personality quotes

Bittersweet October. The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking, perfect pause between the opposing miseries of summer and winter. ~Carol Bishop Hipps



No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. ~H.L. Mencken



If you can go through life without experiencing pain you probably haven�t been born yet. ~Neil Simon



Never be grandiloquent when you want to drive home a searching truth. Don't whip with a switch that has the leaves on, if you want it to tingle. ~Henry Ward Beecher



We must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called on to perform what we cannot. ~Abraham Lincoln



This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army of the battlefield, and the battle takes place. Things remembered arrive at full gallop, ensuing to the wind. The light cavalry of comparisons deliver a magnificent deploying charge, the artillery of logic hurry up with their train and ammunition, the shafts of with start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle commences and is concluded with torrents of black water, just as a battle with powder. ~Honore de Balzac, "The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee"



An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain - the equality of all men. ~Ignazio Silone



Here is my advice as we begin the century that will lead to 2081. First, guard the freedom of ideas at all costs. Be alert that dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify. And don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with to free, public, unhampered expression. ~Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081



Many who would not take the last cookie would take the last lifeboat. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960



Cats can work out mathematically the exact place to sit that will cause most inconvenience. ~Pam Brown



The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not. ~Mark Twain The only way to lose weight is to check it as airline baggage. ~Peggy Ryan



Neurotics expect you to remember all the things that they tell you, and many that they don't. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966



Much unhappiness results from our inability to remember the nice things that happen to us. ~W.N. Rieger



If you promise not to believe everything your child says happens at school, I'll promise not to believe everything he says happens at home. ~Anonymous Teacher If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains. ~Cicero



Soccer is not about justice. It's a drama - and criminally wrong decisions against you are part and parcel of that. ~Pete Davies



We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings. ~Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present



I think the enemy is here before us.... I think the enemy is simple selfishness and compulsive greed.... I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land. ~Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again, 1949



A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money. ~W.C. Fields



The passion to get ahead is sometimes born of the fear lest we be left behind. ~Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind, 1954



If the sole reason why you must not kill your neighbour is because God has forbidden it and will severely punish you for it in this or the next life - then, when you learn that there is no God and that you need not fear His punishment, you will certainly kill your neighbour without hesitation, and you can only be prevented from doing so by mundane force. Thus either these dangerous masses must be held down most severely and kept most carefully away from any chance of intellectual awakening, or else the relationship between civilization and religion must undergo a fundamental revision. ~Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion