Jim > Jim's Quotes

“Best advice I've ever received: Finish.”
― Peter Mayle

“Why not make a daily pleasure out a daily necessity.”
― Peter Mayle

“The cemeteries are full of indispensable men.”
― Charles de Gaulle

“How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?”
― Charles de Gaulle

“When I am right, I get angry. Churchill gets angry when he is wrong. We are angry at each other much of the time.”
― Charles de Gaulle

“The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.”
― Charles de Gaulle

“Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.”
― Charles de Gaulle

“All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.”
― St. Francis Of Assisi, The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“Brevity is the soul of lingerie.”
― Dorothy Parker, While Rome Burns

“I like reading in a pub rather than a library or study, as it's generally much easier to get a drink.”
― Pete McCarthy, McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery In Ireland

“Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.”
― Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Maxims

“Anyone who needs more than one suitcase is a tourist, not a traveler”
― Ira Levin, Rosemary’s Baby

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me.”
― Steve Jobs

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
― Alan Watts

“Time is the coin of your life. You spend it. Do not allow others to spend it for you.”
― Carl Sandburg

“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.”
― Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu

“Aging is not 'lost youth' but a new stage of opportunity and strength.”
― Betty Friedan

“I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun. ”
― George Plimpton

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“Each of us, when our day's work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.”
― O. Henry

“Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.”
― Michael Crichton

“The future has an ancient heart.”
― Carlo Levi

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes...you're Doing Something.”
― Neil Gaiman

“One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.”
― Alan Furst, The World at Night