"He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical."
— G.K. Chesterton

"There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a tired feeling.
"
— Paula Poundstone

"My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met."
— Rodney Dangerfield

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."
— Robert Frost

"The rest of us, not chosen for enlightenment, left on the outside of Earth, at the mercy of a Gravity we have only begun to learn how to detect and measure, must go on blundering inside our front-brain faith in Kute Korrespondences, hoping that for each psi-synthetic taken from Earth's soul there is a molecule, secular, more or less ordinary and named, over here - kicking endlessly among the plastic trivia, finding in each Deeper Significance and trying to string them all together like terms of a power series hoping to zero in on the tremendous and secret Function whose name, like the permuted names of God, cannot be spoken... plastic saxophone reed sounds of unnatural timbre, shampoo bottle ego-image, Cracker Jack prize one-shot amusement, home appliance casing fairing for winds of cognition, baby bottles tranquilization, meat packages disguise of slaughter, dry-cleaning bags infant strangulation, garden hoses feeding endlessly the desert... but to bring them together, in their slick persistence and our preterition... to make sense out of, to find the meanest sharp sliver of truth in so much replication, so much waste... [Gravity's Rainbow, p. 590]"
— Thomas Pynchon

"A thousand words leave not the same deep impression as does a single deed."
— Henrik Johan Ibsen

"Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again - the first kiss of the rest of your life. A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the world's greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding"
— Saul Williams (Said the Shotgun to the Head)

"Come, my love, we have oceans to sail."
— Saul Williams (Said the Shotgun to the Head)

"Talk to strangers
when the family fails and friends lead you astray
when Buddha laughs and Jesus weeps and it turns out God is gay.
'Cause angels and messiahs love can come in many forms:
in the hallways of your projects, or the fat girl in your dorm,
and when you finally take the time to see what they’re about
perhaps you find them lonely or their wisdom trips you out."
— Saul Williams

"only through new words
might new worlds
be called
into order"
— Saul Williams (Said the Shotgun to the Head)

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
— Benjamin Franklin

"“Sometimes we encounter men, even entire families, whose gross ignorance, unappealing mien or reckless habits make us wonder how their genes have survived the trials and tribulations of the ages. Yet we do well to remember that, should the world be plunged into nuclear holocaust, the principal candidate for survival is neither man, nor the great elephant, nor the swift stallion, nor the wily fox – it is the lowly cockroach.”
(Bernard Ancieux, La Fin, 1976)"
— Richard de Nooy (Six Fang Marks and a Tetanus Shot)

"Usually we walk around constantly believing ourselves. "I'm okay" we say. "I'm alright". But sometimes the truth arrives on you and you can't get it off. That's when you realize that sometimes it isn't even an answer--it's a question. Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything."
— Steven Wright

"I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant."
— Robert McCloskey

"To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."
— Charles Bukowski

"That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen."
— Charles Bukowski (Women: A Novel)

"Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink."
— Charles Bukowski

"An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way."
— Charles Bukowski

"I wanted the whole world or nothing."
— Charles Bukowski (Post Office)

"“If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose”"
— Charles Bukowski

"People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love."
— Charles Bukowski (Women)

"each man's hell is in a different
place: mine is just up and
behind
my ruined
face."
— Charles Bukowski

"If you are going to try, go all the way or don't even start. If you follow it you will be alive with the gods. It is the only good fight there is.
"
— Charles Bukowski

"Where words leave off, music begins."
— Heinrich Heine

"Some people create with words or with music or with a brush and paints. I like to make something beautiful when I run. I like to make people stop and say, 'I've never seen anyone run like that before.' It's more than just a race, it's a style. It's doing something better than anyone else. It's being creative."
— Steve Prefontaine

"Somebody may beat me, but they are going to have to bleed to do it."
— Steve Prefontaine

"I don't just go out there and run. I like to give people watching something exciting."
— Steve Prefontaine

"To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift."
— Steve Prefontaine

"Most people run a race to see who is fastest. I run a race to see who has the most guts."
— Steve Prefontaine

"The best pace is a suicide pace, and today looks like a good day to die."
— Steve Prefontaine

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
— Mark Twain

"You can never be overdressed or overeducated."
— Oscar Wilde

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

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

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
— Oscar Wilde

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
— Oscar Wilde

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
— Oscar Wilde

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
— Oscar Wilde

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
— Oscar Wilde

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."
— Oscar Wilde

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
— Oscar Wilde

"I am not young enough to know everything."
— Oscar Wilde

"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray and Three Stories)

"A good friend will always stab you in the front."
— Oscar Wilde

"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power."
— Oscar Wilde

"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast."
— Oscar Wilde