125 Sarcastic Quotes
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Sarcasm can be cruel and is always harmful to relationships when used instead of polite, direct, and specific communication, especially during arguments. However, as a form of humor—particularly as social commentary—it can be wickedly funny! Oscar Wilde, famous for his own frequent use of it, called it “the lowest form of wit”—obviously intended as a sarcastic barb aimed at himself as much as anyone else.
Sarcastic humor, when done right, is like a fun-to-watch scary movie: Everything is moving along just fine, when, all of a sudden, there’s an unexpected twist—but it’s funny (or at least thought-provoking) instead of scary. They almost make you do a mental double-take. Also, they’re often funnier if you know something about the person delivering the sarcastic comment (as with the Oscar Wilde example above); hence, sometimes the humor is lost unless you’re familiar with particular facts. You know, the “inside joke.” Having said all that, if you enjoy a sarcastic zinger now and again, you might like these 125 quotes and jokes.
125 SARCASTIC QUOTES AND JOKES
1. I kept putting my wife under a pedestal.
- Woody Allen
2. You have delighted us long enough.
- Jane Austen
3. People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.
- Russel Baker
4. You can only be young once. But, you can always be immature.
- Dave Barry
5. Magnetism is one of the Six Fundamental Forces of the Universe, with the other five being Gravity, Duct Tape, Whining, Remote Control, and the Force that Pulls Dogs toward the Groins of Strangers.
- Dave Barry
6. The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.
- Dave Barry
7. The old system of having a baby was much better than the new system. The old system being characterized by the fact that the man didn’t have to watch.
- Dave Barry
8. What Women Want: To be loved, to be listened to, to be desired, to be respected, to be needed, to be trusted, and sometimes, just to be held. What Men Want: Tickets for the world series.
- Dave Barry
9. Scientists tell us that the fastest animal on earth, with a top speed of 120 feet per second, is a cow that has been dropped out of a helicopter.
- Dave Barry
10. It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
- Caron de Beaumarchais
11. When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
- Yogi Berra
12. Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
- Ambrose Bierce
13. I feel so miserable without you, it’s almost like having you here.
- Stephen Bishop
14. One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child’s name and how old he or she is.
- Erma Bombeck
15. We have women in the military, but they don’t put us in the front lines. They don’t know if we can fight, if we can kill. I think we can. All the general has to do is walk over to the women and say, “You see the enemy over there? They say you look fat in those uniforms.”
- Elayne Boosler
16. He was happily married, but his wife wasn’t.
- Victor Borge
17. Sometimes I need what only you can provide: your absence.
- Ashleigh Brilliant
18. The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if it were.
- David Brinkley
19. I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.
- A. Whitney Brown
20. I won’t say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like “What I’m going to be if I grow up.”
- Lenny Bruce
21. Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.
- George W. Bush
22. Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
- Samuel Butler
23. “Automatic” simply means that you can’t repair it yourself.
- Frank Capra
24. Anytime four New Yorkers get into a cab together without arguing, a bank robbery has just taken place.
- Johnny Carson
25. He is a self-made man and worships his creator.
- Irvin S. Cobb
26. I believe in luck: How else can you explain the success of those you don’t like?
- Jean Cocteau
27. A modest little person, with much to be modest about.
- Winston Churchill
28. I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
- Clarence Darrow
29. You have to stay in shape. My grandmother, she started walking five miles a day when she was 60. She’s 97 today, and we don’t know where the hell she is.
- Ellen DeGeneres
30. An appeal is when you ask one court to show it’s contempt for another court.
- Finley Peter Dunne
31. History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
- Abba Eban
32. If A is a success in life, then A equals X plus Y plus Z. Work is X; Y is play; and Z is keeping your mouth shut.
- Albert Einstein
33. He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
- William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)
34. You can’t find any true closeness in Hollywood, because everybody does the fake closeness so well.
- Carrie Fisher
35. To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness—though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
- Gustave Flaubert
36. Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
- Redd Foxx
37. Don’t you wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence? There’s one marked “brightness,” but it doesn’t work.
- Gallagher
38. I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.
- Gandhi
39. The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights.
- J. Paul Getty
41. When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
- Goethe
42. People come to Washington believing it is the center of power. I know I did. It was only much later that I learned that Washington is a steering wheel that’s not connected to an engine.
- Richard Goodwin
43. Despite a lifetime of service to the cause of sexual liberation, I have never caught venereal disease, which makes me feel rather like an Arctic explorer who has never had frostbite.
- Germaine Greer
44. Just when you realize life’s a bitch, it has puppies.
- Adrienne E. Gusoff
45. We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can’t scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me.
- Jack Handey
46. If you can’t live without me, why aren’t you dead already?
- Cynthia Heimel
47. Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?
- Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)
49. When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
- Eric Hoffer
50. A good listener is usually thinking about something else.
- Kin Hubbard
51. In elementary school, in case of fire you have to line up quietly in a single file line from smallest to tallest. What is the logic? Do tall people burn slower?
- Warren Hutcherson
52. Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
- Aldous Huxley
53. The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward.
- John Maynard Keynes
54. The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think it’s their fault.
- Henry Kissinger
55. Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad name.
- Henry Kissinger
56. An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible.
- Alfred A. Knopf
57. Everyone who ever walked barefoot into his child’s room late at night hates Legos.
- Tony Kornheiser
58. Racism isn’t born, folks, it’s taught. I have a two year old son. You know what he hates? Naps! End of list!
- Denis Leary
59. My mom was a ventriloquist, and she always was throwing her voice. For ten years, I thought the dog was telling me to kill my father.
- Wendy Leibman
60. Traffic signals in New York are just rough guidelines.
- David Letterman
61. Every time I look at you I get a fierce desire to be lonesome.
- Oscar Levant
62. Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, especially if they are worthless.
- Sinclair Lewis
63. People will buy anything that is “one to a customer.”
- Sinclair Lewis
64. He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.
- Abraham Lincoln
65. I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception.
- Groucho Marx
66. I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
- Groucho Marx
67. I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.
- Groucho Marx
68. I didn’t like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions—the curtain was up.
- Groucho Marx
69. Don’t be humble. You’re not that great.
- Golda Meir
70. Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in memory as the wish to forget it.
- Montaigne
71. The trouble with a kitten is that it eventually becomes a cat.
- Ogden Nash
72. It’s always darkest before it turns absolutely pitch black.
- Paul Newman
73. Cab drivers are living proof that practice does not make perfect.
- Howard Ogden
74. Never raise your hand to your children; it leaves your midsection unprotected.
- Robert Orben
75. Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
- Lester Pearson
76. Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.
- Laurence J. Peter
77. Equal opportunity means everyone will have a fair chance at being incompetent.
- Laurence J. Peter
78. A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing.
- Emo Philips
79. How many people here have telekinetic powers? Raise my hand.
- Emo Philips
80. When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn’t work that way, so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.
- Emo Philips
81. I once heard two ladies going on and on about the pains of childbirth and how men don’t seem to know what real pain is. I asked if either of them ever got themselves caught in a zipper.
- Emo Philips
82. I was walking down fifth avenue today and I found a wallet, and I was gonna keep it, rather than return it, but I thought: Well, if I lost a hundred and fifty dollars, how would I feel? And, I realized I would want to be taught a lesson.
- Emo Philips
83. In our school, you were searched for guns and knifes on the way in; and, if you didn’t have any, they gave you some.
- Emo Philips
84. People always ask me, “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” Well, I don’t have an alibi.
- Emo Philips
85. Some mornings it just doesn’t seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps.
- Emo Philips
86. When I wake up in the morning, I just can’t get started until I’ve had that first, piping hot pot of coffee. Oh, I’ve tried other enemas.
- Emo Philips
87. Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn’t block traffic.
- Dan Rather
88. It is after you have lost your teeth that you can afford to buy steaks.
- Pierre-Auguste Renoir
89. When those waiters ask me if I want some fresh ground pepper, I ask if they have any aged pepper.
- Andy Rooney
90. Condoms aren’t completely safe. A friend of mine was wearing one and got hit by a bus.
- Bob Rubin
91. Men forget everything; women remember everything. That’s why men need instant replays in sports. They’ve already forgotten what happened.
- Rita Rudner
92. The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
- George Bernard Shaw
93. I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather … not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car.
- Will Shriner
94. Aren’t we forgetting the true meaning of Christmas? You know, the birth of Santa?
- Bart Simpson
95. Some people approach every problem with an open mouth.
- Adlai Stevenson
96. If you can’t convince them, confuse them.
- Harry S. Truman
97. I never give them hell. I just tell the truth, and they think it’s hell.
- Harry S. Truman
98. He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.
- Forrest Tucker
99. Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
- Mark Twain
100. I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
- Mark Twain
101. Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.
- Mark Twain
102. Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
- Mark Twain
103. I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable.
- Mark Twain
104. Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
- Mark Twain
105. If you can find something everyone agrees on, it’s wrong.
- Mo Udall
106. A healthy adult male bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.
- John Updike
107. f the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can’t be done.
- Peter Ustinov
108. Muscles come and go; flab lasts.
- Bill Vaughan
109. A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
- Gore Vidal
110. Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books; and, there is some evidence that they can’t read them, either.
- Gore Vidal
111. Having the critics praise you is like having the hangman say you’ve got a pretty neck.
- Eli Wallach
112. Actions lie louder than words.
- Carolyn Wells
113. The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
- Oscar Wilde
114. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.
- Oscar Wilde
115. He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.
- Oscar Wilde
116. Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
- Oscar Wilde
117. Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes.
- Oscar Wilde
118. I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.
- Oscar Wilde
119. He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.
- Billy Wilder
120. I don’t know why we are here. But, I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
121. All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening.
- Alexander Wolcott
122. Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.
- Frank Lloyd Wright
123. 24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence?
- Stephen Wright
124. An incompetent attorney can delay a trial for months or years. A competent attorney can delay one even longer.
- Evelle J. Younger
125. The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.
- Frank Zappa
CONCLUSION
Sometimes the bitter pill of criticism is easier to swallow if it’s coated with a little humor, even if it’s sarcastic. Master the art of being funny at the right place and the right time, and doors will open for you. I still love the true story about the negotiations between the U.S. and the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis. At one point, when they got into a heated stalemate, one Soviet posed the question: “What is the difference between capitalism and communism?” No one answered. So, he said, “In capitalism, people exploit people.” Dead silence. Then, he added, “In communism, it’s the other way around.” Be awesome! Be your own hero!
[Post Script Note: I’ve added more quotes for a total of more than 400! : ) Rather than changing the title of this post—which means changing all the links, too—I simply added the new ones to the comments section. Enjoy!]
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June 14th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
I love sarcasm.
June 14th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Me, too! Thanks for your comment!
September 2nd, 2008 at 5:54 pm
126. I don’t think man is woman’s natural enemy. I think his lawyer is.
- Shana Alexander
127. Better to lose count while naming your blessings than to lose your blessings to counting your troubles.
- Maltbie D. Babcock
128. There’s no disaster that can’t become a blessing, and no blessing that can’t become a disaster.
- Richard Bach
129. A minority is always compelled to think. That is the blessing of being in the minority.
- Leo Baeck
130. What the world really needs is more love and less paperwork.
– Pearl Bailey
131. When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.
- Honore de Balzac
132. The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.
- Honore de Balzac
133. You marry the man of your dreams and fifteen years later you’re married to a reclining chair that burps.
- Roseanne Barr
134. The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, one sometimes forgets which.
- James Matthew Barrie
135. My wife Mary and I have been married for forty-seven years; and, not once have we had an argument serious enough to consider divorce. Murder, yes; but, divorce, never.
- Jack Benny
136. Love: a temporary insanity, curable by marriage.
– Ambrose Bierce
137. Women would be more charming if one could fall into her arms without falling into her hands.
- Ambrose Bierce
138. People are always asking couples whose marriage has endured at least a quarter of a century for their secret for success. Actually, it is no secret at all. I am a forgiving woman. Long ago, I forgave my husband for not being Paul Newman.
- Erma Bombeck
139. Marriage is not just spiritual communion and passionate embraces; marriage is also three meals a day, sharing the workload, and remembering to carry out the trash.
- Joyce Brothers
140. There is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?
- George Byron
141. Man’s love is, of man’s life, a part; it is a woman’s whole existence. In her first passion, a woman loves her lover; in all the others, all she loves is love.
- Lord Byron
142. Love without passion is dreary; passion without love is horrific.
- Lord Byron
143. How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
- Albert Camus
144. Faith is putting all your eggs in God’s basket, then counting your blessings before they hatch.
- Ramona C. Carroll
145. It is, perhaps, better to be valued as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.
- Angela Carter
146. Jump out the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it if you feel it. Passion goes, boredom remains.
- Coco Chanel
147. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
- Winston Churchill
148. I used to desire many, many things, but now I have just one desire, and that’s to get rid of all my other desires.
- John Cleese
149. Envy is the art of counting the other fellow’s blessings instead of your own.
- Harold Coffin
150. The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness and kindness, can be trained to do most things.
- Jilly Cooper
151. The big mistake that men make is that when they turn thirteen or fourteen and all of a sudden they’ve reached puberty, they believe that they like women. Actually, you’re just horny. It doesn’t mean you like women any more at twenty-one than you did at ten.
- George William Curtis
152. My wife is a sex object—every time I ask for sex, she objects.
- Les Dawson
153. You know that when I hate you, it is because I love you to a point of passion that unhinges my soul.
- Julie de Lespinasse
154. The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.
- Madame de Stael
155. Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast.
- Marlene Dietrich
156. Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.
– Phyllis Diller
157. It destroys one’s nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being.
– Benjamin Disraeli
158. Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.
– Isadora Duncan
159. Jealousy would be far less torturous if we understood that love is a passion entirely unrelated to our merits.
- Paul Eldridge
160. Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us worthy evidence of the fact.
– George Eliot
161. When love grows diseased, the best thing we can do is to put it to a violent death; I cannot endure the torture of a lingering and consumptive passion.
- George Etherege
162. Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.
- John Fowles
163. Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.
- Rose Franken
164. Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and half shut afterwards.
- Benjamin Franklin
165. Suddenly, quietly, you realize that—from this moment forth—you will no longer walk through this life alone. Like a new sun, this awareness arises within you, freeing you from fear, opening your life. It is the beginning of love, and the end of all that came before.
