From various authors.
To do an evil act is base. To do a good one without incurring danger, is common enough. But it is part of a good man to do great and noble deeds though he risks everything in doing them.
[Doing them he doesn't risk to be reborn in lower realms, and lack of self-respect]
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
To err may be human, but to admit it isn't.
If you are afraid of being lonely, don't try to be right.
The only man who can change his mind is a man that's got one.
Light travels inconceivably fast until it encounters the human mind.
Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.
For most, life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
The praise of a fool is more harmful than his blame.
Blessed is he who has made it through University without being made a fool of.
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
The scholar labours meticulously for years on end to produce his masterpiece - which the thinker destroys with a single sentence.
I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
A child miseducated is a child lost.
You can lead high school graduates to University, but you can't make them think.
Anyone who has ever been to school will always feel comparatively at home in prison.
Very few can be trusted with an education.
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Never let your studies interfere with your education.
Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught.
The average PhD thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another.
Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered have prevented a single foolish action.
Truth may kill a man, but he dies with dignity. And if the human race goes extinct, let it be for truth and not for the cowardice of ignorance.
Nothing makes you as sure of yourself as ignorance.
Goodness plus ignorance makes one Devil.
Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.
Virtue is more to be feared than vice because it is not subject to the regulation of conscience.
It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.
If you are dealing with a fool, dictate, but never argue.
The surest sign that you have no brains is to argue with one who hasn't.
Some of the new books are so down to earth they ought to be ploughed under.
What an author doesn't know usually fills a book.
The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing.
If ignorance is bliss then a lot of people are going to die of joy.
The reason there's so much ignorance is that those who have it are so eager to share it.
To be a success in life all you need is confidence and ignorance.
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
The man who listens to reason is usually thinking of some way to refute it.
Wit helps to play the fool with more confidence.
The human race's favourite method for being in control of the facts is to ignore them.
The ignorance of most people gives one a rough sense of the infinite.
Nothing is impossible for anyone impervious to reason.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere.
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether people do.
Most fools think they are only ignorant.
Wise men learn more from fools than fools from wise men.
Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.
There is no difference between a wise man and a fool when they fall in love.
You can't depend on anyone to be wrong all the time. Even a fool must now and then be right by chance, just as a broken clock is correct twice a day.
Fools and wise men are equally harmless. It is the half-fools and the half-wise that are dangerous.
Infatuation is what makes an intelligent man look foolish to a foolish girl who looks intelligent to him.
Silence is the wisdom of the fool. To make a noise is to be found out.
Remain silent and others suspect that you are ignorant; talk and you remove all doubt of it.
The ignorant are aware of many mysteries and understand everything else, whereas the wise are aware of one mystery and understand nothing else.
Time alone relieves the foolish from sorrow, but reason relieves the wise.
When drunk, men often say sensible things which sound foolish to them when sober.
When the people applauded wildly, Diogenes turned to one of his friends and said "Have I said something foolish?"
If I was appreciated along with other men I would depreciate myself.
A man who has a million dollars feels as well off as if he were not a fool.
Some people gather a lot of money thinking it will make them worth more.
One should not seek to be of value to society any more than one would wish to be popular with a fool.
A practical man is a man who practices the errors of his forefathers.
To think ill of mankind, and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.
What men call good fellowship is commonly but the Virtue of pigs in a litter which lie close together to keep each other warm.
No two things in Nature have less affinity than violence and reflection.
No one ever thought to give awards for wisdom, which is a great relief.
Words are like leaves And where they most abound Much fruit and sense beneath is rarely found.
He writes quickly, with the fluency of the artist who has nothing whatsoever to say.
You should read it, though there is much that is skipworthy.
It was a book to kill time, for those who like it better dead.
The ordinary man would rather read the life of the cruelest pirate that ever lived than the wisest philosopher.
There are two common ways to avoid thinking: one is to never read, and the other is to do nothing but read.
