"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
— Albert Einstein

"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
— Albert Einstein

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
— Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho)

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."
— Terry Pratchett (Jingo)

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

"There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line."
— Oscar Levant

"I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally. "
— W.C. Fields

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it."
— W.C. Fields

"Who knows how to make love stay?

1. Tell love you are going to Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay.

2. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a moustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning."
— Tom Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker)

"If it's a penny for your thoughts and you put in your two cents worth, then someone, somewhere is making a penny."
— Steven Wright

"I have great faith in fools - my friends call it self-confidence."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"Women intrinsically understand human dynamics, and that makes them unstoppable. Unfortunately, the average man is less adroit at fostering such rivalries, which is why most men remain average; males are better at hating things that can't hate them back (e.g., lawnmowers, cats, the Denver Broncos, et cetera). They don't see the big picture."
— Chuck Klosterman (Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas)

"I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."
— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye."
— Miss Piggy

"Reality continues to ruin my life."
— Bill Watterson (The Complete Calvin and Hobbes)

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
— E.B. White

"Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company."
— Mark Twain

"I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it."
— Mae West

"I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability."
— Oscar Wilde

"I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there."
— Oscar Wilde

"The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'."
— Groucho Marx

"Basically, I have two speeds.... Hostile or smart-aleck. Your choice."
— James Patterson (Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports)

"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."
— Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)

"The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also."
— Mark Twain

"You spend your whole life trying to get people to like you and then you run over one person with your car - not even one of the popular ones - and everybody gets on your case. Doesn't make any sense."
— Michael Scott

"I wrote the story myself. It's about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it."
— Mae West

"No good deed goes unpunished."
— Oscar Wilde

"Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love."
— Charles M. Schulz

"Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny."
— Frank Zappa

"Good sex is like good bridge. If you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand."
— Mae West

"The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom."
— H.L. Mencken

"Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me."
— Robert Frost

"I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."
— Marilyn Monroe

"If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution."
— Emma Goldman

"There ain't no devil, only God when he's drunk."
— Tom Waits

"Music is the only religion that delivers the goods."
— Frank Zappa

"So, you can make me come, that doesn't make you Jesus."
— Tori Amos

"I don't like my language watered down, I don't like my edges rounded off."
— Ani DiFranco

"Without music and dance, life is a journey through a desert."
— Pat Conroy

"I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I'm going to be immoderate--and volatile--I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant."
— Joanne Harris (Chocolat)

"We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
— Richard Dawkins

"In the end
these things matter most:
How well did you love?
How fully did you live?
How deeply did you let go?"
— Siddhārtha Gautama

"I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Maybe everyone can live beyond what they're capable of."
— Markus Zusak (I Am the Messenger)

"Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike."
— Oscar Wilde (An Ideal Husband)

"All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber."
— Kurt Vonnegut