more than we are aware, or are willing to allow, on the conduct of the women; this is one of the principal hinges on which the great machine of human society turns.

A woman always has her revenge ready. (Une femme a toujours une vengeance prête.)

Woman was God's second blunder.

We shall find no fiend in Hell can match the fury of a disappointed woman,—scorn'd! slighted! dismiss'd without a parting pang.

A woman seldom writes her mind but in her postscript.

Nor do they trust their tongues alone,
But speak a language of their own;
Can read a nod, a shrug, a look,
Far better than a printed book;
Convey a libel in a frown,
And wink a reputation down.

Now voices over voices rise,
While each to be the loudest vies:
They contradict, affirm, dispute,
No single tongue one moment mute;
All mad to speak, and none to hearken.

From birth to 18 a girl needs good parents. From 18 to 35, she needs good looks. From 35 to 55, good personality. From 55 on, she needs good cash.

Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

The Catholic Church has never really come to terms with women. What I object to is being treated either as Madonnas or Mary Magdalenes.

A woman either loves or hates; she knows no medium.

A woman is always buying something.

Whether they yield or refuse, it delights women to have been asked.

A woman talks to one man, looks at a second, and thinks of a third.

To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

Who is't can read a woman?

Shall I, wasting in despair,
Die because a woman's fair?
Or make pale my cheeks with care
Cause another's rosy are?
Be she fairer than the day,
Or the flow'ry meads in May;
If she be not so to me,
What care I how fair she be?

O woman!
How far thy tongue and heart do live asunder!

Women are the baggage of life: they are
Troublesome, and hinder us in the great march,
And yet we cannot be without 'em.

There is no mischief but a woman is at one end of it.

A good woman is a hidden treasure; he who discovers her will do well not to boast about it.

It is of no advantage to a woman to be young without being pretty, or to be pretty without being young.

There are few women whose charm survives their beauty.

I have never had any great esteem for the generality of the fair sex, and my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance it gave me of never being married to any one among them.

Not ev'n the soldier's fury, rais'd in war,
The rage of tyrants, when defiance stings 'em!
The pride of priests, so bloody when in power,
Are half so dreadful as a woman's vengeance.

Women, like princes, find few real friends:
All who approach them their own ends pursue.

The thoughts of women ever hover round their persons.

I am glad that I am not a man, for then I should have to marry a woman.

Among women all ideas are converted into persons.

Women, when they are bad, are worse than men, and more ready to commit crimes. The soft sex, when degraded, falls lower than the other. Women are always much better or much worse than men.

I've seen your stormy seas and stormy women,
And pity lovers rather more than seamen.

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death … others through sheer inability to cross the street.

Woman is as variable as a feather in the wind.

(La donna è mobile
Qual piuma al vento.)

Dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever. It is as natural for them to make use of it on every occasion as it is for animals to employ their means of defence when they are attacked. A woman who is perfectly truthful is perhaps an impossibility.

To understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other woman.

Man wishes woman to be peaceable, but in fact she is essentially warlike, like the cat.

He gets on best with women who best knows how to get on without them.

It is hard to forget a woman with whom one has been happy.

No woman is too bashful to talk scandal.

A woman has the form of an angel, the heart of a serpent, and the mind of an ass.

Hares are caught with dogs, fools with flattery, and women with money.

Whatever a beautiful woman says is right.

Whenever a woman dies there is one quarrel less on earth.

Women must be praised, whether it is true or false.

Women resist in order to be conquered.

The only secrets women keep are those they don't know.

The man is the head but the woman is the neck, and the neck turns the head.

Woman is a calamity, but every house must have its curse.

Tell a woman she's a beauty, and the Devil will make her believe it.

Three things are useless: whispering to the deaf, grieving for the dead, and advising a woman against her will.

The caprices of womankind are not limited by any climate or nation; and that they are much more uniform than can be easily imagined.

The woman that deliberates is lost.

You can never be kind to a woman with impunity.

It is easy to find persons who will share prosperity; but, except a very few and very good ones, women are not willing to share misfortunes.

With women the heart argues, not the mind.

Women give themselves to God when the devil wants nothing more to do with them. (Tel est le sort des femmes galantes: elles se donnent à Dieu, quand le diable n'en veut plus.)

Woman is an overgrown child that one amuses with toys, intoxicates with flattery, and seduces with promises. (La femme est un grand enfant qu'on amuse avec des joujoux, qu'on endort avec des louanges, et qu'on séduit avec des promesses.)

We women do talk too much; but even then, we don't tell half we know.

My ideal of womanhood has always been the pioneer woman who fought and worked at her husband's side. She bore the children, kept the home fires burning; she was the hub of the family, the planner and the dreamer.

The most virtuous women have in them something that is never chaste. (Les femmes les plus vertueuses ont en elles quelque chose qui n'est jamais chaste.)

Women, perhaps, even require a little hypocrisy. (Peut-être veulent-elles [les femmes] un peu d'hypocrisie?)

One is not born a woman: one becomes one. (On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.)

For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despise women the most.

Women are not a hobby—they're a calamity.

Women are most adorable when they are afraid; that's why they frighten so easily.

It is proverbial that from a hungry tiger and an affectionate woman there is no escape.

Women, ever in extremes, are always either better or worse than men. (Les femmes sont extrémes: elles sont meilleures ou pires que les hommes.)

A woman past forty should make up her mind to be young, not her face.

Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then.

But she was a soft landscape of mild earth,
Where all was harmony, and calm, and quiet,
Luxuriant, budding; cheerful without mirth.

Still I can’t contradict, what so oft has been said,
'Though women are angels, yet wedlock's the devil.'

I care not for these ladies,
That must be wooed and prayed;
Give me kind Amaryllis,
The wanton country maid.

If a woman is strong there will be no peace in the house.

The woman I love says that there is no one whom she would rather marry than me, not if Jupiter himself were to woo her. Says;—but what a woman says to her ardent lover should be written in wind and running water.

(Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle
quam mihi, non si se Iuppiter ipse petat.
Dicit: sed mulier cupido quod dicit amantī,
in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua.)

The woman who is resolved to be respected can make herself so even amidst an army of soldiers. (La mujer que se determina á ser honrada entre un ejército de soldados lo puede ser.)

An honest maid and a broken leg are best at home, a woman and a hen are soon lost by gadding, and the girl who’s anxious to see also longs to be seen.

I like games of chance, including women.

Let no man value at a little price
A virtuous woman's counsel; her wing'd spirit
Is feather'd oftentimes with heavenly words.

Nuns and married women are unhappy after different manners. (Les religieuses et les femmes mariées sont malheureuses de différente manière.)

Women are like water. They are tempting like that, and they can be treacherous, and they can seem to be that bottomless.

Woman is the most superstitious animal beneath the moon. When a woman has a premonition that Tuesday will be a disaster, to which a man pays no heed, he will very likely lose his fortune then. This is not meant to be an occult or mystic remark. The female body is a vessel, and the universe drops its secrets into her far more quickly than it communicates them to the male.

A woman is incapable of complete remorse.

A woman is always a woman even if she is a nun.

A woman's counsel brought us first to woe,
And made her man his paradise forego,
Where at heart's ease he liv'd; and might have been
As free from sorrow as he was from sin.

There is no worse evil than a bad woman; and nothing has ever been produced better than a good one.

Oh, woman, perfect woman! what distraction
Was meant to mankind when thou wast made a devil!
What an inviting hell invented.

Woman is always fickle—foolish is he who trusts her.

(Toute femme varie
Bien fol est qui s'y fie.)

You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men.

I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.

Mankind, from Adam, have been women's fools;
Women, from Eve, have been the devil's tools:
Heaven might have spar'd one torment when we fell;
Not left us women, or not threatened hell.

A faire woman is a paradise to the eye, a purgatorye to the purse, and a hell to the soule.

A woman that is all smiles and graces is a vixen at heart; snakes fascinate.

A woman can say more in a sigh than a man can say in a sermon.

Will never understand what women want. What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood.

I profess not to know how women's hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration.

Women are encouraged to have careers because their talents are useful to the system and, more importantly, because by having regular jobs women become better integrated into the system and tied directly to it rather than to their families. This helps to weaken family solidarity.

A woman's body is a dark and monstrous mystery;
between her supple thighs a heavy whirlpool swirls,
two rivers crash, and woe to him who slips and falls!

O women, women! Who really does understand them? Their smiles contradict their glances, their words promise and beguile, but their tone of voice repulses.

What would a woman not do to hurt a rival!

The life of woman is full of woe,
Toiling on and on and on,
With breaking heart, and tearful eyes,
The secret longings that arise,
Which this world never satisfies!
Some more, some less, but of the whole
Not one quite happy, no, not one!

A woman can only be superior as a woman; as soon as she wants to emulate man, she is nothing but an ape.

No woman, no cry.

How sweetly sounds the voice of a good woman!
It is so seldom heard, that, when it speaks,
It ravishes all senses.

It upsets women to be, or not to be, stared at hungrily.

The freedom women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion: things to make life easier for men, in fact.

The typical American woman is not, and never has been, a beer-drinking or a wine-drinking woman; and to this fact mainly we attribute her wealth of loveliness.

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

He [the child] does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.

In the woods a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child.

He that will win his dame, must do
As love does, when he bends his bow;
With one hand thrust the lady from,
And with the other pull her home.

"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"

"But glory doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure.

He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I ever met.

The more the words,
the less the meaning,
and how does that profit anyone?

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts.

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

It ain't how many words you know, it's how you use them.

By hard, honest labour I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary … I never write metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same money for city. I never write policeman, because I can get the same money for Cop.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called "weasel words." When a weasel sucks eggs it sucks the meat out of the egg and leaves it an empty shell. If you use a "weasel word" after another there is nothing left of the other.

Deeds are masculine; words are feminine. (Fatti maschii; parole femine.)

How many honest words have suffered corruption since Chaucer's days!

Good words are worth much, and cost little.

Many have fallen by the edge of the sword, but not as many as have fallen because of the tongue.

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

But words once spoke can never be recalled.

Confound those who have said our remarks before us. (Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.)

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible, he didn't have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence.

Americans don't like plain talk anymore. Nowadays they like fat talk. Show them a lean, plain word that cuts to the bone and watch them lard it with thick greasy syllables front and back until it wheezes and gasps for breath as it comes lumbering down upon some poor threadbare sentence like a sack of iron on a swayback horse.

The affectation of some late authours, to introduce and multiply cant words, is the most ruinous corruption in any language.

The difference between the almost-right word & the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters. It would not be terrible, though I were to be detained some time here.

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

For words divide and rend;
But silence is most noble till the end.

For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.

For one word a man is often set down as wise, and for one word he is as often set down as a fool.

A flaw in a piece of white jade may be ground away, but a word spoken amiss may not be called back.

A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.

Man ever had, and ever will have, leave
To coin new words well suited to the age.
Words are like leaves, some wither every year,
And every year a younger race succeeds.

In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold:
Alike fantastic, if too new, or old:
Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

As fire is kindled by bellows, so is anger by words.

Words are always bolder than deeds.

Oh! many a shaft, at random sent,
Finds mark the archer little meant,
And many a word, at random spoken,
May soothe or wound a heart that's broken.

How very commonly we hear it remarked that such and such thoughts are beyond the compass of words. I do not believe that any thought, properly so called, is out of the reach of language. For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words, with ever more distinctness than that with which I conceived it.

The spoken word flies away; the written one, remains. (Vox emissa volat; litera scripta manet.)

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt.

Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done
and what I had toiled to achieve,
everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;
nothing was gained under the sun.

So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

What does a man get for all the toil and anxious striving with which he labors under the sun? All his days his work is pain and grief; even at night his mind does not rest. This too is meaningless.

In populous cities, which are the seat of commerce and manufactures, the middle ranks of inhabitants, who derive their subsistence from the dexterity or labor of their hands, are commonly the most prolific, the most useful, and, in that sense, the most respectable part of the community.

Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all.

[Personal] industry must be faint and languid, which is not excited by the sense of personal interest.

If a man will not work, he shall not eat.

The things are mighty few on earth
That wishes can attain.
Whate'er we want of any worth
We've got to work to gain.

For great and low there's but one test:
'Tis that each man shall do his best.
Who works with all the strength he can
Shall never die in debt to man.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, [and] Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.

I wish to preach not the doctrine of ignoble ease but the doctrine of the strenuous life; the life of toil and effort.

If a task is once begun
Never leave it till it's done.
Be the labor great or small
Do it well or not at all.

I do not know anyone who has got to the top without hard work. That is the recipe. It will not always get you to the top, but should get you pretty near.

A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn't feel like it. An amateur is a man who can't do his job when he does feel like it.

Oh you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY and they meet at the bar.

It is allowed that vocations and employments of least dignity are of the most apparent use; that the meanest artisan or manufacturer contributes more to the accommodation of life than the profound scholar and argumentative theorist; and that the public would suffer less present inconvenience from the banishment of philosophers than from the extinction of any common trade.

It is not hard to work; it is hard to begin to work.

Shun those studies in which the work that results dies with the worker.

All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.

Work keeps us from three great evils, boredom, vice, and poverty.

Without work, all life goes rotten, but when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

Like Sisyphus, our work is never done;
Continually rolls back the restless stone.

Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night’s repose.

What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds.

Work is love made visible.

One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure.

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whisky. Much better.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me; the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.

More men are killed by overwork than the importance of the world justifies.

Nobody goes right to work. You might get there on time, but, screw the company, those first twenty minutes belong to you, right? It's not an attitude in line with the American Spirit, but there it is: we all screw around first. "I just got here, man, you kiddin' me?" Really. You never see a memo that says 9:01.

Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Work is done by those [employees] who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.

If we want to be more prosperous we've simply got to get down to it and work for it. The rest of the world does not owe us a living.

A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities. The readiness to work springs from trivial, questionable motives.

Our greatest weariness comes from work not done.

The office is designed for "work," not productivity. Work can be defined as "anything you'd rather not be doing."

One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster.

There is ample work for all in this country provided all will work.

Great is labour, for it honours the worker.

This is the everlasting duty of all men, black or white, who are born into this world. To do competent work, to labor honestly according to the ability given them; for that, and for no other purpose, was each one of us sent into this world; and woe is to every man who by friend or by foe, is prevented from fulfilling this, the end of his being.

He that will not work shall perish from the earth—and the patience of the gods has limits!

Never work when hungry.

Where our work is, there let our joy be.

To live well is to work well, to show a good activity.

They must hunger in frost that will not work in heat.

Let us work without protest; it is the only way to make life endurable.

Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.

What is the use of health, or of life, if not to do some work therewith?

Work is the grand cure for all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,—honest work, which you intend getting done.

The sum of wisdom is, that the time is never lost that is devoted to work.

I don't pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who doesn't work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.

I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.

Good work makes beautiful things, and good work lasts.

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

I will undoubtedly have to seek what is happily known as gainful employment, which I am glad to say does not describe holding public office.

Work is a dull way to get rich.

Any one can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.

It is not real work unless you would rather be doing something else.

A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.

Men's works have an age, like themselves; and though they outlive their authors, yet have they a stint and period to their duration.

The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano;
A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.

Who knows but the world may end tonight?

The world, in its best state, is nothing more than a larger assembly of beings, combining to counterfeit happiness which they do not feel, employing every art and contrivance to embellish life, and to hide their real condition from the eyes of one another.

The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility … The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The world is disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.

The world is becoming like a lunatic asylum run by lunatics.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Oh, this gloomy world,
In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness
Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!

The ae half of the warld thinks the tither daft.

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

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world.

What is in this world but grief and woe?

In this earthly world … to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly.

For the world I count it not an inn, but an hospital, and a place not to live, but to die in.

It is the ordinary way of the world to keep folly at the helm, and wisdom under the hatches.

What is this world?
What but a spacious burial-field unwalled,
Strewed with death's spoils, the spoils of animals
Savage and tame, and full of dead men's bones!

Let not the cooings of the world allure thee:
Which of her lovers ever found her true?

The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one's self to be acquainted with it.

I am leaving at last a world where the heart must either break or turn to bronze.

The natural world, which is in such continual labor … will doubtless come to an end. These revolutions are not for nothing. There is some great event and issue of things, some grand period aimed at.

The world is ruled by interest alone.

I have not loved the world, nor the world me.

This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

The world is something that had better not have been.

The world is a nettle; disturb it, it stings;
Grasp it firmly, it stings not.

What a glorious world Almighty God has given us! How thankless and ungrateful we are, and how we labor to mar His gifts.

You can make me live in your world, O Creator, but you cannot make me admire it.

This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but to say that it is the worst is mere petulant nonsense.

Take the world as it is, not as it ought to be.

The plow is one of the most ancient and most valuable of man’s inventions; but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly plowed, and still continues to be thus plowed by earthworms. It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures.

If evils come not, then our fears are vain: And if they do, Fear but augments the pain.

Worry is a misuse of imagination.

We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth’s creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take in the idea of dying, unable to sit still.

It is not work that kills, but worry.

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. (Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof—KJV)

When I look back on all these worries I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which never happened.

Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry. Worry never fixes anything.

Life wouldn't be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.

The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.

There is no such thing as not worshipping. We all worship something. The only choice we get is what we worship.

There is not one command in all the Gospel for public worship … The frequent attendance at it is never so much as mentioned in all the New Testament.

To fear the worst oft cures the worse.

You do your worst!—and we will do our best!

The worst is yet to come.

The worth of a thing is what it will bring.

What's not worth doing is not worth doing well.

It is easier to seem worthy of positions one does not have than of those one does. (Il est plus facile de paraître digne des emplois qu'on n'a pas que de ceux que l'on exerce.)

The secret wound lives on within the breast.

Their wounded shall fill their ravines and gullies, and the swelling river shall be filled with their dead.

Come not between the dragon and his wrath.

The wretch, concentrated all in self
Living, shall forfeit fair renown
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung
Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.

The wretched hasten to embrace their miseries.

That man is wretched whom none can please.

No piety can delay the wrinkles.

Time heals our scars, but our wrinkles are more stubborn.

In Ireland, a writer is looked upon as a failed conversationalist.

I suppose most editors are failed writers—but so are most writers.

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

Those who claim to teach the craft are, almost by definition, failed writers, with not much value to impart. Most successful writers cannot talk about their books coherently or are unwilling to divulge what they have acquired the hard way.

Those writers who lay on the watch for novelty, could have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation.

The original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.

Writers of all ages have had the same sentiments, because they have in all ages had the same objects of speculation; the interests and passions, the virtues and vices of mankind, have been diversified in different times, only by unessential and casual varieties: and we must, therefore, expect in the works of all those who attempt to describe them, such a likeness as we find in the pictures of the same person drawn in different periods of his life.

The first qualification of a writer is a perfect knowledge of the subject which he undertakes to treat.

Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.

The bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time.

One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention, and the world therefore swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.

It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.

So far as I could make out, what writers did couldn't even be classified as work.

To work in silence and with all one’s heart, that is the writer’s lot; he is the only artist who must be solitary and yet needs the widest outlook on the world.