If words were invented to conceal thought, newspapers are a great improvement on a bad invention.
Two sorts of writers possess genius: those who think, and those who cause others to think.
There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.
Literature is an occupation in which you have to prove your talent to people who have none.
The success of many books is due to the affinity between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public.
The road to ignorance is paved with good editions.
There is no worse robber than a bad book.
The multitude of books is making us ignorant.
An editor is one who separates the wheat from the chaff and prints the chaff.
He who wields a pen is in a state of war.
Writing is one of the few professions left where you take all the responsibility for what you do.
To write prose, one must have something to say; but he who has nothing to say can still make verses and rhymes, where one word suggests the other, and at last something comes out which in fact is nothing but looks as if it were something.
If you find writing prose too boring you can always convert to poetry by starting each sentence with a capital letter, and making each paragraph a stanza, with each line ending on the margin except the last one.
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
A poet is a person who simply cannot keep his confusion to himself.
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
He is a sheep in sheep's clothing.
To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology.
The first among the flock is still a sheep.
Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him.
Only dead fish swim with the stream.
He's a man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
Society is the process in which everyone fights all battles except the one that should be fought.
The length of life ought to be measured by the number and importance of our ideas and not by the number of our days. By this standard, some people have never been born.
I know of very few individuals who deserve to live.
Fame is proof that people are gullible.
"Be yourself" is the worst advice you can give some people.
All that I care to know is that a man is a human being - that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.
It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.
The greatest act of faith is when a man decides that he is not God.
It must be a very weary day to the youth, when he first discovers that after all he will only become a man.
"The way he (George Bernard Shaw) believes in himself is very refreshing in these atheistic days when so many believe in no God at all."
The only excuse for God is that He doesn't exist.
Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
We are the people our parents warned us about.
He who always finds fault with his friends has faulty friends.
With each friend you buy you get an enemy free.
Judge a man by his foes.
Know a man by the company he avoids.
The wise man is never less alone than when he is alone.
Have no illusions, people do not think about you, but of what you are thinking about them.
Vanity is the result of a delusion that someone is paying attention.
You can say what you want to around home because no one pays any attention to you.
All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
While each man loves himself more than anyone else, he sets less value on his own estimate than on the opinions of others.
Most celebrated men live in a condition of prostitution.
The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs less.
Who'd want to be an adult in this world? The normal, relaxed, well-adjusted adult is constantly exhausting itself playing a thousand games - 250 of these are spent in frantic pursuit of what it wants; another 250 are spent trying to avoid what it does not want; a further 250 involve elaborate justifications, trying to give the whole process some semblance of respectability; and the final 250 entail the efforts of trying to appear normal, relaxed, and well-adjusted.
If a growing object is both fresh and spoiled at the same time, chances are it is a child.
We're all born brave, trusting and greedy, and most of us remain greedy.
By the time we arrive at middle age, we have settled on definite convictions, most of which are wrong.
People quiet down as they grow older, probably because they have more to be quiet about.
Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man.
It is a man's fate to keep growing older long after he is old enough.
Last will and testament: a pathetic attempt at immortality.
Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health.
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
Nothing fails like success.
Nothing succeeds like failure.
Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue.
Success in almost any field depends more on energy, drive and persistence than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid leaders.
In judging others people will work overtime for no pay.
The place where optimism most flourishes is in the lunatic asylum.
The lot of critics is to be remembered by what they failed to understand.
Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum -- "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am."
Dangerous exercise - jumping to conclusions.
Only the poor are forbidden to beg.
Time is money if you are willing to sell your life.
I cannot afford to waste my time making money.
To be clever enough to make a lot of money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
Money costs too much.
What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.
The wretchedness of being rich is that you live with rich people.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
In this world it is not what we take up, but what we give up that makes us rich.
There are no dollar signs on tombstones.
No man ever said on his deathbed: "I wish I had spent more time on my business."
Money is the fruit of evil as often as the root of it.
The love of money grows as the money itself grows.
