This is an archive of selected Thoughts Of The Day
as published on our home page.
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.
-- William James
"The highest result of education is tolerance." -- Hellen Keller
"I cannot believe that the artist who establishes beauty as his fundamental approach to art can go very far wrong. No one denies that beauty is broad in scope, so broad that no single lifetime could encompass more than a small part of it. The great danger lies in allowing beauty to get bogged down in personal opinions, trends, and isms, in narrowing our individual understanding to the dogmas prated by the few. Beauty must be free, belonging individually to you and me, as far as we are capable of grasping it. Beauty is all around us, waiting to be discovered, and every artist interprets it on paper or canvas in his own particular way." - Andrew Loomis, The Eye Of The Painter
"It has struck me that people who aren't getting enough sex are always very fascinated by it, even if the fascination takes the form of them being very very cross that other people are getting some." - John Cleese
"Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done." - Vincent Van Gogh
"Political tags-such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth-are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire." -- Robert A Heinlein
"It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
"Rapists, according to the Goldstein study, came from homes that were sexually repressive. Others have found similar things. When the ban on pornography was lifted in Denmark, sex crimes went down 31 percent." - Dr. Marilyn A. Fithian (source: Porn 101, p 124)
[Note: Denmark was first in the world to legalize pornography, in 1968. The resultant drop in r-a-p-e statistics made other Western countries follow suit.]
"I really believe in giving young talent a chance. If you believe in the talent, then you don't have to 'babystep' everybody. It has been a personal cause of mine to take talented but inexperienced people and throw them into the deep end, and almost every time they deliver in spades." - Brad Bird, creator and director of The Incredibles from Pixar
"Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods." -- Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
"It has struck me that people who aren't getting enough sex are always very fascinated by it, even if the fascination might take the form of them being very cross that others are getting some." - John Cleese
"Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo." -- H. G. Wells
"You can't habitually reach for the profound without sometimes missing the obvious." - Eolake Stobblehouse
"The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust." -- Henry L. Stimson
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." -- Arthur Schopenhauer
"If there were no God, there would be no Atheists." -- G. K. Chesterton
"Humor is also a way of saying something serious." -- T. S. Eliot
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." -- Arthur Schopenhauer
"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"My faith in doctors/ is immense./ Just one thing spoils it;/ their pretence/ of authorised/ omniscience." - Piet Hein, Danish poet, philosopher, designer
"Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do." -- Elizabeth Bowen
"The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys." -- Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the British Post Office, 1876
"... she is a monster without being a myth, which is rather unfair." - Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body." -- Sir Richard Steele
"One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done." -- Marie Curie, letter to her brother, 1894
"Life engenders life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich." -- Sarah Bernhardt
"In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these." -- Paul Harvey
"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous." -- Robert Benchley
"I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it." -- Thomas Jefferson
"Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful." - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"You have the brain of a four-year-old boy, and I bet he was glad to get rid of it." - Groucho Marx, Horsefeathers
"I can't be talking to you about this anymore. I would horse-whip you if I had a horse." - Groucho Marx, Horsefeathers
"[Time is] the most valuable thing a man can spend." -- Theophrastus
"You're alive. Do something. The directive in life, the moral imperative was so uncomplicated. It could be expressed in single words, not complete sentences. It sounded like this: Look. Listen. Choose. Act." -- Barbara Hall
"Military justice is to justice what military music is to music." -- Groucho Marx
"Do give books... for Christmas. They're never fattening, seldom sinful, and permanently personal." -- Lenore Hershey
"Don't look now, but there is one man too many in this room, and I think it's you." -- Groucho Marx
"We begin to see that the completion of an important project has every right to be dignified by a natural grieving process. Something that required the best of you has ended. You will miss it." -- Anne Wilson Schaef
"The greater good and individual liberty are not opposites. In fact, nothing which suppresses individual liberty could ever help the greater good. Great accomplishments often are built by groups, but the idea and the vision and the drive always comes from an individual." - Eolake Stobblehouse
"I've learned that you can't have everything and do everything at the same time." -- Oprah Winfrey
"All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others." -- Cyril Connolly
"I know there are nights when I have power, when I could put on something and walk in somewhere, and if there's a man who doesn't look at me, it's because he's gay." - Kathleen Turner
"Lack of height obviously equates with lack of intellect - at best you have comedy value. You're somebody that the bigger boys can kick around and by so doing feel much better about themselves. It's like being black, except that there are no laws against discriminating against you." - Eric Goulden
"No." -- Amy Carter, (President Jimmy Carter's daughter) when asked by a reporter if she had any message for the children of America
"As you journey through life take a minute every now and then to give a thought for the other fellow. He could be plotting something." -- Hagar the Horrible
"Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy." -- Mahatma Gandhi
"Remember! Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights - then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward, that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend." -- Endicott Peabody
"Breasts stuffed with bags of silicone, soya, saline or horsehair might be lifesavers in a flood, or provide a nutricious snack in a famine, but they are not sexy." - Bob Carlos Clarke
"Using recreational drugs, including pot and alcohol, is like eating rocks before a swim. Why help the enemy? He has done nothing to deserve it." - Eolake Stobblehouse
"We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world." -- Helen Keller
"Well, we wouldn't need it either, would we?" - Eolake Stobblehouse
"Anybody who watches three games of football in a row should be declared brain dead." -- Erma Bombeck
"A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on." -- William S. Burroughs
"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious... they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side." -- Aristotle
"If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the philosopher's stone." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Evil (ignorance) is like a shadow--it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stamp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it." -- Shakti Gawain
"It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen." -- Aristotle, 'Nicomachean Ethics,' 325 B.C.