- Robert Frost
166. Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.
- Robert Frost
167. A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he’s finished.
- Zsa Zsa Gabor
168. I never hated a man enough to give him diamonds back.
- Zsa Zsa Gabor
169. I hated him with a passion so deep, sometimes it felt like love.
- Terri Guillemets
170. Get a job, your husband hates you.
Get a great job, your husband leaves you.
Get a stupendous job, your husband leaves you for a teenager.
- Cynthia Heimel
171. If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.
- Katherine Hepburn
172. A woman who can’t forgive should never have more than a nodding acquaintance with a man.
- Ed Howe
173. Marriage is a mistake every man should make.
- George Jessel
174. Why can’t life’s problems hit us when we’re seventeen and know everything?
- A. C. Jolly
175. Isn’t that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love—fashion, as it were, for passion?
– Erica Jong
176. Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.
– Erica Jong
177. And the crazy part of it was even if you were clever, even if you spent your adolescence reading John Donne and Shaw, even if you studied history or zoology or physics and hoped to spend your life pursuing some difficult and challenging career, you still had a mind full of all the soupy longings that every high-school girl was awash in … underneath it, all you longed to be was annihilated by love, to be swept off your feet, to be filled up by a giant prick spouting sperm, soapsuds, silk and satins and, of course, money.
– Erica Jong
178. Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s just too much fraternizing with the enemy.
– Henry Kissinger
179. Feminine passion is to masculine as an epic is to an epigram.
- Karl Kraus
180. Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.
- Stephen Leacock
181. You don’t have to be anti-man to be pro-woman.
– Jane Galvin Lewis
182. Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.
– Georg C. Lichtenberg
183. What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears as easily as we open and shut our mouths.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg
184. Easy is an adjective used to describe a woman who has the sexual morals of a man.
– Nancy Linn-Desmond
185. The best love affairs are those we never had.
– Norman Lindsay
186. If I am not worth the wooing, I am surely not worth the winning.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
187. Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, a good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-dressed, well-groomed, and unaggressive.
– Marya Mannes
188. The force of passion is balanced by the force of interest.
- Jose Marti
189. A man is only as old as the woman he feels.
- Groucho Marx
190. I chased a woman for almost two years only to discover her tastes were exactly like mine—we were both crazy about girls.
- Groucho Marx
191. Marriage is a very good thing; but, I think it’s a mistake to make a habit out of it.
- W. Somerset Maugham
192. A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn’t want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.
– W. Somerset Maugham
193. Love is often gentle; desire always a rage.
- Mignon McLaughlin
194. To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia—to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
- H. L. Mencken
195. I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk ahead. He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war.
– Robert Mueller
196. Young wives are the leading asset of corporate power. They want the suburbs, a house, a settled life, and respectability. They want society to see that they have exchanged themselves for something of value.
– Ralph Nader
197. The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
198. The same passions in man and woman nonetheless differ in tempo; hence, man and woman do not cease misunderstanding one another.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
199. There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
200. Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
- Joyce Carol Oates
201. Of course the heart has it reasons, of which reason knows nothing.
- Blaise Pascal
202. If you have a great passion it seems that the logical thing is to see the fruit of it, and the fruit are children.
- Roman Polanski
203. He fell in love with himself at first sight, and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful. Self-love seems so often unrequited.
- Anthony Powell
204. To say “I love you,” one must first be able to say the “I.”
- Ayn Rand
205. I blame my mother for my poor sex life. All she told me was “the man goes on top and the woman underneath.” For three years my husband and I slept in bunk beds.
- Joan Rivers
206. The pleasure of love is in loving. We are happier in the passion we feel than in the passion we inspire.
- Francois de la Rochefoucauld
207. Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones, as wind extinguishes candles and fans a fire.
- François de la Rochefoucauld
208. To be happy with a man you must understand him a lot and love him a little. To be happy with a woman you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all.
– Helen Rowland
209. When you see a married couple coming down the street, the one who is two or three steps ahead is the one that’s mad.
- Helen Rowland
210. When I meet a man I ask myself, “Is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?”
- Rita Rudner
211. The only feeling of real loss is when you love someone more than you love your self.
- Salmon Rushdie
212. How come we don’t always know when love begins, but we always know when it ends?
- Salmon Rushdie
213. There is a place you can touch a woman that will drive her crazy—her heart.
- Salmon Rushdie
214. Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.
– Bertrand Russell
215. Why is it that men can be bastards and women must wear pearls and smile?
– Lynn Hecht Schafren
216. Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open.
– George Bernard Shaw
217. The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists.
- H. Allen Smith
218. I’ve yet to be on a campus where most women weren’t worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career. I’ve yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing.
– Gloria Steinem
219. Most women are one man away from welfare.
– Gloria Steinem
220. Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.
– Gloria Steinem
221. We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons … but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.
