"Imagination is more important than knowledge." --Albert Einstein
"I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are the details." --Albert Einstein
"God is subtle but he is not malicious" --Albert Einstein
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new." --Albert Einstein
"Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds." --Albert Einstein
"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." --Albert Einstein
"Watch your thoughts; they become your words. Watch your words; they become your actions. Watch your actions; they become your habits. Watch your habits; they become your character. Watch your character for it will become your destiny. If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?" --Hillel
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." --Douglas Adams
"If a million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing." --Anatole France
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." --Henry David Thoreau
"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice." --Albert Einstein
"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live." --Mark Twain
"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber." --Plato
"Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve." --George Bernard Shaw
"The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled." --Plutarch
"What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult." --Sigmund Freud
"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind." --Virginia Woolf
"Well what is the answer? But, what, then, is the question?" -Gertrude Stein (last words)
"The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper." --Bertrand Russell
"You see things and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were and say, 'Why not?'" --George Bernard Shaw
"The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas." --Linus Pauling
"Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too." --Voltaire
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." --C.S. Lewis
"Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents." -- Ezra Pound
"The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand." -- Frank Herbert
"Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
"A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
"For the man who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study to fill their memories do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, since they are carrying what ought to have carried them." -- A. Schopenhauer
"But men love abstract reasoning and neat systematization so much that they think nothing of distorting the truth, closing their eyes and ears to contrary evidence to preserve their logical constructions." -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." -- Buddha
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -- Galileo Galilei
"Question with boldness even the existence of God; because if there be one, He must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfold fear." -- Thomas Jefferson
"I have no romantic feelings about age. Either you are interesting at any age or you are not. There is nothing particularly interesting about being old or being young, for that matter." --Katharine Hepburn
"We turn not older with years, but newer every day." --Emily Dickinson
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." --F. Scott Fitzgerald {rel}, 1896-1940
"Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes." --Thoreau
"Yes, I am a dreamer, for a dreamer is he who can find his way by moonlight and who can see the dawn before the rest of the world." --- Oscar Wilde
"Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginative." --Oscar Wilde.
"All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them." --Isak Dinesen
"In every idea a multitude of new ideas is lying dormant." --Emmanual Swedenborg
"A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam that flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his own thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a sort of alienated majesty." --Emerson
"There is no such thing as a 'self-made' man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our thoughts, as well as our success." --George Adams
"Discoveries are often made by not following instructions, by going off the main road, by trying the untried." --Frank Tyger
"We discover in others what others hide from us, and we recognize in others what we hide from ourselves." --Vauvenargues
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." --Oscar Wilde
"Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas." --Oscar Wilde
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been tried from time to time." --Winston Churchill
"Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one." --Stella Adler
"Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do belive in Art for Art's sake." -- E. M. Forster
"Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom " Robert Frost
"Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced."--Leo Tolstoy
"Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before." --Edith Warton
"I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time." --Orson Welles
"I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter." --Winston Churchill
"When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us. " --Alexander Graham Bell
"I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me." --George Bernard Shaw
"The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards." -- Anatole France
"Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it." --Tallulah Bankhead
"An egotist is a person of low taste--more interested in himself than in me. " --Ambrose Bierce
"Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer. " --Charles Caleb Colton
"True friendship is never serene." --Marie de Rabutin-Chantal
"A man cannot be too careful in his choice of enemies." --Oscar Wilde
"We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like." --Alfred Hitchcock
"He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed. " --H.H. Munro
"The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different." --Aldous Huxley
"A satirist is a man who discovers unpleasant things about himself and then says them about other people." -- Peter McArthur
"Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost." --James Thurber
"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." --Susan Ertz
"I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way." --Franklin P. Adams
"We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it -- and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit on a hot stove lid again -- and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore." --Mark Twain
"What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." --Crowfoot, Blackfoot warior and orator, 1890 (Last words)
"Don't take life too seriously. You'll never get out alive." --Bugs Bunny
"Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels." --Goya
"Only a brave person is willing to honestly admit, and fearlessly to face, what a sincere and logical mind discovers." --Rodan of Alexandria
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw
"Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason." --Oscar Wilde
"Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh." -- W. H. Auden
"You have to walk carefully in the beginning of love; the running across fields into your lover's arms can only come later when you're sure they won't laugh if you trip." -- Jonathan Carroll
"There are very few people who are not ashamed of having been in love when they no longer love each other." --Francois, Duc de La Rouchefoucald
"Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality." --Victor Frankel
"Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition." --Alexander Smith
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." --Albert Einstein
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The real danger from advertising is that it helps to shatter and ultimately destroy our most precious non-material possessions: the confidence in the existence of meaningful purposes of human activity and respect for the integrity of man." --Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy
"Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this, that you are dreadfully like other people." -- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
"When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes." --Desiderius Erasmus (1465-1536)
"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstacy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer." -- Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
"There are people into whose heads it never enters to conceive of any better state of society than that which now exists." -- Henry George (1839-1897)
"Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book (. . .) and his friends could only read the title." -- Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Jacob's Room
"Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind." -- Seneca (4 B.C. - A.D. 65)
"My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular." -- Adlai E. Stevenson (1900-1965)
"You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power -- he's free again." -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, 1968
"There is one psychological peculiarity in the human being that always strikes one: to shun even the slightest signs of trouble on the outer edge of your existence at times of well-being." -- Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn
"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up." -- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
"A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. . . . It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy." -- Edward P. Morgan
"While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior." -- Henry C. Link
"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." -- Carl Jung
"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other." -- Eric Hoffer
"A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or the evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all. To transmit that feeling, he writes." -- William Sansom
"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Every man takes the limit of his own field of vision for the limits of the world." -- Arthur Schopenhauer
"A man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to let alone." -- Henry David Thoreau
"The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in." -- James Baldwin
"Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless." -- Sinclair Lewis
"It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents man from living freely and nobly." -- Bertrand Russell
"If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it." -- S.I. Hayakawa
"Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe." -- Flannery O'Connor
"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence." -- Robert Frost
"If you jot down every silly thought that pops into your mind, you will soon find out everything you most seriously believe." -- Mignon McLaughlin
"One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements." -- George Norman Douglas
"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author." -- G.K. Chesterton
``Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself 10 years ago.'' -- Horace Mann
"We read to understand we are not alone.'' -- C.S. Lewis
"Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs." -- Sir Robert Peel
``The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.'' -- Henry Thoreau
"Variety of oppinion is necessary for objective knowledge." --Paul K. Feyerabend
"The function of genius is to furnish cretins with ideas twenty years later." --Louis Aragon
"The dullards envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end." --Max Beehohm
"If we complain about the tune, there is no reason to attack the monkey while the organ grinder is present." --Aneurin (Nye) Bevan
"Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man." -Robert Luis Stevenson
"Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact." --Bertrand Russell
"In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable and must be content with broken portions." --William Osler
"The resonsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision." --George Eliot
"Talent is that which is in a man's power, genius it that in whose power a man is." --James Russell Lowell
"What the superior man seeks is in him; what the common man seeks is in others." --Confucius
"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." --Francis Bacon
"It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you." --Woodrow Wilson
"That which we call sin in others, is experiment for us." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There is always something ridiculous about the passions of people whom one has ceased to love." --Oscar Wilde
"The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony." --H. L. Menken
"Kindness is generally reciprocal; we are desirous of pleasing others because we receive pleasure from them." --Samuel Johnson
"To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified." --William James
"If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?" --Thomas H. Huxley
"The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eyes; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract." --Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Nothing reveals a man's character better than the kind of joke at which he takes offense." --G. C. Lichtenberg
"It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions." --Thomas H. Huxley
"My ideas of civility were formed among heathens." --Charles Dickens
"Fame is proof that people are gullible." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened." --Winston Churchill
"The most tragic problem of philosophy is to reconcile intellectual necessities with the necessities of the heart and the will." --Miguel de Unamuno
"You cannot know what is not, nor can you express it. What can be thought of and what can be--they are the same." --Parmenides
"Cogito, ergo sum...can only mean, 'I think therefore I am a thinker.' The truth is, sum ergo cogito." --Miguel de Unamuno
"The passion for freedom of the mind is strong and everlasting, which is fortunate, because so is the passion to squelch it." --A. M. Rosenthal
"[The self, the 'I'] is introduced, not because observation reveals it, but because it is linguistically convenient and apparently demanded by grammar. Nominal entities of this sort may or may not exist, but there is no good ground for supposing that they do." --Bertrand Russell
"Thinking is the activity I love best, and writing is simply thinking though my fingers." --Isaac Asimov
"Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more science that a heap of stones is a house." --Jules-Henri Poincare'
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information about it." --Samuel Johnson