"The cost of a things is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." -- Henry David Thoreau
"Anger at lies lasts forever. Anger at truth can't last." -- Greg Evans
"If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?" -- Harry Shearer
"In all large corporations, there is a pervasive fear that someone, somewhere is having fun with a computer on company time. Networks help alleviate that fear." -- John C. Dvorak
"Mainstream literature seems like painting in miniature a lot of the time, and then suddenly you get to science fiction and you get the opportunity to work on a proper canvas." - Iain M Banks
"The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through." -- Jackson Pollock
"No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person." - Willa Cather
"The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear." -- Herbert Agar
"A man may well bring a horse to the water but he cannot make him drink." -- John Heywood
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind." -- Albert Einstein
"If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his house, what books he may read or what films he may watch." - Justice Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) US Supreme Court From a unanimous court opinion (1969)
"When the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." - Abraham Maslow
"Oh how sweet it is to hear one's own convictions from another's lips." - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
"Only when lions have historians, will hunters cease being heroes." - African Proverb
"Beware of righteous anger. It is a very seductive emotion." - Eolake Stobblehouse
"Nothing makes a woman more beautiful than the belief she is beautiful." - Sophia Loren
"In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty." - Christopher Morley
"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions." -- Albert Einstein
"It is hard to find one classic stellar name in the creative arts who were not for a long time either ignored by or attcked violently by the established authorities. So my point is, why care at all what they say? They obviously don't have the first clue." - Eolake Stobblehouse
"There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness." - Countess of Blessington
"Beauty, n: the power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband." - Ambrose Bierce
"Plain women know more about men than beautiful ones do. But beautiful women don't need to know about men. It's the men who have to know about beautiful women." - Katherine Hepburn
"The average man is more interested in a woman who is interested in him than he is in a woman, any woman, with beautiful legs." - Marlene Dietrich
"When a girl ceases to blush, she has lost the most powerful charm of her beauty." - Gregory I
"What ever beauty may be, it has for its basis order, and for its essence unity." - Father Andre
"Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder." - Immermann
"You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul's own doing." - Marie Carmichael Stopes
"The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring." - Francis H. Bradley
"Most beautiful but dumb girls think they are smart and get away with it, because other people, on the whole, aren't much smarter." - Louise Brooks
"I'm still chasing girls. I don't remember what for, but I'm still chasing them." - Joe E. Lewis
"I never cared for fashion much, amusing little seams and witty little pleats: it was the girls I liked." - David Bailey, photographer
"When a woman behaves like a man why doesn't she behave like a nice man?" - Dame Edith Evans
"If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base." - Dave Barry
"It is better to be high-spirited even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent." - Vincent van Gogh
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw
"Protect your dreams for they will carry you beyond all obstacles." - composer Robert Bruce
"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it." -- Henry David Thoreau
"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done." -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't." -- Anatole France
"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'" -- Charles M. Schulz, Charlie Brown in Peanuts
"Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story." -- John Barth
"Girls are always running through my mind. They don't dare walk." -- Andy Gibb
"To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered." -- Voltaire
"Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein." -- Joe Theismann, Former quarterback
"Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact." -- Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness (1930) ch. 1
"In the beginning there was nothing. God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better." -- Ellen DeGeneres
"I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice." -- Abraham Lincoln
"Sometimes what's right isn't as important as what's profitable." -- Trey Parker and Matt Stone, South Park, Prehistoric Ice Man, 1999
"Always be ready to speak your mind and a base man will avoid you." -- William Blake
"I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me." -- John Cleese
"The murals in restaurants are on par with the food in museums." -- Peter De Vries
Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." -- Howard Aiken
"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal." - Albert Camus
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -- Krishnamurti
"A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds." -- Sir Francis Bacon
"In my opinion, no one can possible achieve any real and lasting success or 'get rich' in business by being a conformist." - J. Paul Getty
"It isn't a very long step from a conformist society to a regimented society. Although it would take longer to create an Orwellian nightmare through voluntary surrender of individuality -- and thus of independence -- than through totalitarian edict, the results would be very much the same." - J. Paul Getty
"It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact." -- Edmund Burke
"Beauty isnt in things, its in your soul." - Saint Theresa of Lisieux
"The defect of equality is that we only desire it with our superiors." - Henry Becque
"I like nonsense -- it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope...and that enables you to laugh at all of life's realities." - Theodor S. Geisel
"Moderation in all things, including moderation." Mark Twain
"If there is a significant difference between theory and practice, then the theory is wrong or incomplete." - Eolake Stobblehouse
"Anarchy doesnt mean out of control. It means out of *their* control."
