Keith B > Keith's Quotes

“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

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”
― Oscar Wilde

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
― Albert Camus

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.”
― Oscar Wilde

“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
― Albert Camus

“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”
― Truman Capote

“I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”
― George Washington Burnap, The Sphere and Duties of Woman: A Course of Lectures

“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
― Plato

“On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”
― George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

“I think I am, therefore, I am... I think.”
― George Carlin

“A preoccupation with the next world clearly shows an inability to cope credibly with this one.”
― Richard K. Morgan, Broken Angels

“In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.”
― Plato

“The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.”
― Tom Robbins

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
― Herman Melville

“[Credit is a system whereby] a person who can't pay, gets another person who can't pay, to guarantee that he can pay.”
― Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It's so fuckin' heroic.”
― George Carlin

“Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it.”
― George Carlin

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
― Carl Sagan

“In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”
― Carl Sagan

“Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny.”
― Frank Zappa