Last Word

Friday, January 25, 2008

Compiled by A.S. Erickson

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
—Oscar Wilde

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
—William Shakespeare

The most dangerous strategy is to jump a chasm in two leaps.
—Benjamin Disraeli

It is a great thing to know the season for speech and the season for silence.
—Seneca

Every hero becomes a bore at last.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
—Samuel Johnson

Beware of seriousness: it is a form of stupidity.
—Alexander Waugh

Death is not the worst; rather, in vain
To wish for death, and not to compass it.
—Sophocles

Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think laughable.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
—H. L. Mencken

The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
—James Thurber

It is not unseemly for a man to die fighting in defense of his country.
—Homer

I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
—Mark Twain

The greatest of faults is to be conscious of none.
Thomas Carlyle

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you’ve conquered human nature.
—Charles Dickens

Anything too stupid to be said is sung.
—Voltaire

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

When books are burned in the end people will be burned too.
—Heinrich Heine

It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, to retrace one’s steps to the upper air - there’s the rub, the task.
—Virgil

Wine, n. Fermented grape-juice known to the Women’s Christian Union as “liquor,” sometimes as “rum.” Wine, madam, is God’s next best gift to man.
—Ambrose Bierce

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
—Thomas Mann

I say to mankind, be not curious about God. For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God—I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least.
—Walt Whitman

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who overcomes his enemies.
—Aristotle

Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky

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