– Gloria Steinem
222. Men are allowed to have passion and commitment for their work … a woman is allowed that feeling for a man, but not her work.
- Barbra Streisand
223. The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation—or a relationship.
- Deborah Tannen
224. The book of female logic is blotted all over with tears, and Justice in their courts is forever in a passion.
- William Makepeace Thackeray
225. I wish someone would have told me that, just because I’m a girl, I don’t have to get married.
– Marlo Thomas
226. One of the things about equality is not just that you be treated equally to a man, but that you treat yourself equally to the way you treat a man.
– Marlo Thomas
227. To me, “sexual freedom” means freedom from having to have sex.
– Lily Tomlin
228. If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?
– Lily Tomlin
229. The formula for a happy marriage? It’s the same as the one for living in California: when you find a fault, don’t dwell on it.
– Jay Trachman
230. When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But, when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
- Mark Twain
231. A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
- Mark Twain
232. Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.
- Mark Twain
233. Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
- Mark Twain
234. An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven’t been done before.
- Mark Twain
235. Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
- Mark Twain
236. By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity—another man’s I mean.
- Mark Twain
237. Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
- Mark Twain
238. Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.
- Mark Twain
239. Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.
- Mark Twain
240. Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.
- Mark Twain
241. Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
- Mark Twain
242. Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.
- Mark Twain
243. Honesty is the best policy—when there is money in it.
- Mark Twain
244. I am opposed to millionaires; but, it would be dangerous to offer me the position.
- Mark Twain
245. I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
- Mark Twain
246. I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won’t.
- Mark Twain
247. I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
- Mark Twain
248. I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
- Mark Twain
249. I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting.
- Mark Twain
250. I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.
- Mark Twain
251. I was gratified to be able to answer promptly: I said I don’t know.
- Mark Twain
252. If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
- Mark Twain
253. If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.
- Mark Twain
254. In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.
- Mark Twain
255. In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are, in almost every case, gotten at second hand, and without examination.
- Mark Twain
256. In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
- Mark Twain
257. It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class, except Congress.
- Mark Twain
258. It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.
- Mark Twain
259. It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
- Mark Twain
260. It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
- Mark Twain
261. It is easier to stay out than get out.
- Mark Twain
262. Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
- Mark Twain
263. Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.
- Mark Twain
264. Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
- Mark Twain
265. The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.
- Mark Twain
266. The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
- Mark Twain
267. The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.
- Mark Twain
268. The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
- Mark Twain
269. Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.
- Mark Twain
270. A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
- Mark Twain
271. The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.
- Mark Twain
272. A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.
- Mark Twain
273. The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession, what there is of it.
- Mark Twain
274. It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
- Mark Twain
275. Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.
- Mark Twain
276. The rule is perfect: In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.
- Mark Twain
277. All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then, success is sure.
- Mark Twain
278. Sane and intelligent human beings are like all other human beings, and carefully and cautiously and diligently conceal their private real opinions from the world and give out fictitious ones in their stead for general consumption.
- Mark Twain
279. We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess, than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.
- Mark Twain
280. When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.
- Mark Twain
281. The report of my death was an exaggeration.
- Mark Twain
282. Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
- Mark Twain
283. Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
- Mark Twain
284. Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
- Mark Twain
285. A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
- Mark Twain
286. I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts.
- Mark Twain
287. Now that women are jockeys, baseball umpires, atomic scientists, and business executives, maybe someday they can master parallel parking.
- Bill Vaughan
288. Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution yet.
- Mae West
289. Ten men waiting for me at the door? Send one of them home; I’m tired.
- Mae West
290. It’s not the men in my life that counts—it’s the life in my men.
- Mae West
291. It’s better to be looked over than overlooked.
- Mae West
292. Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.
- Charlotte Whitton
293. Oh! I know this truth, if I know no other,
That passionate Love is Pain’s own mother.
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox
294. The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life.
– Oscar Wilde
295. How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.
- Oscar Wilde
296. Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.
- Oscar Wilde
297. I think, therefore I’m single.
– Liz Winstead
298. You cannot have everything. I mean, where would you put it?
- Steven Wright
299. A bachelor is a man who never makes the same mistake once.
- Ed Wynn
300. In how many lives does love really play a dominant part? The average taxpayer is no more capable of a “grand passion” than of a grand opera.
- Israel Zangwill
October 7th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Here’s more! But, instead of adding to the above comment (and having to renumber everything each time), I’ve decided to start the next bunch in this new comment.
301. I began wearing hats as a young lawyer because it helped me to establish my professional identity. Before that, whenever I was at a meeting, someone would ask me to get coffee.
- Bella Abzug
302. No amount of human having or human doing can make up for a deficit in human being.
- John Adams
303. If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a terrible warning.
- Catherine Aird
304. The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.
- Muhammad Ali
305. If you don’t decide where you’re going, life will decide for you.
- Tim Allen
306. He who floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions—such a man is a mere article of the world’s furniture—a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being—an echo, not a voice.
