Jeff Joseph > Jeff's Quotes

“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”
― Will Durant

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

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

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“If you drink, don’t drive. Don’t even putt.”
― Dean Martin

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works

“I never change, I simply become more myself.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Solstice

“The human brain, it has been said, is the most complexly organised structure in the universe and to appreciate this you just have to look at some numbers. The brain is made up of one hundred billion nerve cells or "neurons" which is the basic structural and functional units of the nervous system. Each neuron makes something like a thousand to ten thousand contacts with other neurons and these points of contact are called synapses where exchange of information occurs. And based on this information, someone has calculated that the number of possible permutations and combinations of brain activity, in other words the numbers of brain states, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe.”
― V.S. Ramachandran

“There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”
― David M. Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

“It is only through us that God lives. When we abandon him, he dies.”
― David M. Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“The first duty of a man is to think for himself”
― Jose Marti

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.”
― George Saunders

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
― Winston Churchill

“Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.”
― David McCullough

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”
― Henry James

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

“What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate and bifocals?Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the poison, step over the noose while a generation of trapped,, poisoned, and trussed-up men scream at them and call them no-goods, come to bad ends, blot-on-the town-thieves, rascals, bums. Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the town and bums,, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to catch whole for they will break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book-to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“Doc would listen to any kind of nonsense and change it for you to a kind of wisdom.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“Men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy everything lovable about them.... In the world ruled by tigers with ulcers, rutted by strictured bulls, scavenged by blind jackals.... What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, and bifocals?”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“Hazel grew up - did four years in grammar school, four years in reform school, and didn't learn a thing in either place. Reform schools are supposed to teach viciousness and criminality but Hazel didn't pay enough attention.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“And everywhere people asked him why he was walking through the country.
Because he loved true things, he tried to explain. He said he was nervous and besides he wanted to see the country, smell the ground and look at grass and birds and trees, to savor the country, and there was no other way to do it save on foot. And people didn't like him for telling the truth. They scowled, or shook and tapped their heads, they laughed as though they knew it was a lie and they appreciated a liar. And some, afraid for their daughters or pigs, told him to move on, to get going, just not to stop near their place if he knew what was good for him.
And so he stopped telling the truth. He said he was doing it on a bet - that he stood to win a hundred dollars. Everyone liked him then and believed him.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“Hazel used his trick. "They got no starfish there?"

"They got no ocean there" said Doc.

"Oh!" said Hazel and he cast frantically about for a peg to hang a new question on. He hated to have a conversation die out like this. He wasn't quick enough. While he was looking for a question Doc asked one. Hazel hated that, it meant casting about in his mind for an answer and casting about in Hazel's mind was like wandering alone in a deserted museum. Hazel's mind was choked with uncataloged exhibits. ...”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“Doc still loved true things but he knew that it was not a general love and it could be a very dangerous mistress.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.”
― Guy de Maupassant

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

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring