Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

With close-lipped Patience for our only friend, Sad Patience, too near neighbor to Despair.

Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again.

(In a semi-dark house...) Karen: AAAAAAAAHHH! Matthew: What?!? Karen: My hair got in my face and I thought I had run into something.

The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.

While driving fast: Karen: We're going to make this light. Matthew (frightened): Um, no we're not. Karen: Oh. I was looking at the wrong light.

Arnold's Laws of Documentation: (1) If it should exist, it doesn't. (2) If it does exist, it's out of date.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.

Karen: Well, everybody talks about me, of course, because I'm so cool. Matthew: I'm glad you're so humble. Karen: Hey, I'm *way* more humble than you!

Bagdikian's Observation: Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" on a ukelele.

If experience has established any one thing in this world, it has established this: that it is well for any great class and description of men in society to be able to say for itself what it wants, and not to have other classes, the so-called educated and intelligent classes, acting for it as its proctors, and supposed to understand its wants and to provide for them. A class of men may often itself not either fully understand its wants, or adequately express them; but it has a nearer interest and a more sure diligence in the matter than any of its proctors, and therefore a better chance of success.

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.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.

Matthew: Having a TV in the kitchen is a bad idea. Karen: Know what's worse? Having a kitchen in the bedroom.

But each day brings its petty dust our soon-choked souls to fill, and we forget because we must, and not because we will.

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.

Protestantism has the method of Jesus with His secret too much left out of mind; Catholicism has His secret with His method too much left out of mind; neither has His unerring balance, His intuition, His sweet reasonableness. But both have hold of a great truth, and get from it a great power.

Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

Light half-believers of our casual creeds, who never deeply felt, nor clearly will d, whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds, whose vague resolves never have been fulfilled.

Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.

Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.

Greatness is a spiritual condition.

The need of expansion is as genuine an instinct in man as the need in a plant for the light, or the need in man himself for going upright. The love of liberty is simply the instinct in man for expansion.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.

This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.

The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

Resolve to be thyself: and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery.

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.

Can anyone explain why Matthew's head is radioactive?

Reggie Smith of the Dodgers and Gary Matthews of the homers hit Braves in that game.

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

Resolve to be thyself and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery.

It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking at it that one overcomes it but, rather, often by working on the one next to it. Certain people and certain things require to be approached on an angle.

I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today.

But each day brings its petty dust Our soon-chok'd souls to fill, And we forget because we must, And not because we will.

...what thwarts us and demands of us the greatest effort is also what can teach us most.

Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.

Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he Who finds himself, loses his misery.

I feel it is time that I also pay tribute to my four writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.