Nobody has money who ought to have it.
God shows his contempt for wealth by the kind person he selects to receive it.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Most people sell their souls and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.
It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.
The poor live the most independent lives of any.
Many people have character who have nothing else.
Confound these ancestors . . . They've stolen our best ideas!
Originality is undetected plagiarism.
Plagiarism is sometimes unrecognized originality.
Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism.
Everything has been thought of before; the problem is to think of it again.
I hold it a noble task to rescue from oblivion those who deserve to be eternally remembered.
The historian is a prophet looking backwards.
All history is the propaganda of the victorious.
The meek shall inherit the earth -- they are too weak to refuse.
There's only one thing that can continue to grow without nourishment: the human ego.
[Ego also requires nourishment, but its cultivation comes effortlessly.]
The man who lives by himself and for himself is apt to be corrupted by the company he keeps.
Some people have such open minds that nothing stays in them long.
I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing.
He that hath ears to hear, let him stuff them with cotton.
Quarrels would not last long if the fault were only on one side.
The best way of answering a bad argument is to let it go on.
If someone says they agree with you in principle, it means they haven't the slightest intention of putting it into practice.
A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.
Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover about everybody's face but their own.
Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.
Somebody's boring me . . . I think it's me.
I am always embarrassed by compliments - I always feel that they have not said enough.
I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top.
Never do today what you can do tomorrow. Something may occur to make you regret your premature action.
It is well to put off until tomorrow what you ought not to do at all.
Ours is a world where people don't know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it.
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
Invention is the mother of necessity.
The line is often busy when your conscience tries to speak.
My duty is a thing I never do, on principle.
When a man claims that he is working toward the betterment of humanity - and humanity agrees - you can be sure he is not.
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
If you are good, you'll be assigned all the work. If you are really good, you'll get out of doing it.
It is, no doubt, an immense advantage to have done nothing, but one should not abuse it.
Many a man holds both day and night jobs so he can drive from one to the other in a more expensive car.
Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do with their time.
Work is a form of nervousness.
I do not like work even when another person is doing it.
The lazy man gets round the sun as quickly as the busy one.
Industry is the root of all ugliness.
The one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action.
Action is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
People who like to be referred to as dreamers are too often merely sleepers.
Avoid Quiet and Placid persons unless you are in Need of Sleep.
Actions lie louder than words.
People with good memories seldom remember anything worth remembering.
Everyone complains of his memory, but no one complains of his judgement.
You can make the average man mad by referring to him as the average man.
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
Nobody minds a clever man, as long as he does not impart his cleverness to others.
Take care that no one hates you justly.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
They who know _the truth_ are not equal to those who love it, and they who love it are not equal to those who delight in it.
The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth.
A conclusion is the place where you get tired of thinking.
Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.
I have yet to see a problem, however complicated, which, when you look at it in the right way, did not become more complicated.
The superior man is distressed by his want of ability.
The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.
If you think the world is against you - it doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't.
A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.
In our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.
What governs men is the fear of truth.
Children are afraid of being left in the dark; men are afraid of not being left in it.
If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you. If you really make them think, they'll hate you.
It is a fine thing to be honest, but it is also very important to be right.
Judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made them.
Self-love seems so often unrequited.
I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.
The worst thing about war is that it seldom kills off the right people.
A nation is only at peace if it's at war.
A human relationship is what happens when you know you can rely on the other person to be as dishonest as you are.
The human race expresses great concern that everyone should express their abilities to the full, and never more so than when those abilities are non-existent.
One of the greatest superstitions of our time is the belief that it has none.
Society expresses its sympathy for the geniuses of the past to distract attention from the fact that it has no intention of being sympathetic to the geniuses of the present.
Equality: It is easier to make people appear equally stupid than to make them appear equally clever.
A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.
Acting is all about honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
At one time I thought he wanted to be an actor. He had certain qualifications, including no money and a total lack of responsibility.
A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.
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