Sam > Sam's Quotes

“ The Paradoxical Commandments

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.”
― Kent M. Keith, The Silent Revolution: Dynamic Leadership in the Student Council

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Oh phosphorescence. Now there’s a word to lift your hat to... To find that phosphorescence, that light within — is the genius behind poetry.”
― William Luce, The Belle of Amherst

“When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation."

[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.”
― Herman Melville

“Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.”
― Helen Keller, The Story of My Life

“Some people care too much. I think it's called love.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“I used to believe in forever, but forever's too good to be true”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.”
― Bill Watterson

“Getting an inch of snow is like winning 10 cents in the lottery.”
― Bill Watterson

“Barney's Dad was really bad so Barney hatched a plan
when his dad said "Eat your peas."
Barney shouted no and ran

Barney tricked his mean old dad and locked him in the cellar
Barney's Mom never found out where he'd gone,
Cause Barney didn't tell her.

There his dad spent his life eating mice and gruel
With every bite for fifty years
he was sorry he'd been cruel”
― Bill Watterson, The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes: A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury

“I don’t feel very much like Pooh today," said Pooh.

"There there," said Piglet. "I’ll bring you tea and honey until you do.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“We'll be Friends Forever, won't we, Pooh?' asked Piglet.
Even longer,' Pooh answered.”
Winnie-the-Pooh”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows