GoodQuotes
Culled from 40 years of reading, by Robert Bonotto
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.