"You do not need to be different form who you are. You only need to be more of the person you already are." - Brian Tracy
"The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time." - Jack London
"... privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals." - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
"If something about the human body disgusts you... complain to the manufacturer." - Lenny Bruce
"... Any belief that living in the country is romantic is all romance as far as I am concerned. The idyl is utterly without stimulus, and all those trees and all that grass drain the spirit." - Peter O'Toole in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell
"It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor." - Neil Gaiman, Sandman
"These 'reality TV shows' are engineered by the globalists to condition ignorant people to accept universal camera surveillance, including in the home." - Aftermath News -
"Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life." - W. E. B. Du Bois, last message to the world, 1957
"It was never what I wanted to buy that held my heart's hope. It was what I wanted to be." -- Lois McMaster Bujold, "Memory", 1996
"How to achieve such anomalies, such alterations and re-fashionings of reality so what comes out of it are lies, if you like, but lies that are more than literal truth." - Vincent van Gogh
"Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul." - Vincent van Gogh
"Finding God's most glorious work to be Woman, that all human beauty had been concentrated in her, I resolved to dedicate myself to painting . . . God's most glorious work, more finely than ever had been done." William Etty
"We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle." - Winston Churchill
"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner." - James Bovard
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." - Ronald Reagan
"If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate. If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist." - Joseph Sobran
"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session." - Mark Twain
"The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other." - Ronald Reagan
"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools." - Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher (1820-1903)
"What this country needs are more unemployed politicians." - Edward Langley
"The best index to a person's character is (a) how he treats people who can't do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can't fight back." - Abigail Van Buren
"If you believe you can, you probably can. If you believe you won't, you most assuredly won't. Belief is the ignition switch that gets you off the launching pad." - Denis Waitley "How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it." - Marcus Aurelius
"Change your thoughts and you change your world." - Norman Vincent Peale
"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men." - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Handle them carefully, for words have more power than atom bombs." - Pearl Strachan
"It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless of course you are an exceptionally good liar." - Jerome K. Jerome
"God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference." - Saint Francis of Assisi, 1182 - 1226
"Of course truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense." - Mark Twain
"Trying to describe a building is like trying to describe a beautiful woman: the proper medium is a picture." - Robert A. Heinlein
"Do you not see that, among human beauties, it is a very beautiful face and not rich ornaments that stop passers-by? ... Do you not see beautiful young people diminish their excellence with excessive ornamentation?" - Leonardo da Vinci
"Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around." - Leo Buscaglia
"Beware of one who flatters unduly;he will also censure unjustly." - Arabian Proverb
"Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is." - Thomas S. Szasz
"We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle." - Winston Churchill
"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force." - Ayn Rand, the Nature of Government
"Everything that's done by the government is done in your name. You are responsible whether you like it or not." - Helen Thomas
"Windows is like Macintosh in the same way that a transvestite is like a real woman. It's 95% the same, and actually what some people would prefer, but not really the same for those who care about small differences." - Dan Mason
"Be cautious of those who confuse kindness with weakness." - Noah ben Shea
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - Albert Einstein
"Environmentalists changed the word "jungle" to "rain forest," because no one would give them money to save a jungle."
"It is good to love as many things as one can, for therein lies true strength, and those who love much, do much and accomplish much, and whatever is done with love is done well." - Vincent van Gogh
"What a lovely surprise to discover how un-lonely being alone can be." - Ellen Burstyn
"One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education. The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted." - Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
"There is nothing so powerful as truth, -- and often nothing so strange." - Daniel Webster
"We believe no more in Bonaparte's fighting merely for the liberties of the seas than in Great Britain's fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations." - Thomas Jefferson
"If you want help, help others. If you want trust, trust others. If you want love, give it away. If you want friends, be one. If you want a great team, be a great teammate. That's how it works." - Dan Zadra
"And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet." - Mat 24:6
"Good manners have much to do with emotions. To make them ring true, one must feel them, not merely exhibit them." - Amy Vanderbilt
"The most important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative, and the second disastrous." - Margaret Fontey
"We can often do more for other men by trying to correct our own faults than by trying to correct theirs." - Francois Fenelon
"The most important thing is not clicking the shutter... it is clicking with the subject." - Alfred Eisenstadt
"In order to 'give a meaning to the world,' one has to feel involved in what he frames through the viewfinder." - Henri Cartier-Bresson
"The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how." - Margaret Atwood
"If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has nobusiness telling a man, sitting alone in his house, what books he may reador what films he may watch." - Justice Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) US Supreme Court From a unanimous court opinion (1969)
"Those who dance are called insane by those who don't hear the music." - Eddie Vedder
"Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands- and then eat just one of the pieces." - Judith Viorst
"Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model." - Vincent van Gogh
"What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?" - Vincent van Gogh
"The only things in my life that compatibly exist with this grand universe are the creative works of the human spirit." - Ansel Adams
"You don't take a photograph, you make it." - Ansel Adams
"We Barbie dolls are not supposed to behave the way I do." - Sharon Stone
"What's nice about my dating life is that I don't have to leave my house. All I have to do is read the paper: I'm marrying Richard Gere, dating Daniel Day-Lewis, parading around with John F. Kennedy, Jr., and even Robert De Niro was in there for a day." - Julia Roberts
"If you're afraid of doing a nude scene, I advice you to just act your next practice scene in the nude. Just go for it, just do it." - Sharon Stone
"To be offended by the visual appearance of another person is prejudice, akin to racism. The right to exist, uncovered, should hold precedence over the right not to view this, for the objection is irrational." - Terri Webb
"I didn't grow up with a mother telling me what was under my clothes was bad or evil." - Charlize Theron
"Fig leaves belong on trees, not people." - Corky Stanton
"The best thing to do would be to designate everywhere as clothing optional, and we could leave little fenced in areas for the prudes to prance around in. Call them 'Prudist Camps'. They could peer out of their fences and indulge in their offensive 'I'm offended' behaviour whenever they saw a natural person walk by, without bothering the rest of us." - Anonymous
"Gymnophobia"-- (gymnos being the Greek word for "nude") The fear of being (or seeing others) naked. A gymnophobic person usually wants to force all others to a clothes compulsive lifestyle.
"Body shame, like prejudice, is not natural. It is learned from others and benefits no one."
