User:ClockworkSoul/oldquotes

Quote archive

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"He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash." – Critic H. L. Mencken, on the inaugural address of Warren G. Harding (June 23, 2009)
Watch your thoughts; they become words.

Watch your words; they become actions.

Watch your actions; they become habits.

Watch your habits; they become character.

Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

—Lao-Tze (June 11, 2009)
"Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them, rains fell straighter, clocks slowed, sounds were amplified" – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, by Ron Hansen (December 25 2008))
"We must not look at goblin men,

We must not buy their fruits:

Who knows upon what soil they fed

Their hungry thirsty roots?"

– Goblin Market, by Christina Rossetti (July 11 2008)
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" – Samuel Johnson (April 29 2008)
"A posteriori, through experience, [man] finds to his astonishment that he is not free, but subjected to necessity, that in spite of all his resolutions and reflections he does not change his conduct, and that from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he must carry out the very character which he himself condemns...." – Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life (March 09 2008)
"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." – Carl Gustav Jung (February 25 2008)
"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead." – Bertrand Russell (January 25 2007)
"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed." – Carl Jung (December 16 2006)
"Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real." – Iris Murdoch (December 15 2006)
"Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love." – Charles M. Schulz (December 10 2006)
"Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer." – Dave Barry (October 21 2006)
"I can't give you brains, but I can give you a diploma." – The Wizard of Oz (October 14 2006)
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." – Arthur Schopenhauer (August 12 2006)
"The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous." – Margot Fonteyn (February 23 2006)
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction." – E. F. Schumacher (February 10 2006)
"Politics are like sausage: nobody wants to know how it's made, and it'll eventually destroy your heart." – Stephen Colbert (January 10 2006)
"One of the things I learned the hard way was that it doesn't pay to get discouraged. Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore your faith in yourself." – Lucille Ball (January 5 2006)
"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus." – Francis P. Church (December 5 2005)
"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into." – Jonathan Swift (March 25 2005)
"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad." – Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson (8 December 2004)