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The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once.

Rene Descartes

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

Oscar Wilde

Insanity is knowing that what you’re doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can’t stop it.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.

Freya Stark

Can you imagine what I would do if I could do all I can?

Sun Tzu

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?

Ernest Hemingway

Don’t you believe that there is in man a deep so profound as to be hidden even to him in whom it is?

Augustine of Hippo

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

Mary Oliver

Peace is when time doesn’t matter as it passes by.

Maria Schell

Commitment means that it is possible for a man to yield the nerve center of his consent to a purpose or cause, a movement or an ideal, which may be more important to him than whether he lives or dies.

Howard Thurman

The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape.

Alice James

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

Carl Jung

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.

Harry Frankfurt

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

Winston Churchill

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

Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.

Lewis Carroll

I’m going to tell stories to the world. I think there’s time for me to grow. We’ll see.

Sasha Alexander

Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.

William Shakespeare

A rose must remain with the sun and the rain or its lovely promise won’t come true.

Ray Evans

He that is of the opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money.

Benjamin Franklin

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.

Edwin Land

An intense anticipation itself transforms possibility into reality; our desires being often but precursors of the things which we are capable of performing.

Samuel Smiles

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The most imaginative people are the most credulous; for them everything is possible.

Alexander Chase

Pets are humanizing. They remind us we have an obligation and responsibility to preserve and nurture and care for all life.

James Cromwell

It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

Eleanor Roosevelt

We fear violence less than our own feelings. Personal, private, solitary pain is more terrifying than what anyone else can inflict.

Jim Morrison

When we see persons of worth, we should think of equaling them; when we see persons of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.

Confucius

Freedom – to walk free and own no superior.

Walt Whitman

All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.

Tacitus

In any of the arts, you never stop learning.

Claire Bloom

Furthermore, America suffers not only from a lack of standards, but also not infrequently from a confusion or an inversion of standards.

Irving Babbitt

Just because everything is different doesn’t mean anything has changed.

Irene Peter

But if you really want to learn about life, get a cat. The way I think people should relate to animals is with a cat. Because the world is his.

James Cromwell

In the whole round of human affairs little is so fatal to peace as misunderstanding.

Margaret E. Sangster

All the world is birthday cake, so take a piece, but not too much.

George Harrison

Drink! for you know not whence you came nor why: drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.

Omar Khayyam

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Kites rise highest against the wind – not with it.

Winston Churchill

My nature is to be linear, and when I’m not, I feel really proud of myself.

Cynthia Weil

It’s cool to go places where working people are happy.

Neil Young

Solitude sharpens awareness of small pleasures otherwise lost.

Kevin Patterson

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

George Sand

I’ve written some poetry I don’t understand myself.

Carl Sandburg

Whatever is not commonly seen is condemned as alien.

Iris Chang

Prowling his own quiet backyard or asleep by the fire, he is still only a whisker away from the wilds.

Jean Burden

A rooster crows only when it sees the light. Put him in the dark and he’ll never crow. I have seen the light and I’m crowing.

Muhammad Ali

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.

John Lubbock

And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him.

Jack London – “The Call of the Wild”

Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.

Jane Howard

To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts – such is the duty of the artist.

Robert Schumann

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.

Plato

If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.

Frank Lloyd Wright

I’d rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth.

Steve McQueen

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.

Robert Benchley

Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.

Alan Lakein

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.

Antisthenes

The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.

Walter Bagehot

It is an ill thing to be the first to bring news of ill.

Aeschylus

My father was both the person who gave me reason to learn how to fight and the one who taught me the basics of fighting. He would tell me that if it was a big fight, it would probably be uneven, it wouldn’t be fair.

June Jordan

Round up the usual suspects.

the movie Casablanca, 1942

Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be.

Kahlil Gibran

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

Maya Angelou

Delay is the deadliest form of denial.

C. Northcote Parkinson

I am not an Englishman, I was never an Englishman, and I don’t ever want to be one. I am a Scotsman! I was a Scotsman and I will always be one.

Sean Connery

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

George Orwell, “1984″

The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler.

Edward Teller

When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.

(attributed to) Leonardo da Vinci

I heard that Jesus had a pet dinosaur. Evolution must be a myth then.

John Bacon

As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.

Dick Cavett

Scratch the Christian and you find the pagan – spoiled.

Israel Zangwill

 

4 Comments »

  • Deb said:

    Hey! I like this section! :) And you *do* like quotes after all. Me, too.

  • dan (author) said:

    I like quotes when they’re used for literary/artistic purposes. I feel like most writers never wanted to “convince” people, but to get their brains and hearts working. In actuality, I should thank those who have quoted various people. You learn a lot, both about a writer and the person quoting them, when you dig up the reality of thought by which the quoted lived their lives.

  • Deb Seaton said:

    That’s true about quotes. And it’s one of the many markers I look at when analyzing content about a person. I assess an individual in terms of a host of such indicators, to determine my impressions. Which, I might add, are deadly accurate. ;)

  • Emily Overturf said:

    I can’t wait for the day when I see something the one of you two said on someone else’s quote board. It’ll happen.

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  • August 19, 2010
    latest addition I've added this Sidenotes feature to the main page. I've been wanting a "further research" widget for a while; we'll keep testing.