"There's something therapeutic about nudity. Clothing is one of the external things about a character. Take away the Gucci or Levi's and we're all the same." - Kevin Bacon
"Bathing led to nudity. Nudity led to promiscuity. So believed the colonial lawmakers of Pennsylvania and Virginia. Philadelphia was especially strict in those early years. You could be jailed there bathing more than once a month."
"Forcing others to wear clothes because we cannot control our own lust, is abuse of others."
"Being natural and matter-of-fact about nudity prevents your children from developing an attitude of shame or disgust about the human body. If parents are very secretive about their bodies and go to great lengths to prevent their children from ever seeing a buttock or breast, children will wonder what is so unusual, and even alarming, about human nudity." - Dr. Lee Salk
"I come from a country where you don't wear clothes most of the year. Nudity is the most natural state. I was born nude and I hope to be buried nude." - Elle MacPherson, Australian model and actress.
"Clothes therefore, must be the insignia of the superiority of man over all other animals, for surely there could be no other reason for wearing the hideous things." - From Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
"Are we so narrow minded that we show war, murder, r-a-p-e, etc. on TV, but we do not allow to show one of the most wonderful creations (the human body) in its natural form." - Mario Roman
"I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience." - Shelley Winters
"How is it possible for the human body, which was created in the image of god, to be offensive to anybody? Satan would love to see God's greatest creation be considered offensive."
"Because God created it, the human body can remain nude and uncovered and preserve intact its splendor and its beauty." - Pope John Paul II
"Complete nudity in itself is not erotic. It becomes so only when preceeded by or contrasted to a state of dress. In this limited context then, all clothes become somewhat immoral, if we define immorality as inciting sexual interest. Habitual nakedness may indeed be capable of elevating man to a higher mental plane." -Dr. Marylnn J. Horn
"What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties!" - Henry David Thoreau, Journals
"The girl with dark hair was coming towards him across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With all its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole [oppressive] culture, a whole system of thought." - George Orwell, 1984
"His disciples asked, 'When will you become revealed to us and when shall we see you?' Jesus answered, 'When you disrobe without being ashamed and take up your garments and place them under your feet like little children and tread on them, then will you see the son of the Living One, and you will not be afraid.'" - The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas
"Sometimes I like to run naked in the moonlight and the wind, on a little trail behind out house, when the honeysuckle blooms. It's a feeling of freedom, so close to God and nature." Dolly Parton
"We may not return the affection of those who like us, but we always respect their good judgment." - Libbie Fudim "Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem." - John Galsworthy "It's kind of fun to do the impossible." - Walt Disney "Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy". - Henry Kissinger
"Science could cure AIDS, cancer, and the common cold by noon on tuesday, and the news media would still find a way of making it sound like a bad day." - Eolake Stobblehouse "Many people are forewarned against enthusiasm; they mistake it with fanaticism, and it's a big mistake. Fanaticism is an exclusive passion based upon one opinion; enthusiasm connects to the universal harmony; it's love of beauty, the elevation of the soul, the pleasure of devotion, all united in the same sentiment that has grandure and calm. The meaning of this word for the Greeks provides the most noble definition: enthusiasm [eudaimonia] signifies God is in us. In effect, when man's existence is expansive it has something of the divine." - Madame de Stael "Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think laughable." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe "Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?" - Lillian Hellman "Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot; others transform a yellow spot into the sun." - Pablo Picasso "I have known war as few men now living know it. It's very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes." - General Douglas MacArthur "The powers in charge keep us in a perpetual state of fear keep us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real." - General Douglas MacArthur
"One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda." - General Douglas MacArthur
"To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of the weary pilgrimage." - Samuel Johnson
"Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently." - Henry Ford
"The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but for the deliverance from fear. It is the storm within that endangers him, not the storm without." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid." - Benjamin Franklin
"Most of our obstacles would melt away if, instead of cowering before them, we should make up our minds to walk boldly through them." - Orison Swett Marden
"Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind." - Samuel Johnson
"Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent." - Marilyn vos Savant
"Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves." - Lord George Byron"
Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind." - Leonardo da Vinci
"Truth is eternal, knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them." - Madeleine L'Engle
"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." - Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis
"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence." - Albert Einstein
"Trust in yourself. Your perceptions are often more accurate than you are willing to believe." - Claudia Black
"He that is conscious of guilt cannot bear the innocence of others: So they will try to reduce all others to their own level." - Charles James Fox
"Court life with love, and tame it with discipline; be an amateur at heart, and a professional in mind." - Eolake Stobblehouse
"..for coordinated energy is the last word in ethics and in politics, and perhaps in logic and metaphysics as well." - Will Durant, the intro to The Story of Philosophy
"The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you... There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it." - Frederick Buechner
"Photography is bringing order out of chaos." - Ansel Adams
"Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is freedom." - Marilyn Ferguson
"Beauty is as useful as the useful. Perhaps more so." - Victor Hugo
"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult." - Julie Cameron
"The nakedness of woman is the work of God." - William Blake
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle
To love what you do and feel that it matters - how could anything be more fun?" - Katherine Graham
"The greatest and noblest pleasure which we have in this world is to discover new truths, and the next is to shake off old prejudices." - Frederick II
"Excellence does not require perfection." - Henry James
"'On with the dance, let the joy be unconfined!' is my motto, whether there's any dance to dance or any joy to unconfine." - Mark Twain
"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!" - Albert Einstein
"The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice." - Mahatma Gandhi
"Vengeance is not the point; change is. But the trouble is that in most [people's] minds the thought of victory and the thought of punishing the enemy coincide." - Barbara Deming
"Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority." - Thomas Huxley (1825-1895)
"The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think--rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men." - Bill Beattie
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world: indeed it's the only thing that ever has!" - Margaret Meade
"For a young person, and indeed for many adults, one of the most important and difficult things in life is learning to trust your own perceptions and your own judgements.
The world is full of conflicting opinions. It is also full of people who want something from you, or want you to be different from what you are.
It is tempting to go with the flow, and follow the popular opinion, in the hope that this will make you popular as well. But not only does this not work very well, it is doubtful how valuable it really is to be "popular".
It is not easy in the storm of emotions to be objective. But if you keep learning and studying, both from books and real life, you will find things that work for you. Keep at it, it will get easier, slowly but surely." - Eolake Stobblehouse
"The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing heart." - Robert G. Ingersoll
"Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free." - Will Durant, the intro to The Story of Philosophy
"Complete nudity in itself is not erotic. It becomes so only when preceded by or contrasted to a state of dress. In this limited context then, all clothes become somewhat immoral, if we define immorality as inciting sexual interest. Habitual nakedness may indeed be capable of elevating man to a higher mental plane." - Lucy Irvine
"Either you think -- or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you." - F Scott Fitzgerald
"Natural ties hold; artificial ties bind." - Eolake Stobblehouse
"Until you die, everything is life, so make the best of it." - Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
"I have some good friends who occasionally can be unpleasant. But none of my good friends are ever dishonest." - Eolake Stobblehouse
"How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?" - Michelangelo
[On being asked by Pope Paul IV to censor the nudity in the Sisinte Chapel.] "Tell the Pope that this is a small matter and it can easily be made suitable; let him make the world a suitable place and the painting will soon follow suit." - Montaigne
"A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well." - Unknown
"Truth is, most of us contain a splashing, giggling, squealing child who knows without thinking that bare skin and water go together as wings go with air, roots with earth, and the phoenix with incendiary sun." - Elle MacPherson
"The human body is first and foremost a mirror to the soul and its greatest beauty comes from that." - Auguste Rodin
"We don't see things as they are... We see things as we are." - Anais Nin
"Moderation is a good thing. If you don't overdo it." - Hagar the Viking
"The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies." - American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything." - Mark Twain
"Winning may not be everything, but losing has little to recommend it." - Dianne Feinstein
"A doubtful friend is worse than a certain enemy. Let a man be one thing or the other, and we then know how to meet him." - Aesop
"I have been trained with the dominating thought of art as something almost religious in quality."- Ansel Adams
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it." - Charles Buxton
"Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together." - Vincent Van Gogh, 1853-1890, Dutch Painter
"I never cared for fashion much, amusing little seams and witty little pleats: it was the girls I liked." - David Bailey, 1938-, British Photographer
"Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God." - Jean Anouilh
"A man is as young as the woman he feels." - Groucho
"I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate." - Vincent Van Gogh
"Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so." -Shakespeare-
"Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it." - Lewis Carroll
"It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to." - Vincent Van Gogh
"I want you to lead a life instead of following one around." - Postcards From The Edge, Carrie Fisher.
"Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions." - Dalai Lama
"Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea." - John Ciardi
"If you hear a voice within you saying, 'You are not a painter,' then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced." -- Vincent Van Gogh
"Excellence is a responsibility. And 'modesty', both false and real, is just a way of trying to shirk that responsibility." Eolake Stobblehouse
"The best way to know God is to love many things." - Vincent Van Gogh
"Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself." - Chinese Proverb
"Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education." - Bertrand Russell
"I am not young enough to know everything." - Oscar Wilde
"Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph." - Haile Selassie
"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody." -Bill Cosby
"My guess is that there aren't a hundred top-flight professional comedians, male and female, in the whole world. They are a much rarer and far more valuable commodity than all the gold and precious stones in the world. But because we are laughed at, I don't think people really understand how essential we are to their sanity." - Groucho Marx
"He soured on life some seconds after he was born and has made a profession of deteriorating ever since." - Mission Earth, Hubbard
"Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." - Gandhi
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is." - Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut
"The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions." - Alfred Lord Tennyson
"The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper." -Eden Phillpotts
"To the woman who complained that riches hadn't made her happy the Master said, 'You speak as if luxury and comfort were ingredients of happiness; whereas all you need to be really happy, my dear, is something to be enthusiastic about.'" - Anthony de Mello, SJ
"What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?" - Bertold Brecht
"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." - Emerson
"Buried deep within each of us is a spark of greatness, a spark than can be fanned into flames of passion and achievement. That spark is not outside of you it is born deep within you." - James A. Ray
"The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them." - Michel de Montaigne
"Your self-confidence increases when you know you are living your life according to your highest values." - Brian Tracy
"Trying to save someone from their own stupidity is like trying to teach a pig how to dance: it wastes your time, and annoys the pig." - Robert Heinlein
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
"The highest destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule." - Albert Einstein
"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." - Theodore Roosevelt
"Goals are a preview of future events and experiences in your life. - Mark Victor Hansen
"Hope for a miracle. But don't depend on one." - the Talmud
"I have learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances." - Martha Washington
"There is no mistake so great as the mistake of not going on." - William Blake
"Be who you are and say what you feel because the people who mind don't matter and the people who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anais Nin
"I studied the lives of great men and famous women, and I found that the men and women who got to the top were those who did the jobs they had in hand, with everything they had of energy and enthusiasm." - Harry Truman
"I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him." - Galileo Galilei
"Nanny Ogg never did any housework herself, but she was the cause of housework in other people." - Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
"In the Beginning there was nothing, which exploded." - Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
"We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities but its own talents." - Eric Hoffer
"There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self." - Aldous Huxley
"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic." - Anais Nin
"The only difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging." - Will Rogers
"Women are creatures meant to be loved, not to be understood." - Oscar Wilde
"It's always the old, who lead us on to war, It's always the young to fall." - Phil Ochs
"Instead of getting married again, I'm going to find a woman I don't like and just give her a house." - Lewis Grizzard.