They [struggling writers] knew luxury; they knew beggary; but they never knew comfort.

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

For a writer, going back home means back to the pen, pencil, and typewriter—and the blank, implacable sheet of white paper.

I want to look like an American Voltaire or Gibbon, but am slowly settling down to be a third-rate Boswell hunting for a Dr. Johnson.

He writes nothing whose writings are not read.

Tailors and writers must mind the fashion.

The mark of a really great writer is that he gives expression to what the masses of mankind think or feel without knowing it. The mediocre writer simply writes what everyone would have said.

I look upon these writers as Goths in poetry, who, like those in architecture, not being able to come up to the beautiful simplicity of the old Greeks and Romans, have endeavored to supply its place with all the extravagances of an irregular fancy.

Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?

Becoming a writer is not a "career decision" like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and … you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Omit needless words.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

[Writing a book] is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

And, like every other ink-stained wretch, he could never be certain of future income.

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma."

"And in the afternoon?"

"In the afternoon–well, I put it back again."

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vain.

Just as the sentence contains one idea in all its fullness, so the paragraph should embrace a distinct episode; and as sentences should follow one another in harmonious sequence, so paragraphs must fit into another like the automatic couplings of railway carriages.

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.

"Journalist" is a term of contempt employed by writers who are not read to refer to writers who are read.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

Of writing well the source and fountainhead is wise thinking.

In matters editorial, I am a believer in totalitarian despotism. Most writers are lazy, difficult, selfish, thoughtless, and unreliable.

If you write for the critics, only the critics will read you.

Start. Don't look back. If at the end it doesn't meet your hopes, start again. Now you know more about your hopes.

After being turned down by numerous publishers, he had decided to write for posterity.

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen, paper, and no telephone or wife.

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when reading.

The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.

It is one of the common distresses of a writer to be within a word of a happy period, to want only a single epithet to give amplification its full force, to require only a correspondent term in order to finish a paragraph with elegance, and make one of its members answer to the other; but these deficiencies cannot always be supplied; and after a long study and vexation, the passage is turned anew, and the web unwoven that was so nearly finished.

Gentlemen, you do me too much honor, but I have four reasons for not writing: I am too old, too fat, too lazy, and too rich.

I finished the lives of the Poets, which I wrote in my usual way, dilatorily and hastily, unwilling to work, and working with vigour and haste.

If, as it has sometimes happened in general combinations against merit, he cannot persuade the world to buy his works, he may present them to his friends; and if his friends are seized with the epidemical infatuation (folly, foolishness), and cannot find his genius, or will not confess it, let him then refer his cause to posterity, and reserve his labours for a wiser age.

It is not difficult to conceive, however, that for many reasons a man writes much better than he lives.

[They] do not know, or do not reflect, that an author has a rule of choice peculiar to himself; and selects those subjects which he is best qualified to treat, by the course of his studies, or the accidents of his life; that some topicks of amusement have been already treated with too much success to invite a competition; and that he who endeavours to gain many readers must try various arts of invitation, essay every avenue of pleasure, and make frequent changes in his methods of approach.

Whatever we conceive well we express clearly, and words flow with ease.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Too many people want to have written.

It requires no especially great talent to write in such a way that another will be very hard put to it to understand what you have written.

In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.

Learn to write well, or not to write at all.

Johnson's style was grand and Gibbon's elegant; the stateliness of the former was sometimes pedantic, and the polish of the latter was occasionally finical. Johnson marched to kettle-drums and trumpets; Gibbon moved to flute and hautboys: Johnson hewed passages through the Alps, while Gibbon levelled walks through parks and gardens.

