Our lives are not in the lap of the gods, but in the lap of our cooks. ~Lin Yutang
Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks. ~Doug Larson
The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family. ~Thomas Jefferson
There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft. ~Jessamyn West, Saturday Review, 21 September 1957
This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still. ~Joseph Conrad
Striving to better, oft we mar what's well. ~William Shakespeare, King Lear, 1605
A dream has power to poison sleep. ~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Mutability"
Each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. ~Edgar Allan Poe
I love America, and I love American women. But there is one thing that deeply shocks me - American closets. I cannot believe one can dress well when you have so much. ~Andree Putman
I was undoubtedly at the end of my strength. A flood of tears gushed from my eyes. I wouldn't have been able to tell the reason for these tears, which were not tears of distress, and which, to the contrary, gave me relief and relaxation.... It was for myself I was weeping, perhaps, for my presence in this garden, for this cursed love in which I felt that everything which then remained to me - every generous impulse, every lost desire, and every noble ambition was profaned by the impure breath of these kisses, of which I was ashamed and for which I was also thirsty. Well, no! Why should I lie to myself? Physical tears... tears of weakness, fatigue and fever, tears of enervation before sights too cruel for my debilitated senses, before odors too strong for my sense of smell, before the continual oscillation of my carnal desires from impotence to frenzy... the tears of a woman... tears for nothing at all! ~"The Garden," Chapter 6
The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good old days. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physical demythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, roofless wandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right to walk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror. The walk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage of the feudal promenade in the nineteenth century. ~Theodor W. Adorno
Women are like dogs really. They love like dogs, a little insistently. And they like to fetch and carry and come back wistfully after hard words, and learn rather easily to carry a basket. ~Mary Roberts Rinehart
To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer. ~Farmer's Almanac, 1978
Vegetarian: A person who eats only side dishes. ~Gerald Lieberman
The Internet is clearly about more than sports scores and email now. It's a place where we can conduct our democracy and get very large amounts of data to very large numbers of people. ~Frank James
If you are happy, go skipping. If you are sad, go skipping! ~Terri Guillemets
You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers. ~Walter Lippmann
You are a puppet, but in the hands of the infinite, which may be your own. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation's braggart lords. ~John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, 1916
There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science. ~Anton Chekhov
One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. "Oh, no," I said. "Disneyland burned down." He cried and cried, but I think that deep down, he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late. ~Jack Handey One thing you learn in a long marriage is how many sneezes to wait before saying, "Bless you." ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
Nowhere is there an account or portrait of Christ laughing... he is always stern, serious and as gloomy as a prison guard. Never does one see him laughing until tears appear in his eyes like the roly-poly squint-eyed Buddha guffawing with arms upraised. ~Author Unknown
A sport where the players actually enjoy getting hit in the head by a ball. ~Soccer advertisement, published for the MetroStars Major League Soccer team, 1997
A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. ~John Muir