Language is a virus from outer space.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.
ROBERT BENCHLEY Key member of the Algonquin round table, his best work appeared in the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He also acted in and narrated a short satirical ‘public information’ film, How to Sleep, which won an Oscar in 1935.
Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question.
ERIC HOFFER
I personally think we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
JANE WAGNER
I wonder what language truck drivers are using, now that everyone is using theirs?
SYDNEY PFIZER
There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything.
MARIA MONTESSORI
Anthropologically speaking, the human race can be said to have evolved from primitive to civilised states, but there is no sign of language having gone through the same evolution. There are no ‘bronze age’ or ‘stone age’ languages.
DAVID CRYSTAL
The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.
LEWIS THOMAS
A language is a dialect with an army and navy.
MAX WEINRICH
To have another language is to possess a second soul.
CHARLEMAGNE
Those who know nothing of foreign languages, know nothing of their own.
GOETHE
If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.
DOUG LARSON
Status quo, you know, is Latin for ‘the mess we’re in’.
RONALD REAGAN
There is no ‘cat language’. Painful as it is for us to admit, they don’t need one.
BARBARA HOLLAND
Hello.
RUPERT BROOKE
It has all been very interesting.
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU
I think I am beginning to understand something of it.
AUGUSTE RODIN
I wish I had spent more time in the office.
HENRY ROYCE
Wish I had time for just one more bowl of chili.
KIT CARSON
Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.
PANCHO VILLA
Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.
JOHN BARRYMORE
What is done by what is called myself is, I feel, done by something greater than myself in me.
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL Developed the theory of electromagnetism and produced the first colour photograph. Einstein had his picture on his study wall, alongside images of Newton and Faraday.
Try to be forgotten. Go and live in the country. Stay in mourning for two years, then remarry, but choose somebody decent.
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN To his wife, Natalya.
You made one mistake. You married me.
BRENDAN BEHAN To his wife, Beatrice.
I just had eighteen straight whiskies, I think that’s a record.
DYLAN THOMAS This is the most famous of several possibilities for his last words (sometimes it’s nineteen whiskies) including: ‘After thirty-nine years, this is all I’ve I done’ and ‘I love you but I’m alone’ to his then lover Liz Reitell.
Be not solitary, be not idle.
ROBERT BURTON
I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis.
HUMPHREY BOGART
The fog is rising.
EMILY DICKINSON
Decay is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.
BUDDHA
So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!
HENRY JAMES
Laughter, while it lasts, slackens and unbraces the mind, weakens the faculties and causes a kind of remissness and dissolution in all the powers of the soul; and thus it may be looked on as weakness in the com position of human nature. But if we consider the frequent reliefs we receive from it and how often it breaks the gloom which is apt to depress the mind and damp our spirits, with transient, unexpected gleams of joy, one would take care not to grow too wise for so great a pleasure of life.
JOSEPH ADDISON
Nobody ever died of laughter.
MAX BEERBOHM
There are some things so serious you have to laugh at them.
NIELS BOHR
At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.
JEAN HOUSTON
Laughter is an orgasm triggered by the intercourse of reason with unreason.
JACK KROLL
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
MARK TWAIN
The gods too are fond of a joke.
ARISTOTLE
Never laugh feebly at what you know to be wrong
BISHOP MANDELL CREIGHTON A brilliant administrator who was instrumental in tidying up the rituals and doctrines of the Church of England. He was the first Bishop of London (1897–1900) to wear a mitre since the Reformation.
Laughter is man’s most distinctive emotional expression. Man shares the capacity for love and hate, anger and fear, loyalty and grief, with other living creatures. But humour, which has an intellectual as well as an emotional element, belongs to man.
MARGARET MEAD
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they might have been.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
If two or three Englishmen are together any length of time, and do not laugh, something has gone wrong.
WILLIAM CORY
Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
VICTOR BORGE
He who laughs last has not yet heard the bad news.
BERTOLT BRECHT
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
She has a laugh so hearty it knocks the whipped cream off an order of strawberry shortcake on a table fifty feet away.
DAMON RUNYON
She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going into a tunnel.
P. G. WODEHOUSE
You don’t stop laughing because you grow old. You grow old because you stop laughing.
MICHAEL PRITCHARD Began life as a stand-up comedian; his mantra is now ‘learning through laughter’.
Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see how they are made.
OTTO VON BISMARCK
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
ANATOLE FRANCE
The law was made for one thing alone, for the exploitation of those who don’t understand it, or are prevented by naked misery from obeying it.
