Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

The moment you're born you're done for.

To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where previously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists.

The traveler, however virginal and enthusiastic, does not enjoy an unbroken ecstasy. He has periods of gloom, periods when he asks himself the object of all these exertions, and puts the question whether or not he is really experiencing pleasure. At such times he suspects that he is not seeing the right things, that the characteristic, the right aspects of these strange scenes are escaping him. He looks forward dully to the days of his holiday yet to pass, and wonders how he will dispose of them. He is disgusted because his money is not more, his command of the language so slight, and his capacity for enjoyment so limited.

There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.

Arnold's Laws of Documentation: (1) If it should exist, it doesn't. (2) If it does exist, it's out of date. (3) Only documentation for useless programs transcends the first two laws.

Happiness includes chiefly the idea of satisfaction after full honest effort. No one can possibly be satisfied and no one can be happy who feels that in some paramount affairs he failed to take up the challenge of life.

Pardo's First Postulate: Anything good in life is either illegal, immoral, or fattening. Arnold's Addendum: Anything not fitting into these categories causes cancer in rats.

Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.

Because her instinct has told her, or because she has been reliably informed, the faded virgin knows that the supreme joys are not for her; she knows by a process of the intellect; but she can feel her deprivation no more than the young mother can feel the hardship of the virgin's lot.

Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.

If you have not taken the time to define what happiness means to you, what have your spent your whole life pursuing?-Bo Bennett

It is well, when judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.

If egotism means a terrific interest in one's self, egotism is absolutely essential to efficient living.

It's easier to go down a hill than up it but the view is much better at the top.

There can be no doubt that the average man blames much more than he praises. His instinct is to blame. If he is satisfied he says nothing; if he is not, he most illogically kicks up a row.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Any change, even for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.

Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.

The price of justice is eternal publicity.

Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.

Of all the inhabitants of the inferno, none but Lucifer knows that hell is hell, and the secret function of purgatory is to make of heaven an effective reality.

All wrong doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best thing to do.

A first-rate Organizer is never in a hurry. He is never late. He always keeps up his sleeve a margin for the unexpected.

We need a sense of the value of time -- that is, of the best way to divide one's time into one's various activities.

It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable.

I'm only upset that I'm not a widow. [On her ex-husband Tom Arnold]

There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.

The supply of time is a daily miracle. You wake up in the morning and lo! Your purse is magnificently filled with 24 hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of life. It is yours! The most precious of your possessions.

You wake up in the morning, and your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of un-manufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. No one can take it from you. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.

I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I'm homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint. I was programmed to be a novelist or a playwright. But I'm not.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Falsehood often lurks upon the tongue of him, who, by self-praise, seeks to enhance his value in the eyes of others.

"And yet,' demanded Councilor Barlow, 'what's he done Has he ever done a day's work in his life What great cause is he identified with' 'He's identified,' said the first speaker, 'with the great cause of cheering us all up.'

Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn't block traffic.

Always behave as if nothing had happened, no matter what has happened.

Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.

A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.

The real tradegy is the tragedy of the man who never in his life braces himself for his one supreme effort-he never stretches to his full capacity, never stands up to his full stature.