"You must always think of the future. For instance, why do banks own everything in this world, and ordinary people have only debts? Because banks think in decades and centuries, and ordinary people think in days and weeks." - Eolake Stobblehouse
"I hate patriotism. Last time I checked, it was a round world." - Bill Hicks
"See, the problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time." - Robin Williams.
"Why should I paint dead fish, onions, and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier." - Marie Laurencin
"The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less." - Brendon Behan
"All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life." - Oscar Wilde
"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free." - Michelangelo
"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist." - Albert Einstein
"It's not true that I had nothing on. I had the radio on." - Marylin Monroe
"Sex... In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact." - Marlene Dietrich
"Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer." - Andrea Dworkin
"From the moment I was six I felt sexy. And let me tell you it was hell, sheer hell, waiting to do something about it." - Bette Davis
"Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself." - Potter Stewart
"Marriage is said to be the price that men pay for sex, while sex is the price that women pay for marriage." - Rachel Campbell
"My girlfriend always laughs during sex -- no matter what she's reading." - Steve Jobs (Founder: Apple Computers)
"Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected." - Steve Jobs
"I want to put a dent in the universe." - Steve Jobs
"Pretty much, Apple and Dell are the only ones in this industry making money. They make it by being Wal-Mart. We make it by innovation." - Steve Jobs
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither Liberty NOR safety" - Ben Franklin
"Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind." - Leonardo da Vinci
"Attitudes are contagious, is yours worth catching?"
"I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom." - Gen George Patton
"The highest reward for a man's toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it." - John Ruskin
"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people." - Laurence Peter
"Wisdom is knowledge with understanding and perspective." - Eolake Stobblehouse
"What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?"
Michelangelo
"To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe." - Anatole France
"Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old" - Franz Kafka
"In a perfect world you wouldn't need a utopia." - Mike Meyers
"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." - Douglas Adams.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who are hungry and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." - Dwight Eisenhower
"It is never wise to seek or wish for another's misfortune. If malice or envy were tangible and had a shape, it would be the shape of a boomerang." - Charley Reese
"Government is not reason. Government is not eloquence. It is force. And, like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." - George Washington
"For the first time in my life I was reading things which had not been approved by the Prophet's censors, and the impact on my mind was devastating. Sometimes I would glance over my shoulder to see who was watching me, frightened in spite of myself. I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy . . . censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty litle force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything--you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him." - Robert Heinlein, Revolt in 2100
"There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us."
"He who cherishes a beautiful vision, a lofty ideal in his heart, will one day realize it. Dream lofty dreams and as you dream so shall you become..." - James Allen
"A slander is like a hornet; if you can't kill it dead the first time, better not strike at it." - Henry Wheeler Shaw
"We all have to excel at one of two things. Either we become good at planting in the spring, or we learn how to beg in the fall." - Jim Rohn
"Each snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty." - Stanislaw J. Lee
"Cause Change & Lead. Accept Change & Survive. Resist Change & Die." - Ray Norda, Chairman, Novell
"It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles." - Machiavelli
"No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave." - Calvin Coolidge
"You don't think God makes mistakes? Of course he does, we all do. Of course, when we make mistakes, they call it 'evil'. When God makes mistakes, they call it 'nature'." - Jack (Jack Nicholson) in The Witches of Eastwick
"Do you think God knew what he was doing when he created Woman? Or was it just another one of his tiny mistakes like earthquakes, tidal waves, floods?" - Jack (Jack Nicholson) in The Witches of Eastwick
"So, women... a mistake? Or did he do it to us on purpose?" - Jack (Jack Nicholson) in The Witches of Eastwick
"I hate men, but I'm not a lesbian." - Elaine on Seinfeld
"The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity." - Harlan Ellison
"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." - Robert Heinlein
"History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats." - B. C. Forbes.
"You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire Universe, deserve your love and affection." - Buddha
"You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand." - Woodrow Wilson
"They'll show us how to break the rules, but never how to make the rules. Reduce us down to witless pods." - David Bowie, Black Tie White Noise
"I dream my painting, and then I paint my dreams." - Vincent van Gogh
"Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen." - Mort Sahl
"We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom thatis in it - and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again--and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore." - Mark Twain
"Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." - Abraham Lincoln
"Often we have no time for our friends but all the time in the world for our enemies." - Leon Uris
"We often fear the thing we want the most."
"INFLATION: Cutting money in half without damaging the paper."
"GOSSIP: A person who will never tell a lie if the truth will do more damage."
"ADULT: A person who has stopped growing at both ends and is now growing in the middle."
"Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind." - Leonardo da Vinci
"You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some with you." - Joubert
"I put a dollar in a change machine. Nothing changed." - George Carlin
"God is a comic playing to an audience that's afraid to laugh." - Voltaire (1694-1778)
"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. " - Albert Einstein
"He who cherishes a beautiful vision, a lofty ideal in his heart, will one day realize it. Dream lofty dreams and as you dream so shall you become." - James Allen
"Part of prudence is perceiving what you can get away with. Don't break rules for sport or out of spite, or your serious missions will be endangered." - Eolake Stobblehouse
"It is a common misunderstanding that to be successful, you have to do well what others are doing well. There are all kinds of chances that you just have to do well what you do well, and do it consistently." - Eolake Stobblehouse
"Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you." - Carl Sandburg
"Striving for perfection is the greatest stopper there is... It's your excuse to yourself for not doing anything. Instead, strive for excellence, doing your best." - Sir Laurence Olivier
"There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path." - The Matrix
"All pop music is about sex. Rock is about wanting to do it, jazz is about doing it, and country and western is about feeling guilty after you've done it." - Robert Waldo Brunelle, Jr.
