Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

If you're going to do something tonight that you'll be sorry for tomorrow, sleep late.

Implicit in the activist conception of government is the assumption that you can take the good things in a complex system for granted, and just improve the things that are not so good. What is lacking in this conception is any sense that a society, an institution, or even a single human being, is an intricate system of fragile inter-relationships, whose complexities are little understood and easily destabilized.

Informal relationships are not mere minor interstitial supplements to the major institutions of society. These informal relationships not only include important decision-making processes, such as the family, but also produce much of the background social capital without which the other major institutions of society could not function nearly as effectively as they do.

Every animal is sad after coitus except the human female and the rooster.

A line runs from the meditations of the heart to the words of the mouth. The meditations are not clear to us until the mouth utters its words. If what the mouth utters is unclear or foolish or mendacious, it must be that the meditations are the same. But the line runs both ways. The words of the mouth will become the meditations of the heart, and the habit of loose talk loosens the fastenings of our understanding.

Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

Insanity -- a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

A wonderful discovery--psychoanalysis. Makes quite simple people feel they're complex.

I have heard it said that the first ingredient of success -- the earliest spark in the dreaming youth -- if this; dream a great dream.

If there were dreams to sell, what would you buy?

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.

Instinct is the nose of the mind.

In a mad world, only the mad are sane.

The true function of art is to...edit nature and so make it coherent and lovely. The artist is a sort of impassioned proofreader, blue-penciling the bad spelling of God.

It is only doubt that creates. It is only the minority that counts.

We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.

Any man who inflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.