BERTOLT BRECHT
Law is a Bottomless-Pit, it is a Cormorant, a Harpy, that devours every thing.
JOHN ARBUTHNOT Friend to Swift, Pope, Newton and Pepys, he was a satirist, mathematician, doctor, antiquarian, the inventor of John Bull, author of a bestselling diet book and guardian of Peter the Wild Boy. No one has a bad word to say about Arbuthnot.
Someone has tabulated that we have thirty-five million laws on the books to enforce the Ten Commandments.
BERT MASTERSON
Chance too, which seems to rush along with slack reins, is bridled and governed by law.
BOETHIUS
If you ask me, ‘Why should not the people make their own laws?’ I need only ask you, ‘Why should not the people write their own plays?’ They cannot. It is much easier to write a good play than to make a good law. And there are not a hundred men in the world who can write a play good enough to stand the daily wear and tear as long as a law must.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW.
Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
CHARLES LAMB
I was never ruined but twice, once when I lost a lawsuit and once when I won one.
VOLTAIRE
Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.
JEREMY BENTHAM
No brilliance is required in law, just common sense and relatively clean fingernails.
JOHN MORTIMER
We are more casual about qualifying the people we allow to act as advocates in the courtroom than we are about licensing electricians.
WARREN E. BERGER
Under the English legal system you are innocent until you are shown to be Irish.
TED WHITEHEAD
I defended about one hundred forty people for murder in this country and I think in all of the cases I received just one Christmas card from all of these defendants.
SAMUEL LEIBOWITZ
I get paid for seeing that my clients have every break the law allows. I have knowingly defended a number of guilty men. But the guilty never escape unscathed. My fees are sufficient punishment for anyone.
F. LEE BAILEY
An incompetent lawyer can delay a trial for months or years. A competent lawyer can delay one even longer.
EVELLE J. YOUNGER
I don’t want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do; I hire them to tell me how to do what I want to do.
JOHN PIERPONT MORGAN
I’m not an ambulance chaser. I’m usually there before the ambulance.
MELVIN BELLI
I used to be a lawyer but now I am a reformed character.
WOODROW WILSON
I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders not more followers.
RALPH NADER
All are born to observe order, but few are born to establish it.
JOSEPH JOUBERT One of the great aphorists and life-enhancers, friend of Diderot and Chateaubriand, his mind was so fine and curious he never managed to publish anything during his lifetime. His wife arranged for his collected Pensées to be published in 1838.
No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself, or to get all the credit for doing it.
ANDREW CARNEGIE
The way to get people to build a ship is not to teach them carpentry, assign them tasks, and give them schedules to meet; but to inspire them to long for the infinite immensity of the sea.
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY
A boss creates fear, a leader confidence. A boss fixes blame, a leader corrects mistakes. A boss knows all, a leader asks questions. A boss makes work drudgery, a leader makes it interesting. A boss is interested in himself or herself, a leader is interested in the group.
RUSSELL H. EWING
Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.
COLIN POWELL
The real leader has no need to lead – he is content to point the way.
HENRY MILLER
I learned that a great leader is a man who has the ability to get other people to do what they don’t want to do and like it.
HARRY S. TRUMAN
Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
I have a different vision of leadership. A leadership is someone who brings people together.
GEORGE W. BUSH On the campaign trail in Bartlett, Tennessee, 18 August 2000.
Learning is its own exceeding great reward.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
T. H. HUXLEY
Personally I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.
JOHN LUBBOCK
Where did I learn to understand sculpture? In the woods by looking at the trees, along roads by observing the formation of clouds, in the studio by studying the model, everywhere except in the schools.
AUGUSTE RODIN
It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.
EARL WEAVER
Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown.
CLAUDE BERNARD
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.
DORIS LESSING
There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
If you fall out of that window and break both your legs, don’t come running to me.
GROUCHO MARX
If it has legs it will have a head.
TANZANIAN PROVERB
A horse has four legs, yet it often falls.
ZULU PROVERB
Falsehoods have short legs.
MACEDONIAN PROVERB
Men’s legs have a terribly lonely life – standing in the dark in your trousers all day.
KEN DODD
When a dog runs, the dog is moving his legs; when a sea-urchin runs, the legs are moving the sea-urchin.
