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  • Lauren Bacall
    • I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.
    (topic: faces)

  • Richard Bach
    • The meaning I picked, the one that changed my life: Overcome fear, behold wonder.
    (topic: fear)

  • Gaston Bachelard
    • One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
    (topic: past)

    To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
    (topic: reading)

    The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.
    (topic: sleep)

    I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.
    (topic: words)

    A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
    (topic: writing)

  • Francis Bacon
    • Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
    (topic: books)

    Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.
    (topic: death)

    This communicating of a man's self to his friend works two contrary effects; for it redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in half.
    (topic: friendship)

    Knowledge is power.
    (topic: knowledge)

    Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.
    (topic: marriage)

    If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
    (topic: doubt)

    The remedy is worse than the disease.
    (topic: medicine)

  • Russell Baker
    • The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.
    (topic: travel)

    Situation comedy on television has thrived for years on "canned" laughter grafted by gaglines by technicians using records of guffawing audiences that have been dead for years.
    (topic: television)

  • Mikhail Bakunin
    • Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.
    (topic: kindness)

  • James Baldwin
    • American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
    (topic: America)

    The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did--which was to hide.
    (topic: failure)

  • J. G. Ballard
    • I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again...the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.
    (topic: future)

  • Djuna Barnes
    • We are adhering to life now with our last muscle--the heart.
    (topic: heart)

  • Natalie Clifford Barney
    • Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.
    (topic: faces)

  • J. M. Barrie
    • A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don't find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.
    (topic: past)

    We are all failures--at least, all the best of us are.
    (topic: failure)

  • Frank Barron
    • The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person.
    (topic: creativity)

  • John D. Barrow
    • There was no "before" the beginning of our universe, because once upon a time there was no time.
    (topic: time)

  • John Barrymore
    • A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.
    (topic: regret)

  • Stan Barstow
    • The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.
    (topic: reading)

  • Bernard Baruch
    • To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am.
    (topic: age)

    There are no such things as incurable, there are only things for which man has not found a cure.
    (topic: medicine)

  • Jacques Barzun
    • Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea keeps them whole.
    (topic: idealism)

  • Charles Baudelaire
    • The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
    (topic: prayer)

    We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.
    (topic: time)

  • Jean Baudrillard
    • You need an infinite stretch of time ahead of you to start to think, infinite energy to make the smallest decision. The world is getting denser. The immense number of useless projects is bewildering. Too many things have to be put in to balance up an uncertain scale. You can't disappear anymore. You die in a state of total indecision.
    (topic: indecision)

    Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
    (topic: television)

    Sadder than destitution, sadder than a beggar is the man who eats alone in public. Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honor of sharing or disputing each other's food.
    (topic: food)

    Executives are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an executive away from his business, he goes on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business. He never stops hurtling onwards, making decisions and executing them.
    (topic: business)

  • Jessie Tarbox Beals
    • Too many photographers try too hard. They try to lift photography into the realm of Art, because they have an inferiority complex about their Craft. You and I would see more interesting photography if they would stop worrying, and instead, apply horse-sense to the problem of recording the look and feel of their own era.
    (topic: photography)

  • Simone De Beauvoir
    • Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen.
    (topic: romance)

  • Samuel Beckett
    • What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.
    (topic: destiny)

    Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
    (topic: failure)

  • Sir Thomas Beecham
    • Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.
    (topic: music)

  • Henry Ward Beecher
    • A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.
    (topic: books)

    To know that one has a secret is to know half the secret itself.
    (topic: secrets)

    Rain! whose soft architectural hands have power to cut stones, and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very mountains.
    (topic: weather)

    Clothes and manners do not make the man; but, when he is made, they greatly improve his appearance.
    (topic: dress)

    The ability to convert ideas to things is the secret of outward success.
    (topic: success)

  • Ruth Benedict
    • The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.
    (topic: community)

    No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.
    (topic: perception)

  • Stephen Vincent Benét
    • We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
    (topic: power)

  • Walter Benjamin
    • Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
    (topic: morning)

  • Alan Bennett
    • Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
    (topic: fame)

    Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.
    (topic: pessimism)

    A cause may be inconvenient, but it's magnificent. It's like champagne or high heels, and one must be prepared to suffer for it.
    (topic: idealism)

  • Stella Benson
    • Family jokes, though rightly cursed by strangers, are the bond that keeps most families alive.
    (topic: family)

  • John Berger
    • The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
    (topic: jealousy)

    The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied...but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.
    (topic: poverty)

    When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.
    (topic: reading)

  • Ingmar Bergman
    • Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.
    (topic: movies)

  • Irving Berlin
    • The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success. Talent is only a starting point in this business. You've got to keep on working that talent. Someday I'll reach for it and it won't be there.
    (topic: success)

  • Georges Bernanos
    • What does the truth matter? Haven't we mothers all given our sons a taste for lies, lies which from the cradle upwards lull them, reassure them, send them to sleep: lies as soft and warm as a breast!
    (topic: lying)

    A poor man with nothing in his belly needs hope, illusion, more than bread.
    (topic: poverty)

  • Wendell Berry
    • The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
    (topic: past)

  • Henry Beston
    • Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.
    (topic: night)

  • Ugo Betti
    • I think the family is the place where the most ridiculous and least respectable things in the world go on.
    (topic: family)

  • Aneurin Bevan
    • We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.
    (topic: indecision)

  • Bible
    • For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
    -- Ecclesiastes 1:18 (topic: knowledge)

    To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
    -- Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 (topic: time)

    Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger resteth in the bosom of fools.
    -- Ecclesiastes 7:9 (topic: anger)

    The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
    -- Ecclesiastes 9:11 (topic: luck)

    Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.
    -- Ephesians 4:26 (topic: anger)

    And if any mischief follow, then though shalt give life for life,
    Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,
    Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.
    -- Exodus 21:23-25 (topic: revenge)

    Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
    -- Genesis 3:19 (topic: death)

    When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
    -- I Corinthians 13:11 (topic: maturity)

    The price of wisdom is above rubies.
    -- Job 28:18 (topic: wisdom)

    The truth shall make you free.
    -- John 8:32 (topic: truth)

    What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
    -- Mark 8:36 (topic: ambition)

    What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
    -- Matthew 19:6 (topic: divorce)

    No man can serve two masters.
    -- Matthew 6:24 (topic: loyalty)

    Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.
    -- Proverbs 27:6 (topic: friends and enemies)

    Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom; and with all they getting get understanding.
    -- Proverbs 4:7 (topic: wisdom)

    The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.
    -- Psalms 14:1 (topic: atheism)

    Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.
    -- Psalms 30:5 (topic: joy and sorrow)

    Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.
    -- Ruth 1:16 (topic: loyalty)

    Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies. Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins. Thy neck is like a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus. Thine head upon thee is like Carmel, and the hair of thine head like purple; the king is held in the galleries. How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!
    -- Song of Solomon 7:2-6 (topic: body)

    Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.
    -- Song of Solomon 8:7 (topic: love)

    Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
    --Proverbs 22:6 (topic: education)

  • Ambrose Bierce
    • Confidante. One entrusted by A with the secrets of B confided to herself by C.
    (topic: secrets)

  • Elizabeth Bishop
    • What childishness is it that while there's breath of life
    in our bodies, we are determined to rush
    to see the sun the other way around?
    (topic: travel)

  • Shirley Temple Black
    • Good luck needs no explanation.
    (topic: luck)

  • Tony Blair
    • We know if they could, they would go further.
    (topic: september 2001 attacks)

    It will be determined, it will take time, and it will continue over time until this menace is properly dealt with and its machinery of terror destroyed.
    (topic: september 2001 attacks)

  • William Blake
    • He who binds to himself a joy
    Does the winged life destroy;
    But he who kisses the joy as it files
    Lives in eternity's sun rise.
    (topic: happiness)

    The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity...and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
    (topic: nature)

    To see a World in a Grain of Sand
    And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
    Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
    And Eternity in an hour.
    (topic: nature)

    A truth that's told with bad intent
    Beats all the lies you can invent.
    (topic: truth)

  • Christie Blatchford
    • The people who did this have underestimated them.

    They have looked upon the most affluent and overweight people in the world, seen softness and not understood that underneath, there is iron and resolve and unfathomable will. They have seen the startling diversity of race and religion and ethnicity and heard the cacophony of voices in that remarkable country, and failed to grasp that beneath the heart of every hyphenated American, there rages the heart of an American, period.
    (topic: september 2001 attacks)

  • Allan Bloom
    • Education is the movement from darkness to light.
    (topic: education)

    Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.
    (topic: music)

    The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency--the belief that the here and now is all there is.
    (topic: reading)

  • Léon Blum
    • When a woman is twenty, a child deforms her; when she is thirty, he preserves her; and when forty, he makes her young again.
    (topic: mothers)

  • Dirk Bogarde
    • The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.
    (topic: photography)

  • Robert Bolt
    • Even at our birth, death does but stand aside a little. And every day he looks towards us and muses somewhat to himself whether that day or the next he will draw nigh.
    (topic: death)

  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer
    • The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.
    (topic: optimism)

  • Daniel J. Boorstin
    • The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes "sight-seeing."
    (topic: travel)

    Celebrity-worship and hero-worship should not be confused. Yet we confuse them every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but are famous because they are great. We come closer and closer to degrading all fame into notoriety.
    (topic: fame)

  • Jorge Luis Borges
    • Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
    (topic: time)

    I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
    (topic: night)

  • Nicholas Bouleau
    • Honor is like a steep island without a shore: one cannot return once one is outside.
    (topic: honor)

  • Edouard Bourdet
    • One must choose, in life, between making money and spending it. There's no time to do both.
    (topic: money)

  • Elizabeth Bowen
    • When you love someone all your saved-up wishes start coming out.
    (topic: love)

    No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.
    (topic: perception)

  • F. H. Bradley
    • We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings.
    (topic: mothers)

  • Janice Bradshaw
    • Poverty is taking your children to the hospital and spending the whole day waiting with no one even taking your name--and then coming back the next day, and the next, until they finally get around to you.
    (topic: poverty)

  • Bertolt Brecht
    • Mixing one's wines may be a mistake, but old and new wisdom mix admirably.
    (topic: wisdom)

  • Gerald Brenan
    • We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.
    (topic: leisure)

  • Robert Bresson
    • Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.
    (topic: creativity)

  • Benjamin Britten
    • It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness & of pain: of strength & freedom. The beauty of disappointment & never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, & everlasting beauty of monotony.
    (topic: music)

  • Jacob Bronowski
    • Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.
    (topic: creativity)

    Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.
    (topic: nature)

    The world is made of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.
    (topic: failure)

  • Charlotte Brontë
    • Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.
    (topic: revenge)

  • Anita Brookner
    • The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.
    (topic: books)

    The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.
    (topic: romance)

    A man of such obvious and exemplary charm must be a liar.
    (topic: charm)

  • Gwendolyn Brooks
    • we are each other's business:
    we are each other's magnitude and bond.
    (topic: family)

  • Heywood Broun
    • The most casual examination will reveal the fact that all the jokes about the horrible results of masculine cooking and sewing are written by men. It is all part of a great scheme of sex propaganda.
    (topic: men and women)

    The tragedy of life is not that man loses but that he almost wins.
    (topic: failure)

    I doubt whether the world holds for any one a more soul-stirring surprise than the first adventure with ice-cream.
    (topic: food)

  • John Mason Brown
    • Charm is a glow within a woman that casts a most becoming light on others.
    (topic: charm)

  • Sir Thomas Browne
    • There are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherin he that cannot read A, B, C may read our natures.
    (topic: faces)

    A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.
    (topic: truth)

  • Robert Browning
    • What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?
    (topic: kissing)

    Women know
    The way to rear up children (to be just),
    They know a simple, merry, tender knack
    Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,
    And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
    And kissing full sense into empty words.
    (topic: mothers)

    Who hears music, feels his solitude
    Peopled at once.
    (topic: music)

    Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
    Or what's a heaven for?
    (topic: ambition)

    Faultless to a fault.
    (topic: perfection)

    Since when was genius found respectable?
    (topic: genius)

  • Jean de La Bruyère
    • We should keep silent about those in power; to speak well of them almost implies flattery; to speak ill of them while they are alive is dangerous, and when they are dead is cowardly.
    (topic: power)

  • William Cullen Bryant
    • Weep not that the world changes--did it keep
    A stable, changeless state, 'twere cause indeed to weep.
    (topic: change)

    These struggling tides of life that seem
    In wayward, aimless course to tend,
    Are eddies of the mighty stream
    That rolls to its appointed end.
    (topic: destiny)

  • Pearl S. Buck
    • The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.
    (topic: solitude-loneliness)

    Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together.
    (topic: mothers)

    Praise out of season, or tactlessly bestowed, can freeze the heart as much as blame.
    (topic: praise)

    It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late.
    (topic: religion)

  • Eustace Budgell
    • Friendship is a strong and habitual inclination in two persons to promote the good and happiness of one another.
    (topic: friendship)

  • Bulwer-Lytton
    • The pen is mightier than the sword.
    (topic: writing)

  • Julie Burchill
    • Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a smile.
    (topic: death)

  • Edmund Burke
    • Manners are of more importance than laws... Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in.
    (topic: manners)

    Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power; but they will never look to anything but power for their relief.
    (topic: power)

    No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
    (topic: fear)

    He had no failings which were not owing to a noble cause; to an ardent, generous, perhaps an immoderate passion for fame; a passion which is the instinct of all great souls.
    (topic: fame)

  • Thomas E. Burnett Jr.
    • A group of us are going to do something.
    (topic: september 2001 attacks)

  • George W. Bush
    • The resolve of our great nation is being tested. But make no mistake, we will show the world that we will pass the test.
    (topic: september 2001 attacks)

    I can hear you, the rest of the world can hear you and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.
    (topic: september 2001 attacks)

    Great tragedy has come to us, and we are meeting it with the best that is in our country, with courage and concern for others because this is America. This is who we are.
    (topic: september 2001 attacks)

  • Samuel Butler
    • The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
    (topic: books)

    God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.
    (topic: creativity)

    We all like to forgive, and love best not those who offend us least, nor who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.
    (topic: forgiveness)

    Neither have they hearts to stay,
    Nor wit enough to run away.
    (topic: indecision)

    Logic is like the sword--those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.
    (topic: logic)

    The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
    (topic: lying)

    Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to tell a lie well.
    (topic: lying)

    Money has a power above
    The stars and fate, to manage love:
    Whose arrows, learned poets hold,
    That never miss, are tipped with gold.
    (topic: money)

    Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.
    (topic: words)

    Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.
    (topic: moderation)

    I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other--I mean from the attempt to prolong family connections unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so.
    (topic: family)

    Don't learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world.
    (topic: experience)

    Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism.
    (topic: medicine)

  • Lord Byron
    • Nothing can confound
    A wise man more than laughter from a dunce.
    (topic: laughter)

    The lapse of ages changes all things--time, language, the earth, the bounds of the sea, the stars of the sky, and every thing "about, around, and underneath" man, except man himself.
    (topic: change)

    On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;
    No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet
    To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.
    (topic: dance)

    Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure;
    Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.
    (topic: hatred)

    Better to sink beneath the shock
    Than moulder piecemeal on the rock!
    (topic: adventure)

    In solitude, where we are least alone.
    (topic: solitude-loneliness)

    One certainly has a soul; but how it came to allow itself to be enclosed in a body is more than I can imagine. I only know if once mine gets out, I'll have a bit of a tussle before I let it get in again to that of any other.
    (topic: soul)

    I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.
    (topic: travel)

    But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
    Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
    That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
    (topic: words)

    If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing...I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.
    (topic: writing)

    A woman should never be seen eating or drinking, unless it be lobster salad and Champagne, the only true feminine & becoming viands.
    (topic: food)