ad
c Author & Topic Index Home

    
  • James Branch Cabell
    • People marry through a variety of other reasons, and with varying results; but to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy.
    (topic: marriage)

    The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
    (topic: pessimism)

  • John C. Calhoun
    • In looking back, I see nothing to regret and little to correct.
    (topic: regret)

  • Joseph Campbell
    • A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.
    (topic: heroes)

    When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.
    (topic: marriage)

    When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity.
    (topic: marriage)

    Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.
    (topic: religion)

  • Albert Camus
    • Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
    (topic: friendship)

    Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.
    (topic: future)

    You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.
    (topic: happiness)

    Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.
    (topic: music)

    How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
    (topic: truth)

  • Elias Canetti
    • The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.
    (topic: writing)

  • Truman Capote
    • I was eleven, then I was sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years.
    (topic: age)

  • Thomas Carlyle
    • No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
    (topic: laughter)

    In books lies the soul of the whole past time.
    (topic: books)

    Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the Infinite.
    (topic: music)

    The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb, for we have no word to speak about it.
    (topic: time)

    I don't pretend to understand the Universe--it's a great deal bigger than I am.
    (topic: universe)

  • J. L. Carr
    • A school is not a factory. Its raison d'être is to provide opportunity for experience.
    (topic: school)

  • Lewis Carroll
    • While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit.
    (topic: laughter)

    I have had prayers answered--most strangely so sometimes--but I think our heavenly Father's loving-kindness has been even more evident in what He has refused me.
    (topic: prayer)

    "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less."
    (topic: words)

    'What is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'
    (topic: books)

  • Willa Cather
    • I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
    (topic: death)

    When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.
    (topic: kindness)

    The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
    (topic: truth)

  • Miguel de Cervantes
    • It seldom happens that any felicity comes so pure as not to be tempered and allayed by some mixture of sorrow.
    (topic: joy and sorrow)

    Now blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep: it covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; 'tis meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot. 'Tis the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap; and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise-man even. There is only one thing...that I dislike in sleep; 'tis that it resembles death; there's very little difference between a man in his first sleep, and a man in his last sleep.
    (topic: sleep)

    Truth indeed rather alleviates than hurts, and will always bear up against falsehood, as oil does above water.
    (topic: truth)

    Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be!
    (topic: idealism)

  • Sébastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
    • People are governed with the head; kindness of heart is little use in chess.
    (topic: heart)

    Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the one most surely wasted.
    (topic: laughter)

    It must be admitted that there are some parts of the soul which we must entirely paralyse before we can live happily in this world.
    (topic: soul)

  • Raymond Chandler
    • The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.
    (topic: movies)

    Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.
    (topic: television)

    Common sense always speaks too late. Common sense is the guy who tells you you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He's high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a grey suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always somebody else's money he's adding up.
    (topic: common sense)

  • George Chapman
    • Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools.
    (topic: age)

  • Alexander Chase
    • To remain young one must change. The perpetual campus hero is not a young man but an old boy.
    (topic: change)

  • Chaucer
    • The guilty think all talk is of themselves.
    (topic: guilt)

  • John Cheever
    • It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.
    (topic: morning)

  • Lord Chesterfield
    • I recommend to you to take care of the minutes; for hours will take care of themselves.
    (topic: time)

    Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than the people you are with. Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket: and do not merely pull it out and strike it; merely to show that you have one.
    (topic: education)

    Men, as well as women, are much oftener led by their hearts than by their understandings.
    (topic: heart)

    I am convinced that a light supper, a good night's sleep, and a fine morning, have sometimes made a hero of the same man, who, by an indigestion, a restless night, and rainy morning, would have proved a coward.
    (topic: heroes)

    Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well.
    (topic: excellence)

  • G. K. Chesterton
    • White...is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black...God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
    (topic: colors)

    I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.
    (topic: destiny)

    The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
    (topic: travel)

    The average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson colour of it should creep into his vote...The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes.
    (topic: voting)

    An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
    (topic: adventure)

    A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.
    (topic: apologies)

    Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.
    (topic: cruelty)

  • Lydia M. Child
    • Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of the character, though few can decypher even fragments of their meaning.
    (topic: flowers)

    Misfortune is never mournful to the soul that accepts it; for such do always see that every cloud is an angel's face.
    (topic: misfortune)

  • Shirley Chisholm
    • There is little place in the political scheme of things for an independent, creative personality, for a fighter. Anyone who takes that role must pay a price.
    (topic: creativity)

  • Noam Chomsky
    • If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
    (topic: censorship and free speech)

  • Sir Winston Churchill
    • It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link of the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.
    (topic: destiny)

    Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
    (topic: heroes)

    These are not dark days: these are great days--the greatest days our country has ever lived.
    (topic: optimism)

    Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer. You have only to persevere to save yourselves.
    (topic: perseverance)

    There is no such thing as a moral dress... It's people who are moral or immoral.
    (topic: dress)

    Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong.
    (topic: responsibility)

  • Madonna Louise Ciccione
    • I have the same goal I've had ever since I was a girl. I want to rule the world.
    (topic: ambition)

  • Cicero
    • The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.
    (topic: wisdom)

    A mental stain can neither be blotted out by the passage of time nor washed away by any waters.
    (topic: mind)

  • E. M. Cioran
    • You are done for--a living dead man--not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the "mystery" of life.
    (topic: hatred)

    Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
    (topic: silence)

  • Eric Clapton
    • You were at school and you were pimply and no one wanted to know you. You get into a group and you've got thousands of chicks there.
    (topic: fame)

  • Septima Poinsette Clark
    • I have great belief in the fact that whenever there is chaos, it creates wonderful thinking. I consider chaos a gift.
    (topic: creativity)

  • Eldridge Cleaver
    • The Twist was a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion, and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.
    (topic: dance)

  • William Jefferson Clinton
    • You are the most powerful cultural force in the world.
    (topic: television)

  • Leonard Cohen
    • I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.
    (topic: pessimism)

  • Frank Moore Colby
    • I know of no more disagreeable situation than to be left feeling generally angry without anybody in particular to be angry at.
    (topic: anger)

    Many people lose their tempers merely from seeing you keep yours.
    (topic: anger)

  • Johnetta Betsch Cole
    • While it is true that without a vision the people perish, it is doubly true that without action the people and their vision perish as well.
    (topic: idealism)

  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
    • Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.
    (topic: love)

    No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humour.
    (topic: mind)

    If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake--Aye, what then?
    (topic: doubt)

  • Charles Caleb Colton
    • Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meanderings, but leads none of us by the same route.
    (topic: happiness)

    Knowledge is two-fold, and consists not only in an affirmation of what is true, but in the negation of that which is false.
    (topic: knowledge)

    To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet.
    (topic: solitude-loneliness)

    Friendship often ends in love; but love in friendship--never.
    (topic: love)

    There is this difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man, really is so; but he that thinks himself the wisest, is generally the greatest fool.
    (topic: wisdom)

    Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.
    (topic: writing)

    Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.
    (topic: education)

    Nothing so completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity himself, than straightforward and simple integrity in another.
    (topic: honor)

  • Confucius
    • Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.
    (topic: perception)

  • William Congreve
    • Heav'n has no Rage like Love to Hatred turn'd,
    Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn'd.
    (topic: anger)

  • Cyril Connolly
    • Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.
    (topic: hatred)

    When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.
    (topic: loyalty)

    All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
    (topic: charm)

  • Joseph Conrad
    • For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
    (topic: ocean)

    The sea--this truth must be confessed--has no generosity. No display of manly qualities--courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness--has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.
    (topic: ocean)

    Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
    (topic: words)

  • John Constable
    • I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, -- light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.
    (topic: beauty)

  • Eliza Cook
    • Who would not rather trust and be deceived?
    (topic: trust)

  • Charles Horton Cooley
    • To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self.
    (topic: heroes)

    Money is to my social existence what health is to my body.
    (topic: money)

    Travellers never think that THEY are the foreigners.
    (topic: travel)

  • Calvin Coolidge
    • The business of America is business.
    (topic: America)

  • Pierre Corneille
    • Love lives on hope, and dies when hope is dead;
    It is a flame which sinks for lack of fuel.
    (topic: love)

    The manner of giving is worth more than the gift.
    (topic: gifts and giving)

  • Bill Cosby
    • If the new American father feels bewildered and even defeated, let him take comfort from the fact that whatever he does in any fathering situation has a fifty percent chance of being right.
    (topic: fathers)

    Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.
    (topic: music)

  • Margaret Courtney
    • Be kind to thy father, for when thou wert young,
    Who loved thee so fondly as he?
    He caught the first accents that fell from thy tongue,
    And joined in thy innocent glee.
    (topic: fathers)

  • William Cowper
    • Variety's the very spice of life,
    That gives it all its flavour.
    (topic: change)

  • Quentin Crisp
    • The young always have the same problem-- how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.
    (topic: age)

    Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically--for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist--but then what isn't?
    (topic: lying)

  • Aleister Crowley
    • I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.
    (topic: school)

  • e. e. cummings
    • America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.
    (topic: America)

    kisses are a better fate
    than wisdom.
    (topic: kissing)

    for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
    it's always ourselves we find in the sea
    (topic: ocean)

  • Mario Cuomo
    • I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work fifteen and sixteen hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.
    (topic: fathers)