"Think universally. Act terrestrially." - Pip Wilson
"Law and Order is like patriotism--anyone who comes on strong about patriotism has got something to hide; it never fails. They always turn out to be a crook or an asshole or something." - Bill Mauldin
"In Mexico we have a word for sushi: Bait." - Jose Simon
"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book." - Groucho Marx
"A person who trusts no one can't be trusted." - Jerome Blattner
"So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing [the Apple Computer], even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'" - Steve Jobs
"Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations." - Steve Jobs
"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new." - Steve Jobs
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - John F. Kennedy
"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." - Martin Luther King Jr.
"The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side." - James Baldwin
"A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault." - Cardinal Newman
"Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons." - Woody Allen
"Whatever your age, your upbringing, or your education, what you are made of is mostly unused potential." - George Leonard
"We do not have to improve ourselves, we just have to let go of what blocks our heart." - Jack Kornfield
"Nothing in this world can take the place of perseverance. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of education derelicts. Perseverance and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." - Calvin Coolidge
"Yes, he was always very nervous." - Mrs. Matthau when asked whether she knew early on that her son Walter was going to become an actor.
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." - Hermann Goering, April 18, 1946, http://www.snopes.com/quotes/goering.htm
"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses." - Major General Smedley Butler, USMC
"The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today [is] my own government. ... For the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent." - Martin Luther King
"All good is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity is easy. Stay away from easy." - Scott Alexander
"One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison; anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unneccessary tyranny." - Bertrand Russel
"If man were meant to be nude, he would have been born that way." - Oscar Wilde.
"Nothing makes a woman more beautiful than the belief she is beautiful." - Sophia Loren
'In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty." - Christopher Morley
"There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness." - Countess of Blessington
"Beauty is power; a smile is its sword." - Charles Reade
"It is good that the young are beautiful; it is the only advantage they have." - The Duchess of Windsor
"A bachelor never quite gets over the idea that he is a thing of beauty and a boy forever." - Helen Rowland
"Whatever beauty may be, it has for its basis order, and for its essence unity." - Father Andre
"Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference." - Aristotle
"You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul's own doing." - Marie Carmichael Stopes
"What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?" - Michelangelo
"Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform." - Mark Twain
"A great man is always willing to be little." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The top-top professionals of any endeavor are not there by accident, or even talent only. They work continually to learn and to improve, every hour of the day, every hour of the week, even when doing other things in their lives." - Eolake Stobblehouse
"Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time." - Jean Cocteau
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction." - Albert Einstein
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Albert Einstein
"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." - Albert Einstein
"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing." - Albert Einstein
"If triangles had a God, He'd have three sides."
"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, "Where have I gone wrong?" Then a voice says to me, "This is going to take more than one night." - Charlie Brown, Peanuts, Charles Schulz
"The better organized you are in the simple things, the more spontaneous and free you can be in the more important things." - Brian Tracy
"I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers." - Mahatma Gandhi
"If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins." - Benjamin Franklin
"It continues to baffle me why there is no attempt to censor television's continual portrayal of homicide as a means of conflict resolution, while at the same time regarding an unclothed human body as a problem." - Charlie Metcalf
"All things are possible until they are proved impossible - and even the impossible may only be so as of now." - Pearl S. Buck
"Be the change you want to see in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi
"It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows." - Epictetus
"I liked 'em when I was 18. Why should I stop liking 'em now?" - George Burns, on why he kept the company of women 70 years younger than himself
"I've been trying for some time to develop a lifestyle that doesn't require my presence." - Gary Trudeau, author of Doonesbury
"No art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it." - Alberti
"He who cherishes a beautiful vision, a lofty ideal in his heart, will one day realize it. Dream lofty dreams and as you dream so shall you become." - James Allen
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
"I am not only a pacifist, but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war." - Albert Einstein
"I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it." - Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. President & Military General
"There never was a good war or a bad peace." - Benjamin Franklin
"People often ask me if I ever do subjects other than nude females. I usually reply that since I have freedom of choice, why would I want to." - A. Solomon
"Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have." - Margaret Mead
"Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes." - Thoreau
"All great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
"You are only as strong as your purpose, therefore let us choose reasons to act that are big bold righteous and eternal." - Barry Munro
"A person is not old until regrets take the place of dreams."
