GoodQuotes

Culled from 40 years of reading, by Robert Bonotto

Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens,
we have to keep going back and begin all over again.
                                                            -Andre Gide.

Men are given to worshipping manevolent gods, and that
which is not cruel seems to them not worth their adoration.
                                                            -Anatole France.

God was satisfied with his work, and that is fatal.
                                                            -Samuel Butler.

 
The trees reflected in the river -- they are the unconscious
of a spiritual world so near them.  So are we.
                                                            -Nathaniel Hawthorne, American Notebooks.

 
All religions will pass, but this will remain:  simply sitting
in a chair and looking into the distance.
                                                            -V.V.Rozanov, Solitaria, 1912.

 
Those who think they have no need of others become unreasonable.
                                                            -Vauvenargues, Reflections & Maxims, 1746.

 
One is not superior merely because one sees the world in an odious light.                                               -Chateaubriand.

 
There are persons who, when they cease to shock us,
cease to interest us.           -F. H. Bradley, Aphorisms, 1930.

 
Why long for glory, when one despises it as soon as one has it?  But that's precisely what the ambitious man wants:  to have it in order to despise it. 
                                              -Jean Rostand, On Vanity, 1925.

 
Never argue with a man with nothing to lose.
                                                            -Gracian, 1647.

 
There is no such thing as a great talent without great
will-power.                                 -Balzac, La Muse de Department, 1843.

 
To have a horror of the bourgeois .... is bourgeois.
                                                            -Jules Renard, Journal, 1889.

 
Riches, knowledge, & honor are but several sorts of power.
                                                            -Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651.

 
Some people are molded by their aspirations, others by
their hostilities.                -Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart.

 
To buy books would be a good thing if we could also buy
the time to read them.                                
                                                            -Schoepenhauer, On Reading Books, 1851.

 
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
                                                            -T. S. Eliot, 1920.

 
We are often dismayed to find that even disasters cannot
cure us of our faults.                    
                                                    -Vauvengargues, Reflections & Maxims, 1746.

 
One's real life is so often the life one does not lead.
                                                              -Oscar Wilde.

 
Everyone has his own theater, in which he is the manager,
actor, prompter, playwright, scene-shifter, doorkeeper,
all in one; and audience into the bargain.
                                                                -Julius Hare, Guesses at Truth, 1827.

 
I marvel that while each man loves himself more than anyone else, he often
sets less value on his own estimate than on the opinions of others.           
                                               -Marcus Aurelius.

 
The difference between talent and genius is, talent never says anything but which he has heard once, and genius things which he has never heard.  Genius is power; talent
is applicability.                    -Emerson, Journals, 1843.

 
Intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance,
while temperate intemperance helps in its fight against
intemperate temperance.    
                                                              -Mark Twain, Notebooks.

 
Only the shallow know themselves.                
                                                             -Oscar Wilde.

 
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant as you were
a year ago.                                  -Bernard Berenson, Notebooks, 1892.

 
Politeness is a false coin: to be miserly with it shows a
want of intelligence.             -Schoepenhauer, 1851.

 
[Since] we are made of contradictions, our freedom
is necessary. Lidian says the only sin people never forgive
each other for is a difference in opinion.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  -                                               --Emerson, Journals, 1844.

 
Ours is an age in which partial truths are tirelessly
transformed into total falsehoods, and then acclaimed as
revolutionary revelations.
                                                              -Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin, 1974.

 
Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of
good fortune that seldom happens, as by little advantages
that occur every day.
                                                              -Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography.

 
In doubts about one's life, one's work, one's methods,
one's principles, one's practice, there is always living.  It is
a sign of not being dead, to doubt and be discomfortable.
                                                              -John Addington Symonds, Letters & Papers.

 
The more intelligent one is, the more men of originality
one finds. Ordinary people find no difference between men.
                                                              -Pascal, Thoughts, 1670.