- Henri-Frédéric Amiel
307. Man never knows what he wants. He aspires to penetrate mysteries; and, as soon as he has, he wants to reestablish them. Ignorance irritates him, and knowledge cloys.
- Henri-Frédéric Amiel
308. Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars; and, they pass by themselves without wondering.
- Saint Augustine
309. It’s like, at the end, there’s this surprise quiz: Am I proud of me? I gave my life to become the person I am right now! Was it worth what I paid?
- Richard Bach
310. The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change.
- Richard Bach
311. There’s a period of life when we swallow a knowledge of ourselves and it becomes either good or sour inside.
- Pearl Bailey
312. I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
- James Baldwin
313. What we buy, and pay for, is part of ourselves.
- Amelia Barr
314. You grow up the day you have your first real laugh, at yourself.
- Ethel Barrymore
315. If you haven’t had at least a slight poetic crack in the heart, you have been cheated by nature.
- Phyllis Battelle
316. It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.
- Jean Baudrillard
317. We grow neither better nor worse as we grow older, but more like ourselves.
- Mary Lamberton Becker
318. There are joys which long to be ours. God sends ten thousands truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.
- Henry Ward Beecher
319. Readjusting is a painful process, but most of us need it at one time or another.
- Arthur Christopher Benson
320. Belladonna: n. In Italian, a beautiful lady; in English, a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.
- Ambrose Bierce
321. The young women in my classes are feisty and clever and believe, often with the passion of youthful optimism, that feminism is a battle already won. I worry for them—and for my daughters, too.
- Louise Brown
322. Like an old gold-panning prospector, you must resign yourself to digging up a lot of sand from which you will later patiently wash out a few minute particles of gold ore.
- Dorothy Bryant
323. If in the last few years you haven’t discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead.
- Gelett Burgess
324. The contemplative life is often miserable. One must act more, think less, and not watch oneself live.
- Nicolas Chamfort
325. “It is of no importance to know who I am since some day I shall no longer be”—that is what each of us should answer those who bother about our identity and desire at any price to coop us up in a category or a definition.
- E. M. Cioran
326. As in political, so in literary, action, a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.
- Joseph Conrad
327. Living is being born slowly. It would be a little too easy if we could borrow ready-made souls.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
328. The outward man is the swinging door; the inner man is the still hinge.
- Meister Eckhart
329. He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice.
- Albert Einstein
330. It’s never too late to be who you might have been.
- George Eliot
331. Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
- George Eliot
332. There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.
- George Eliot
333. Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
334. Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
335. People wish to be settled. Only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
336. My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
337. What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters to what lies within us.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
338. We must be our own before we can be another’s.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
339. A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
340. Truth hurts—not the searching after; the running from!
- John Eyberg
341. What you have outside you counts less than what you have inside you.
- B. C. Forbes
342. I cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of my being.
- Anatole France
343. You can put anything into words, except your own life.
- Max Frisch
344. In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.
- Robert Frost
345. “Know thyself”—a maxim as pernicious as it is odious. A person observing himself would arrest his own development. Any caterpillar who tried to “know himself” would never become a butterfly.
- André Gide
346. “Know thyself?” If I knew myself, I’d run away.
- Goethe
347. If your mind isn’t open, keep your mouth shut, too.
- Sue Grafton
348. The greatest explorer on this earth never takes voyages as long as those of the man who descends to the depth of his heart.
- Julien Green
349. The truth is that it is natural, as well as necessary, for every man to be a vagabond occasionally.
- Samuel H. Hammond
350. The Beatles exist apart from my Self. I am not really Beatle George. Beatle George is like a suit or shirt that I once wore, on occasion; and, until the end of my life, people may see that shirt and mistake it for me.
- George Harrison
351. No one can drive us crazy unless we give them the keys.
- Doug Horton
352. If we cannot be happy and powerful and prey on others, we invent conscience and prey on ourselves.
- Elbert Hubbard
353. I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But, through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision, I have finally been included in “We, the people.”
- Barbara Jordan
354. A criminal becomes a popular figure because he unburdens, in no small degree, the consciences of his fellow man, for now they know once more where evil is to be found.
- Carl Jung
355. Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can’t even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.
- Barbara Kingsolver
356. Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
- Barbara Kingsolver
357. Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they’re worn out and times—and this is the worst of all—before we have new ones.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg
358. Our only security is our ability to change.
- John Lilly
359. If you can’t be kind, at least be vague.
- Judith Martin
360. The tragedy in life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.
- Benjamin Mays
361. The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives.
- Thomas Merton
362. The promises of this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms; and, to confide in one’s self, and become something of worth and value, is the best and safest course.
- Michelangelo
363. Real birthdays are not annual affairs. Real birthdays are the days when we have a new birth.
- Ralph Parlette
364. If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else.
- Laurence J. Peter
365. To me, there is only one form of human depravity—the man without a purpose.
- Ayn Rand
366. Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.
- Ayn Rand
367. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
- Ayn Rand
368. Do not ever say that the desire to “do good” by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
- Ayn Rand
369. Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.
- Ayn Rand
370. Evil requires the sanction of the victim.
- Ayn Rand
371. Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.
- Ayn Rand
372. I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
- Ayn Rand
373. The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
- Ayn Rand
374. The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.
- Ayn Rand
375. The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.
- Ayn Rand
376. There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.
- Ayn Rand
377. There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
- Ayn Rand
378. The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.
- Ayn Rand
379. When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.
- Ayn Rand
380. When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.
- Ayn Rand
381. A woman is like a tea bag—you can’t tell how strong she is until she’s in hot water.
- Nancy Reagan
382. Identity is a bag and a gag. Yet, it exists for me with all the force of a fatal disease. Obviously, I am here, a mind and a body. To say there’s no proof my body exists would be arty and specious; and, if my mind is more ephemeral, less provable, the solution of being a writer with solid (touchable, tearable, burnable) books, is as close as anyone has come to a perfect answer.
- Judith Rossner
383. Men are self-confident because they grow up identifying with superheroes. Women have bad self-images because they grow up identifying with Barbie.
- Rita Rudner
384. The only person you should ever compete with is yourself. You can’t hope for a fairer match.
- Todd Ruthman
385. The people and circumstances around me do not MAKE me what I am, they REVEAL who I am.
- Laura Schlessinger
386. There must be more to life than having everything.
- Maurice Sendak
387. Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.
- Dr. Seuss
388. It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too.
- H. W. Shaw
389. To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool.
- Robert E. Sherwood
390. If you can go through life without experiencing pain you probably haven’t been born yet.
- Neil Simon
391. If you treat every situation as a life-and-death matter, you’ll die a lot of times.
- Dean Smith
392. Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
- Wallace Stevens
393. Men are allowed to have passion and commitment for their work … a woman is allowed that feeling for a man, but not her work.
- Barbra Streisand
394. All people should strive to learn, before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.
- James Thurber
395. I loathe the expression “What makes him tick.” It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.
- James Thurber
396. It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
- Mark Twain
397. I think that wherever your journey takes you, there are new gods waiting there, with divine patience—and laughter.
- Susan M. Watkins
398. Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
- Oscar Wilde
399. Everyone is born a king, and most people die in exile.
- Oscar Wilde
400. Man can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as … from a lack of bread.
- Richard Wright
October 8th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
401. We sometimes feel that we have been really understood; but, it was always long ago, by someone now dead.
- Mignon McLaughlin
402. It’s terrifying to see someone inside of whom a vital spring seems to have been broken. It’s particularly terrifying to see him in your mirror.
- Mignon McLaughlin
403. Those who are brutally honest are seldom so with themselves.
- Mignon McLaughlin
404. We catch frightful glimpses of ourselves in the hostile eyes of others.
- Mignon McLaughlin
405. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you?
- Thomas Merton
406. What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery; and, without it, all the others are, not only useless, but, disastrous.
- Thomas Merton
407. If a man happens to find himself, he has a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.
- James A. Michener
408. First, I’m trying to prove to myself that I’m a person. Then maybe I’ll convince myself that I’m an actress.
- Marilyn Monroe
409. There comes a point in many people’s lives when they can no longer play the role they have chosen for themselves. When that happens, we are like actors finding that someone has changed the play.
- Brian Moore
410. A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
- George Moore
411. When I get all these accolades for being true to myself, I say, “Who else can I be? I can’t be Chris Evert.”
- Martina Navratilova
412. The doer is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
413. One’s own self is well hidden from one’s own self; of all mines of treasure, one’s own is the last to be dug up.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
414. There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
- Anaïs Nin
415. Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
- Anaïs Nin
416. Where we come from in America no longer signifies, it’s where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are.
- Joyce Carol Oates
417. Your distress about life might mean you have been living for the wrong reason, not that you have no reason for living.
- Tom O’Connor
418. When you empty yourself of the illusion of who you are, and what you think you are, there is less to lose than you had feared.
- Carol Orsborn
419. In the theory of gender, I began from zero. There is no masculine power or privilege I did not covet. But, slowly, step by step, decade by decade, I was forced to acknowledge that even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity.
- Camille Paglia
420. Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.
- Camille Paglia
421. If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?
- Chuck Palahniuk
422. Who you are moment to moment is just a story.
- Chuck Palahniuk
423. People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.
- Chuck Palahniuk
424. The ancient human question “Who am I?” leads inevitably to the equally important question “Whose am I?”—for there is no self outside of relationship.
- Parker Palmer
425. One must know oneself. If it does not serve to discover the truth, it, at least, serves as a rule of life, and there is nothing better.
