Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2008/01/25/last_word.php
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