John > John's Quotes

“A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.”
― Aristotle

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
― Mark Twain

“Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”
― Plato

“Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
― Aristotle

“May you live every day of your life.”
― Jonathan Swift

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
― Socrates

“I'm not strange, weird, off, nor crazy, my reality is just different from yours.”
― Lewis Carroll

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Get busy living or get busy dying.”
― Stephen King, Different Seasons

“If you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power. Any man can stand adversity — only a great man can stand prosperity. It is the glory of Abraham Lincoln that he never abused power only on the side of mercy”
― Robert Ingersoll

“There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. -Speech at Clinton, Illinois, September 8, 1854.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Common sense is not so common.”
― Voltaire, A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary

“Beware the man of a single book.”
― St. Thomas Aquinas

“What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.”
― Oscar Wilde, Miscellaneous Aphorisms; The Soul of Man

“The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.”
― Voltaire

“Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.”
― Socrates

“A great man is always willing to be little.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A true genius admits that he/she knows nothing.”
― Albert Einstein

“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful. . . . The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.”
― Ann Druyan

“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.”
― Walter Cronkite