- Blaise Pascal
426. Our achievements of today are but the sum total of our thoughts of yesterday. You are, today, where the thoughts of yesterday have brought you; and, you will be, tomorrow, where the thoughts of today take you.
- Blaise Pascal
427. You’ve got to be original because, if you are like somebody else, what do they need you for?
- Bernadette Peters
428. I think history is inextricably linked to identity. If you don’t know your history, if you don’t know your family, who are you?
- Mary Pipher
429. It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away; I’m looking for the truth.” And, so, it goes away. Puzzling.
- Robert M. Pirsig
430. Almost always it is the fear of being ourselves that brings us to the mirror.
- Antonio Porchia
431. Some things become so completely our own that we forget them.
- Antonio Porchia
432. Everything that I bear within me, bound, is to be found somewhere else, free.
- Antonio Porchia
433. And if you find everything as soon as you look for it, you find it in vain, you look for it in vain.
- Antonio Porchia
434. I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.
- Katherine Anne Porter
435. The real meditation is … the meditation on one’s identity. Ah, voilà une chose!! You try it. You try finding out why you’re you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voilà une chose!
- Ezra Pound
436. Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes.
- Hugh Prather
437. Identity is such a crucial affair that one shouldn’t rush into it.
- David Quammen
438. The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
- Anna Quindlen
439. Who has not sat, afraid, before his own heart’s curtain?
- Rainer Maria Rilke
440. A man is ever apt to contemplate himself out of all proportion to his surroundings.
- Christina G. Rossetti
441. Falling, falling, falling, falling down. Look yourself in the eye before you drown.
- Emily Saliers
442. I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity?
- William Saroyan
443. You need to claim the events of your life to make yourself yours.
- Anne-Wilson Schaef
444. If a man does not know what port he is steering for, no wind is favorable to him.
- Seneca
445. Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.
- William Shakespeare
446. We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
- William Shakespeare
447. Oh! that you could turn your eyes towards the napes of your necks, and make but an interior survey of your good selves.
- William Shakespeare
448. Would you have me
False to my nature? Rather say, I play
The man I am.
- William Shakespeare
449. No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.
- George Bernard Shaw
450. I’m not Jack Nicholson. I’m not Brando. But I do mumble.
- Benicio Del Toro
451. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
452. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
453. Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real. Perhaps they are.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
454. There is properly no history; only biography.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
455. Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
456. What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not been discovered.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
457. The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
458. There are always two parties; the establishment and the movement.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
459. Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
460. The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
461. All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
462. In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
463. Hitch your wagon to a star.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
464. Every hero becomes a bore at last.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
465. We boil at different degrees.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
466. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
467. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
468. It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, “Always do what you are afraid to do.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
469. Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
470. A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
471. Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.
- Gustave Flaubert
472. There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.
- Carol Shields
473. Children don’t read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion, or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology … They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff … When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don’t expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions.
- Isaac Bashevis Singer
474. I feel my body, my mind, weighted down—all is heavy—but, my blood, my inner fire, my passion, the little unburdened kid in me, patiently wait to burst free. Some of us die never having burst.
- Drew Sirtors
475. For souls in growth, great quarrels are great emancipators.
- Logan Pearsall Smith
476. One cannot spend forever sitting and solving the mysteries of one’s history.
- Lemony Snicket
477. There are at least two kinds of cowards. One kind always lives with himself, afraid to face the world. The other kind lives with the world, afraid to face himself.
- Roscoe Snowden
478. Make yourself the sort of person you want people to think you are.
- Socrates
479. If we don’t know where we are, we don’t know who we are.
- Wallace Stegner
480. The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.
- Ben Stein
481. A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
482. To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying “amen” to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
483. People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But, the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates.
- Thomas Szasz
484. Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
- Henry David Thoreau
485. You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
- Henry David Thoreau
486. Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
- Mark Twain
487. I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want.
- Mark Twain
488. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man—the biography of the man himself cannot be written.
- Mark Twain
489. We do not deal much in facts when we are contemplating ourselves.
- Mark Twain
490. Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
- Mark Twain
491. The question of who or what the Me is, is not a simple one at all.
- Mark Twain
492. We are the products of editing, rather than authorship.
- George Wald
493. It’s not what you gather, but what you scatter that tells what kind of life you have lived.
- Helen Walton
494. In some extremely important ways, people are what you expect them to be, or at least they behave as you expect them to behave.
- Naomi Weisstein
495. Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
- Walt Whitman
496. Misfortunes one can endure—they come from outside, they are accidents. But, to suffer for one’s own faults—Ah! There is the sting of life.
- Oscar Wilde
497. One’s only real life is the life one never leads.
- Oscar Wilde
498. Most urgently, women’s identity must be premised upon our “beauty” so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.
- Naomi Wolf
499. Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book shown to him by heart, and his friends can only read the title.
- Virginia Woolf
500. Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.
- William Butler Yeats