Popular thoughts
Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them more.
Oscar Wilde
First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.
Epictetus
Men always want to be a womans first love - women like to be a mans last romance.
Oscar Wilde
'If a person were to try stripping the disguises from actors while they play a scene upon stage, showing to the audience their real looks and the faces they were born with, would not such a one spoil the whole play ? And would not the spectators think he deserved to be driven out of the theatre with brickbats, as a drunken disturber ?... Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part, until the manager waves them off the stage ? Moreover, this manager frequently bids the same actor to go back in a different costume, so that he who has but lately played the king in scarlet now acts the flunkey in patched clothes. Thus all things are presented by shadows.'
Erasmus
A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
Oscar Wilde
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
Winston Churchill
A genius is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. He breaks his engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his attention down and back from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his genius constantly occupies his mind.
William James
A good conscience fears no witness, but a guilty conscience is solicitous even in solitude. If we do nothing but what is honest, let all the world know it. But if otherwise, what does it signify to have nobody else know it, so long as I know it myself? Miserable is he who slights that witness.
Seneca
A happy life is one which is in accordance with its own nature.
Seneca
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
Winston Churchill
A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
William James
A man never sees all that his mother has been to him until it's too late to let her know that he sees it.
William Dean Howells
A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.
Soren Kierkegaard
About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won't like you at all.
Rita Mae Brown
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety. Other women cloy the appetites they feed, but she makes hungry where most she satisfies.
William Shakespeare
All I can say about life is, Oh God, enjoy it!
Bob Newhart
All the world's a stage, and the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.
William Shakespeare
And do as adversaries do in law, strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends.
William Shakespeare
And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.
William Shakespeare
And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
Soren Kierkegaard
Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.
Winston Churchill
