"[He] was endowed with a stupidity which by the least little stretch would go around the globe four times and tie."
— Mark Twain

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
— Dr. Seuss

"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth."
— Mark Twain

"People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along."
— Stephen Jay Gould

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
— Stephen Jay Gould

"So many books, so little time."
— Frank Zappa

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
— Mark Twain

"People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be."
— Abraham Lincoln

"I don't like that man. I must get to know him better."
— Abraham Lincoln

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
— Aristotle (Metaphysics)

"There is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
— G.K. Chesterton (The Napoleon of Notting Hill)

"The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more."
— Mark Twain

"The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts."
— Marcus Aurelius

"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment."
— Marcus Aurelius

"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
— Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky)

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."
— Groucho Marx

"From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend on reading it."
— Groucho Marx

"I hated every minute of training, but I said, 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion'."
— Muhammad Ali

"I never understood people who don't have bookshelves."
— George Plimpton

"What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for."
— Isaac Asimov

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
— Ray Bradbury

"Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories."
— Ray Bradbury

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."
— Isaac Asimov

"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
— Isaac Asimov

"My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure."
— Gene Wolfe

"Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

"That pompous phrase (graphic novel) was thought up by some idiot in the marketing department of DC. I prefer to call them Big Expensive Comics."
— Alan Moore

"The odor of bowel wind is known to every human, but the fragrance of book glue has crossed only a fraction of mortal nostrils. And yet it behooves us not to judge the unlettered too harshly. We must stay the impulse to write CHUCKLEHEAD above their doors and carve DOLT upon their tombstones."
— James Morrow

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
— Mark Twain

"The covers of this book are too far apart."
— Ambrose Bierce

"There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know."
— Ambrose Bierce

"Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible."
— Richard P. Feynman

"My particular dread--the vivid possibility that left me staring at tree shadows on the bedroom ceiling night after night--was having to lie in a small tent, alone in an inky wilderness, listening to a foraging bear outside and wondering what its intentions were. I was especially riveted by an amateur photograph in Herrero's book, taken late at night by a camper with a flash at a campground out West. The photograph caught four black bears as they puzzled over a suspended food bag. The bears were clearly startled but not remotely alarmed by the flash. It was not the size or demeanor of the bears that troubled me--they looked almost comically nonaggressive, like four guys who had gotten a Frisbee caught up a tree--but their numbers. Up to that moment it had not occurred to me that bears might prowl in parties. What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children's parties--I daresay it would even give a merry toot--and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag."
— Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)

"Eating in Sweden is really just a series of heartbreaks."
— Bill Bryson

"At the foot of the mountain, the park ended and suddenly all was squalor again. I was once more struck by this strange compartmentalization that goes on in America -- a belief that no commercial activities must be allowed inside the park, but permitting unrestrained development outside, even though the landscape there may be just as outstanding. America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn't have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature."
— Bill Bryson (The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America)

"Black bears rarely attack. But here's the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning and immensely strong, and the are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn't happen often, but - and here is the absolutely salient point - once would be enough."
— Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)

"I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything."
— Bill Bryson

"Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
— Bessie Anderson Stanley

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Always do what you are afraid to do."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The one thing I remember about Christmas was that my father used to take me out in a boat about ten miles offshore on Christmas Day, and I used to have to swim back. Extraordinary. It was a ritual.
Mind you, that wasn't the hard part. The difficult bit was getting out of the sack."
— John Cleese

"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."
— Tom Clancy

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours"
— Alan Bennett (The History Boys: The Film)

"It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit."
— Harry S. Truman