Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.
What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.
Jonathan Swift
What some people invent the rest enlarge.
All human race would be wits. And millions miss, for one that hits.
I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.
Come, agree, the law's costly.
Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.
There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.
Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.
Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and speakers because, whoever shares his thoughts with the public will convince them as he himself appears convinced.
Don't set your wit against a child.
In the school of political projectors, I was but ill entertained, the professors appearing, in my judgment, wholly out of their senses; which is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favorites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity, and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities, and eminent services, of instructing princes to know their true interest, by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employment persons qualified to exercise them; with many other wild impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in me the old observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth.
The two maxims of any great man at court are, always to keep his countenance and never to keep his work.
It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.
Promises and pie crusts are made to be broken.
It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.
Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.
If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scoundrel.
It was a bold person that first ate an oyster.
Nor do they trust their tongue 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.
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.
But you think that it is time for me to have done with the world, and so I would if I could get into a better before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.
Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provision of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.
I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.
The lack of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.
Management works in the system; Leadership works on the system.
Stephen Covey
Seek first to understand and then to be understood.
Private victories precede public victories. You can't invert that process any more than you can harvest a crop before you plant it.
It's easy to say no! when there's a deeper yes! burning inside.
Wisdom is your perspective on life, your sense of balance, your understanding of how the various parts and principles apply and relate to each other. It embraces judgment, discernment, comprehension. It is a gestalt or oneness, and integrated wholeness.
If you're proactive, you don't have to wait for circumstances or other people to create perspective expanding experiences. You can consciously create your own.
Of all ills that one endures, hope is a cheap and universal cure.
Abraham Cowley
The Buck Stops Here
Harry S Truman
Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to joy, and makes right royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven, and we are gods.
Robert G. Ingersoll
For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; as though there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart.
Eugene Ionesco
The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.
There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to realize myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have succeeded, this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is realizable. Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.
Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their clich?s.
Realism, whether it be socialist or not, falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.
The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or ever register.
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