JAKOB JOHANN VON UEXKULL Based his work on the idea of Umwelt (‘surrounding world’) or how different animals perceive their world and the passage of time. To a tick, for example, a mammal is just three things: a milky smell, warm blood and hair.
Though the perfection of my anatomical leg is truly wonderful, I do not want every awkward, big-fatted or gamble-shanked person who always strided or shuffled along in a slouching manner with both his natural legs to think that one of these must necessarily transform him or his movements into specimens of symmetry, neatness and beauty as if by magic – as Cinderella’s frogs were turned into sprightly coachmen.
DR DOUGLAS BLY American inventor of Dr Bly’s Anatomical Leg in 1858.
There is no generally accepted definition of life.
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Life is absurd.
ALBERT CAMUS
Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.
DAVE BARRY
Life is a sexually transmitted terminal disease.
LEWIS GRIZZARD
How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted? And if I am compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I want to see him.
SØREN KIERKEGAARD
The world is disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.
RONALD FIRBANK
The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
GROUCHO MARX
We are born. We eat sweet potatoes. Then we die.
EASTER ISLAND PROVERB
Life is short and full of blisters.
AFRICAN-AMERICAN PROVERB
A blister on top of a tumour and a boil on top of that.
SHOLOM ALEICHEM Yiddish literature’s most popular storyteller. His work was the inspiration for the musical Fiddler on the Roof (1964).
Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
The two entities who might enlighten us, the baby and the corpse, cannot do so.
E. M. FORSTER
The most salient feature of existence is the unthinkable odds against it. For every way that there is of being here, there are an infinity of ways of not being here. Statistics declare us ridiculous. Thermodynamics prohibits us. Life, by any reasonable measure, is impossible.
RICHARD POWERS
Who knows but life be that which men call death, And death what men call life?
EURIPIDES
‘Life’, wrote a friend of mine, ‘is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.’
E. M. FORSTER
In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on.
ROBERT FROST
Life is rather like a tin of sardines and we are all of us looking for the key. We roll back the lid of the sardine tin of life, we reveal the sardines, the riches of life therein, and we get them out, we enjoy them. But, you know, there’s always a little piece in the corner you can’t get out. I wonder – I wonder, is there a little piece in the corner of your life? I know there is in mine.
ALAN BENNETT
Life is a beautiful and strange winged creature that appears at a window, flies swiftly through the banquet hall, and is gone.
THE VENERABLE BEDE
Have you noticed that life, real honest-to-goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in the newspapers?
JEAN ANOUILH
Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: ‘I am with you kid. Let’s go.’
MAYA ANGELOU
You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
QUENTIN CRISP
This is my creed: For man the vast marvel is to be alive. For man as for flower and beast and bird the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh and part of the living incarnate cosmos.
D. H. LAWRENCE
What an awful thing life is. It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from artificial flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons.
ALFRED E. NEUMAN The jug-eared and gap-toothed mascot of Mad magazine since 1955 whose catchphrase was ‘What – me worry?’ The image has certain similarities to early twentieth-century caricatures of Irish immigrants, although some doctors have also suggested Williams syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that creates an elfin appearance and cheerful demeanour in sufferers.
There’ll be two dates on your tombstone. And all your friends will read ’em. But all that’s gonna matter is that little dash between ’em.
KEVIN WELCH
In the end, everything is a gag.
CHARLIE CHAPLIN
We all know what light is but it is not easy to tell what light is.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
There are two kinds of light – the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures.
JAMES THURBER
All the fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no closer to the answer to the question: what are light quanta? Of course today every rascal thinks he knows the answer, but he is deluding himself.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
This world we live in is but thickened light.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Most of all I miss working with Sven Nyqvist, perhaps because we are both utterly captivated by the problems of light; the gentle, dangerous, dreamlike, living, dead, clear, misty, hot, violent, bare, sudden, dark, springlike, slanting, sensuous, subdued, limited, poisonous, calming, pale light.
INGMAR BERGMAN
Prejudice comes from being in the dark; sunlight disinfects it.
MUHAMMAD ALI
Light travels faster than sound – isn’t that why some people appear bright until you hear them speak?
STEVEN WRIGHT
The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.
GLORIA LEONARD Former porn actress and ardent feminist, who was publisher of the riotously successful High Society magazine from the mid-1980s where she introduced phone sex and celebrity nudes. A prominent anti-censorship campaigner, she lists chess as one of her hobbies.
Be a good listener. Unlike your mouth, your ears will never get you in trouble.