"If I seem to take part in politics, it is only because politics encircles us today like the coil of a snake from which one cannot get out, no matter how much one tries. I wish therefore to wrestle with the snake." - Mahatma Gandhi
"What do I think of Western civilisation? I think it would be a very good idea." - Mahatma Gandhi
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." - Mahatma Gandhi
"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." - Mahatma Gandhi
"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest." - Mahatma Gandhi
"Some people say they haven't yet found themselves. But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates." - Thomas Szasz
"I am enthusiastic over humanity's extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuities. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat may come along and make a fortuitous life preserver. This is not to say, though, that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday's fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem." - R Buckminster Fuller, American inventor and futurist
"A man's true wealth is the good he does in the world. Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror." - Kahlil Gibran
"If you don't have a vision, then your reality will always be determined by other's perceptions." - Melanëe Addison
"Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope or confidence." - Helen Keller
"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these." - George Washington
"The one who says it cannot be done, should not interrupt the one doing it" - Chinese Proverb
"Drunkenness is simply voluntary insanity." - Seneca
"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily." - Thomas Szasz
"Those who are incapable of committing great crimes do not readily suspect them in others." - Francois De La Rochefoucauld
"One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the main aim in life. The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community." - Albert Einstein
"The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm." - Aldous Huxley
"However many holy words you read, However many you speak, what good will they do you If you do not act on upon them?" - Buddha
"If we believe in 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,' we will end up being a society of blind, toothless people." - Gandhi
"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things." - Rene Descartes
"Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use." - Emily Post
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies." - Groucho Marx
"To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography." - George Santayana
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. " - Galileo Galilei
"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is brought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?" - Mahatma Gandhi
"We must become the change we want to see in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi
"For me the present is merged in eternity. I may not sacrifice the latter for the present." - Mahatma Gandhi
"Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed." - Mahatma Gandhi
"Every moment of your life is infinitely creative and the universe is endlessly bountiful. Just put forth a clear enough request, and everything your heart desires must come to you." - Mahatma Gandhi
"If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide." - Mahatma Gandhi
"Imitation is the sincerest flattery." - Mahatma Gandhi
"Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth." - Mahatma Gandhi
"Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear." - Mahatma Gandhi
"Truth never damages a cause that is just." - Mahatma Gandhi
"In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place." - Mahatma Gandhi
"I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent." - Mahatma Gandhi
"However much I may sympathise with and admire worthy motives, I am an uncompromising opponent of violent methods even to serve the noblest of causes." - Mahatma Gandhi
"I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill." - Mahatma Gandhi
"Nobody can hurt me without my permission." - Mahatma Gandhi
"Let no one charge me with ever having abused or encouraged weakness or surrendered on matters of principle. But I have said, as I say again, that every trifle must not be dignified into a principle." - Mahatma Gandhi
"Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can, then I acquire the ability to do it even if I didn't have it in the beginning." - Mahatma Gandhi
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony." - Mahatma Gandhi
"There are times when you have to obey a call which is the highest of all, i.e. the voice of conscience even though such obedience may cost many a bitter tear, and even more, separation from friends, from family, from the state, to which you may belong, from all that you have held as dear as life itself. For this obedience is the law of our being." - Mahatma Gandhi
"Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will." - Mahatma Gandhi
"I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave." -- E. M. Forster, as a small child
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it." -- Samuel Johnson
"It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it." -- Arnold Toynbee
"You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try." -- Beverly Sills
"What makes something special is not just what you have to gain, but what you feel there is to lose." -- Andre Agassi
"Just because you love someone doesn't mean you have to be involved with them. Love is not a bandage to cover wounds." -- Hugh Elliott
"The love that matters to you is the love you give. This has been said many times, but it is not easy to grasp in a culture where everything is focused on receiving." - Eolake Stobblehouse
"Worrying is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you anywhere." - Van Wilder, Party Liaison
"It really doesnât matter if the person who hurt you deserves to be forgiven. Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself. You have things to do and you want to move on." -- Real Live Preacher
"I continually find that the top people in any professional field are wonderful and pleasant people. Which of course belies the idea that arrogance has any relation to excellence." - Eolake Stobblehouse
"It matters not whether you win or lose; what matters is whether I win or lose." -- Darrin Weinberg
"A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them." -- P. J. O'Rourke
"The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action." -- Frank Herbert
"To know the road ahead, ask those coming back." -- Chinese Proverb
"Forgiveness is almost a selfish act because of its immense benefits to the one who forgives." -- Lawana Blackwell
"The only thing wrong with immortality is that it tends to go on forever." -- Herb Caen
"Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life." -- Herbert Henry Asquith
"The secret of joy in work is contained in one word - excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it." -- Pearl Buck
"Security is a kind of death." -- Tennessee Williams
"I can't think of a single really worthwhile thing that does not take a long time and much work to achieve. A long perspective and much patience is necessary for big accomplishments." - Eolake Stobblehouse
"Endeavor to be always patient of the faults and imperfections of others for thou has many faults and imperfections of thine own that require forbearance. If thou are not able to make thyself that which thou wishest, how canst thou expect to mold another in conformity to thy will?" -- Thomas a Kempis
"Humor is just another defense against the universe." -- Mel Brooks
"There is no way of proving your point to someone whose income and position depend upon believing the contrary." -- Sydney Harris
"Sophisticated persons masturbate without compunction. They do it for reasons of health, privacy, thrift and because of the remarkable perfection of invisible partners." -- P. J. O'Rourke
"Everyone has a purpose in life. Perhaps yours is watching television." -- David Letterman
"Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them." -- Robertson Davies
"A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled." -- Sir Barnett Cocks
"Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it." -- Joseph Conrad
"Remember that happiness is a way of travel - not a destination." -- Roy M. Goodman
"The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself." -- Archibald Macleish
"What some people mistake for the high cost of living is really the cost of high living." -- Doug Larson
"Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"True merit, like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes." - Edward F. Halifax
"To an engineer, a perfect circle is the only kind he can work with. To an artist, it is the only kind he can't." - Eolake Stobblehouse
"When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about." -- Albert Einstein
"A wise man is one who can see the greater perspective. A hero is one who can act on it." - Eolake Stobblehouse
main | beauty of the day | contact | newsletter w/pics | photos