The perfect delight of writing tales where so many lives come and go at the cost of one which slips imperceptibly away.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

He that without forming his style by the study of the best models hastens to obtrude his compositions on the publick, may be certain, that whatever hope or flattery may suggest, he shall shock the learned ear with barbarisms, and contribute, wherever his work shall be received, to the depravation of taste and the corruption of language.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

It is wonderful how much news there is when people write every other day; if they wait for a month, there is nothing that seems worth telling.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

Sometimes many thoughts present themselves; but so confused and unconnected, that they are not without difficulty reduced to method, or concatenated in a regular and dependent series; the mind falls at once into a labyrinth, of which neither the beginning nor end can be discovered, and toils and struggles without progress or extrication.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

Beginnings are always troublesome. … Even Macaulay's few pages of introduction to his 'Introduction' in the English History are the worst bit of writing in the book.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever after.

What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!

Life is short and Art is long, indeed nearly impossible when one is writing in a language that is worn to the point of being threadbare, so worm-eaten that it frays at every touch.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

What's writing? A way of escape, like travelling to a war, or to see the Mau Mau. Escaping what? Boredom. Death.

When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as Catch-22 I'm tempted to reply, "Who has?"

The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality.

I wrote the books I should have liked to read. That's always been my reason for writing. People won't write the books I want, so I have to do it for myself.

The way for a person to develop a [writing] style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the readers will most certainly go into it.

Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press.

In writing, don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful": make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, "Please, will you do my job for me?"

Write about what really interests you … if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about.

Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.

I am sure that some are born to write as trees are born to bear leaves: for these writing is a necessary mode of their own development. If the impulse to write survives the hope of success, then one is among these. If not, then the impulse was at best only pardonable vanity, and it will certainly disappear when the hope is withdrawn.

Writing a book is much less like creation than it is like planting a garden or begetting a child: in all three cases we are only entering as one cause into a causal stream which works, so to speak, in its own way.

Every sentence should be tested on the tongue, to make sure that the sound of it has the hardness or softness, the swiftness or languor, which the meaning of it calls for.

Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes: work never begun.

Next to the crime of writing contrary to what he thought, was that of writing without thinking.

The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.

I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.

You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

Wordiness is a sickness of American writing. Too many words dilute and blur ideas.

There is not an idea that cannot be expressed in 200 words. But the writer must know precisely what he wants to say. If you have nothing to say and want badly to say it, then all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice.

Good writing, like gold, combines lustrous lucidity with high density. What this means is good writing is packed with hints.

He that will write well in any tongue must follow this counsel of Aristotle, to speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do.

You write with ease, to show your breeding,
But easy writing's vile hard reading.

I do not write so much from the impulse of genius as to soothe the cares of love, and to bewail life's unabating woe.

The knowledge of men and manners is the first principle and fountainhead of good writing.

Scribbling seemeth to be symptom or passion of an irregular and licentious age. When filled the Romans so many volumes as in the times of their ruin?

Think much, speak little, and write less.

Of all those arts in which the wise excel
Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Next to doing things that deserve to be written, there is nothing that gets a man more credit, or gives him more pleasure, than to write things that deserve to be read.

The things that I have written fastest have always pleased the most.

What a devil of a profession! But it has its charms.

A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.

The ancients wrote at a time when the great art of writing badly had not yet been invented. In those days to write at all meant to write well.

The secret of writing well is to know thoroughly, what one writes about, and not to be affected.

With the exception of an epilogue for a private theatrical, I have written nothing now for near six months. It is in vain to spur me on. I must wait. I cannot write without a genial impulse, and I have none.

The misfortune of writing fast is that one cannot at the same time write concisely.

I am irritated by my writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sounds he hears within.

The business of writing has altogether become contemptible to me; and I am become confirmed in the notion that nobody ought to write,—unless sheer fate force him to do it;—and then he ought (if not of the mountebank genus) to beg to be shot rather.

Writing is more and more a terror to old scribes.

Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.

One must write and
rewrite till one writes it right.

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.

It took me 15 years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

I have been told by hospital authorities that more copies of my works are left behind by departing patients than those of any other author.

Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?

You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly.

If anything can go wrong, it will.