FRANK TYGER
When people talk, listen and listen completely. Most people never listen.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
The first duty of love is to listen
PAUL TILLICH
The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them.
FRANK ‘KIN’ HUBBARD
Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.
ISAIAH BERLIN
If we ate what we listened to we’d all be dead.
EARL WILD
Of all modern phenomena, the most monstrous and ominous, the most manifestly rotting with disease, the most grimly prophetic of destruction, the most clearly and unmistakably inspired by evil spirits, the most instantly and awfully overshadowed by the wrath of heaven, the most near to madness and moral chaos, the most vivid with deviltry and despair, is the practice of having to listen to loud music while eating a meal in a restaurant.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Literature is news that stays new.
EZRA POUND
A literary movement consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.
GEORGE MOORE
Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way around.
DAVID LODGE
Mrs Glegg had doubtless the glossiest and crispest brown curls in her drawers, as well as curls in various degrees of fuzzy laxness.
GEORGE ELIOT
She touched his organ, and from that bright epoch even it, the old companion of his happiest hours, incapable as he had thought of elevation, began a new and defined existence
CHARLES DICKENS
Mrs Goddard was mistress of a school … where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity.
JANE AUSTEN
‘Well,’ said the duchess, ‘apart from your balls, can’t I be of any use to you?’
MARCEL PROUST
‘Oh, I can’t explain,’ cried Roderick impatiently, returning to his work. ‘I’ve only one way of expressing my deepest feelings – it’s this.’ And he swung his tool.
HENRY JAMES
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing; the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unforeseen attack.
MARCUS AURELIUS
The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.
ZENO OF CITIUM The founder of Stoicism (from the stoa, or porch, he used to teach from). The core idea – freedom through harmony with nature and overcoming destructive habits – became the dominant philosophy of the Graeco-Roman elite for 600 years.
Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.
SENECA
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
I love my past. I love my present. I’m not ashamed of what I’ve had, and I’m not sad because I have it no longer.
COLETTE
The world is ruled by letting things take their course.
LAOZI (LAO TZU)
May you live every day of your life.
JONATHAN SWIFT
Life is too short to be small.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
It’s not the length of life, but the depth of life.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.
HENRY JAMES
Life is tough. Three out of three people die, so shut up and deal.
RING LARDNER
Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes of playing a poor hand well.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the Titanic who waved off the dessert cart.
ERMA BOMBECK
Study as if you were to live forever; live as if you were to die tomorrow.
SAINT EDMUND OF ABINGDON
This is what you should do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men … re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss what insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.
WALT WHITMAN
Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgement difficult.
HIPPOCRATES
A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to be sure of finding nothing still more disgusting before the day is over,
NICOLAS CHAMFORT
Three things in this life are self-destructive: Anger, Greed, Self-esteem.
MUHAMMAD
Speak the truth, do not yield to anger; give, if thou art asked for little; by these three steps thou wilt go near the gods.
THE DHAMMAPADA Buddhist scripture on ethics usually attributed to Buddha himself and dating from the early third century bc. It means ‘Path of the Dhamma’, the latter term meaning ‘that which upholds’, i.e. the ultimate reality.
Think nothing profitable to you which compels you to break a promise, to lose your self-respect, to hate any person, to suspect, to curse, to act the hypocrite, to desire anything that requires walls and curtains about it.
MARCUS AURELIUS
For a long time it has seemed to me that life was about to begin – Real Life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid – then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.
ALFRED D’SOUZA One of the most quoted of all inspirational passages, confidently attributed to a Father Alfred d’Souza, a writer/philosopher from Brisbane, Australia who died in 2004. Often it gets tangled up with another passage that begins ‘Dance like no one is watching’. Well, that was definitely the work of an Australian singer songwriter, Jim Lesses, in 2000. As for the original quote, it’s a one-off. No information of any kind exists about any philosophically minded Alfred d’Souzas, except for a much-loved radio operator in Mumbai, who died unexpectedly of a heart attack aged 45 in 2006.
My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between, I occupy myself as best I can.
CARY GRANT
It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.
CARL JUNG
Since we have explored the maze so long without result, it follows for poor human reasons, that we cannot have to explore much longer; close by must be the centre, with a champagne luncheon and a piece of ornamental water. How if there were no centre at all, but just one alley after another, and the whole world a labyrinth without end or issue?
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
I feel an irresistible desire to wander, and go to Japan, where I will pass my youth, sitting under an almond tree, drinking amber tea out of a blue cup, and looking at a landscape without perspective.
OSCAR WILDE
I have come to an unalterable decision – to go and live forever in Polynesia. Then I can end my days in peace and freedom, without thoughts of tomorrow and this eternal struggle against idiots.
PAUL GAUGUIN
Life is like a B-movie. You don’t want to leave in the middle of it but you don’t want to see it again.
TED TURNER
If I had my life story offered to me to film, I’d turn it down.
KIRK DOUGLAS
If I had to do my life over, I would change every single thing I have done.
RAY DAVIES
What we call logic may just as well be described as ‘the way adult Athenian males of the fifth century bc think’.
ALAN GARNER
Logic is neither a science nor an art, but a dodge.
BENJAMIN JOWETT
The use of logic in thought is as necessary and justified as the use of perspective in painting – but only as a medium of expression, not as a criterion of reality.
GOVINDA
To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.
GIORGIO DE CHIRICO
A mind all logic is like a knife all blade.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.
LORD DUNSANY
There is no logical way to the discovery of elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
The French are a logical people, which is one reason why the English dislike them so intensely. The other is that they own France, a country we have always judged to be too good for them.
ROBERT MORLEY
The clinching proof of my reasoning is that I will cut anyone who argues further into dogmeat.
SIR GEOFFREY DE TOURNEVILLE Another one-quote-wonder, with no sources and no historical record of his existence other than ‘Norman knight’. He might be Geoffrey de Turville, who was arrested and had his eyes put out by King Henry I in 1125 after joining the unsuccessful second Norman rebellion led by the Count of Meulan.
No, no, you’re not thinking; you’re just being logical.
NIELS BOHR
If the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle.
RITA MAE BROWN
Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
LAWRENCE DURRELL
If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.
ANTON CHEKHOV
The more you stay in this kind of job, the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man.
RICHARD NIXON
Loneliness is the inability to keep something or someone with us company. It is not a tree that stands alone in the middle of a plain, but the distance between the deep sap and the bark, between the leaves and the roots.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
Loneliness is the way by which destiny endeavours to lead man to himself.
HERMANN HESSE
What the world really needs is more love and less paperwork.
PEARL BAILEY
Love is metaphysical gravity.
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
Love will draw an elephant through a key-hole.
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
Some day, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
TEILHARD DE CHARDIN Visionary Jesuit, palaeontologist and philosopher, who helped excavate Peking Man in 1926 and proposed the noosphere, a kind of early version of the Gaia hypothesis, although the Vatican refused him permission to publish it in his lifetime.
He gave her a look you could have poured on a waffle.
RING LARDNER
Love has but one word and it never repeats itself.
JEAN LACORDAIRE The most influential French Catholic writer and thinker of the nineteenth century, he was responsible for re-establishing the French Dominican order in 1850.
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Art is love.
WILLIAM HOLMAN HUNT
Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.
JAMES JOYCE
Mother’s love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.
ERICH FROMM
I loved my mother from the day she died.
MICHAEL HARTNETT
You do not have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s. He’s more particular.
ROBERT FROST
I wish people would love everybody else the way they love me. It would be a better world.
MUHAMMAD ALI
Love is the delightful interval between meeting a beautiful girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock.
JOHN BARRYMORE
Love affairs have always greatly interested me, but I do not greatly care for them in books or moving pictures. In a love affair, I wish to be the hero, with no audience present.
E. W. HOWE
At the beginning of a love affair, not even the neurotic is neurotic.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
JAMES BALDWIN
All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.
LEO TOLSTOY
Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
CARL JUNG
Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.
MATT GROENING Creator of The Simpsons, quoted in the LA Times on St Valentine’s Day, 1991.
Luck is an essential part of a career in physics.
LEON LEDERMAN
Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
What luck for rulers that men do not think.
ADOLF HITLER
I’ve done the calculation and your chances of winning the lottery are identical whether you play or not.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.
ROBERTSON DAVIES
I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
Luck affects everything. Let your hook always be cast. In the stream where you least expect it, there will be fish.
OVID
I’m so unlucky that if I was to fall into a barrel of nipples I’d come out sucking my thumb.
FREDDIE STARR
The foundation of all morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying.
THOMAS HARDY
Lying is done with words and also with silence.
ADRIENNE RICH
We tell lies when we are afraid … afraid of what we don’t know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.
TAD WILLIAMS
The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE