In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Douglas Adams
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
Douglas Adams
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Douglas Adams
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.
Douglas Adams
When I investigate and when I discover that the forces of the heavens and the planets are within ourselves, then truly I seem to be living among the gods.
Leon Battista Alberti
I am not afraid of the storm, for I am learning to sail my ship.
Louisa May Alcott
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
Maya Angelou
If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain.
Maya Angelou
Every problem has a gift for you in its hands.
Richard Bach
You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true. You may have to work for it, however.
Richard Bach
Dogs feel very strongly that they should always go with you in the car, in case the need should arise for them to bark violently at nothing right in your ear.
Dave Barry
If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there is a man on base.
Dave Barry
You can say any foolish thing to a dog, and the dog will give you a look that says, "My God, you're right! I never would've thought of that!"
Dave Barry
When you are about to eat a brownie, your brain transmits a signal to your hand, telling it to go ahead and put the brownie into your mouth; almost instantaneously, your hand responds with the signal informing your brain that you ate the brownie several minutes earlier, because your hand and your mouth agreed many years ago that, as far as chocolate is concerned, there is no need to involve your brain.
Dave Barry
Even death is unreliable; instead of zero it might be some ghastly hallucination, such as the square root of minus one.
Writer Samuel Beckett
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
Henry Ward Beecher
Now comes the mystery.
Henry Ward Beecher, Last words, March 8, 1887
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by then I was too famous.
Robert Benchley
Well, my deliberate opinion is - it's a jolly strange world.
Arnold Bennett
It is well, when judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality.
Arnold Bennett
Don't mistake pleasure for happiness. They're a different breed of dog.
Josh Billings
Things that upset a terrier may pass virtually unnoticed by a Great Dane.
Smiley Blanton
If there is one thing worse than being an ugly duckling in a house of swans, it's having the swans pretend there's no difference.
Teena Booth, Falling From Fire
Friendships are fragile things, and require as much handling as any other fragile and precious thing.
Randolph S. Bourne
I’ve never met a person, I don’t care what his condition, in whom I could not see possibilities. I don’t care how much a man may consider himself a failure, I believe in him, for he can change the thing that is wrong in his life any time he is ready and prepared to do it.
Preston Bradley
If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
Anne Bradstreet
A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him.
David Brink
Breathless, we flung us on a windy hill; Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.
Rupert Brooke
Let the refining and improving of your own life keep you so busy that you have little time to criticize others.
H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost.
H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
He said true things, but called them by wrong names.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
You were made perfectly to be loved - and surely I have loved you, in the idea of you, my whole life long.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp. Or what's a heaven for?
Robert Browning
Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.
Leo Buscaglia
You have to walk carefully in the beginning of love; the running across fields into your lover's arms can only come later when you're sure they won't laugh if you trip.
Jonathan Carroll - Outside the Dog Museum
Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
Tom Clancy
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
Arthur C. Clarke
Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
Arthur C. Clarke
[The ages of] seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder.
Leonard Cohen, The Favorite Game, Bk 1, Ch. 17
He’s a short man, that’s his trouble. Never trust a man with short legs – brains too near their bottoms.
Noël Coward, writer
I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.
E. E. Cummings (1894-1962)
I have gathered a posy of other men’s flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own.
Michel de Montaigne (February 28, 1533 – September 13, 1592)
I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
More than kisses, letters mingle souls.
John Donne
No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.
John Donne - Meditation XVII
The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely.
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
All people want is someone to listen.
Hugh Elliott, Standing Room Only weblog, May 8, 2003
How much of human life is lost in waiting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If I'd known it was going to be a classic, I would have paid attention.
Julius Epstein, Screen writer of Casablanca
Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner
We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow follows us. Choose a place where you won't do harm--yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.
E. M. Forester
Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.
Anne Frank (1929 - 1945), Diary of a Young Girl, 1952
Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on.
Robert Frost
I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
At three cents a word, every time I say ‘bang’ in a story I get three cents. If you think I’m going to finish a gun battle while my hero’s got 15 cents worth of unexploded ammunition in his gun, you’re nuts.
Erle Stanley Gardner
Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So... get on your way.
Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss)
To be honest, Norton's death is something I'm not able to think about. I know it happens to the best of us; I've certainly been through it with humans, with those closest to me, those whom I've loved the most. Yet somehow it's different with my cat. Maybe it's because there's no formal language with which to directly communicate caring or sorrow. When a parent is old or dying, it's easy (unless you're British) to say the words "I love you." And once those words are said, it makes everything less difficult, even the pain of final separation. ...But with an animal, words are meaningless. It's actions that count.... When it does finally come time to say good-bye to him, I want to be sure he knows how much he's meant to me. I may not be able to tell him I love him, but I sure can show him.
Peter Gellers, author of The Cat Who Went To Paris, A Cat Abroad, and The Cat Who'll Live Forever
There’s a kind of flowering dullness about [Julie Andrews], a boredom in rowdy bloom.
Columnist Joyce Haber
Cute little babies that fall out of swings - These are a few of my favourite things.
Oscar Hammerstein, working lyric for a piece from "The Sound of Music"
Breast Feeding should not be attempted by fathers with hairy chests, since they can make the baby sneeze and give it wind.
Mike Harding - The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac
Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
Robert A. Heinlein
Don't ever become a pessimist, Ira; a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun--and neither can stop the march of events.
Robert A. Heinlein - Time Enough For Love
I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
Ernest Hemingway
We need a president who's fluent in at least one language.
Buck Henry
Never regret. If it’s good, it’s wonderful. If it’s bad, it’s experience.
Writer Victoria Holt
There is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.
Homer - Odyssey, ninth century B.C.
To love another person is to see the face of God.
Victor Hugo, Lyric from Les Miserables
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
Every winter,
When the great sun has turned his face away,
The earth goes down into a vale of grief,
And fasts, and weeps, and shrouds herself in sables,
Leaving her wedding-garlands to decay--
Then leaps in spring to his returning kisses.
Charles Kingsley, Saint's Tragedy (act III, sc. 1)
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.
D. H. Lawrence
He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.
Stephen Leacock
The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.
Writer Madeleine L’Engle
Into each life some rain must fall, some days must be dark and dreary.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
If you knew that you were going to die tonight, or merely that you would have to go away and never return, would you, looking upon men and things for the last time, see them in the same light that you have hitherto seen them? Would you not love as you have never yet loved?
Writer Maurice Maeterlinck
Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
W. Somerset Maugham
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.
Herman Melville
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
A. A. Milne
The heart that gives – gathers.
Hannah More (English religious writer and philanthropist)
No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.
Christopher Morley (American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet)
I think that I shall never see A billboard lovely as a tree. Indeed, unless the billboards fall, I'll never see a tree at all.
Ogden Nash - Song of the Open Road, 1945
To keep your marriage brimming, with love in the wedding cup, whenever you're wrong, admit it; whenever you're right, shut up.
Ogden Nash
If you don't want to work, you have to work to earn enough money so that you won't have to work.
Ogden Nash
The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
Blaise Pascal - Pensées, Translated by A.J. Krailsheimer
What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another?
Alan Paton (South African author and liberal political activist)
The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Eden Phillpotts (English novelist, poet, and dramatist)
It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, 'Go away, I'm looking for the truth.' and so it goes away. Puzzling.
Robert M. Pirsig (American writer and philosopher)
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary....
Edgar Allen Poe
To err is human, to forgive, divine.
Alexander Pope (English poet)
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.
Ambrose Redmoon (writer and psychedelic folk rock band former manager)
We cannot really love anybody with whom we never laugh.
Agnes Repplier (American essayist)
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Rainer Maria Rilke
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love; the more they give, the more they possess.
Rainer Maria Rilke
We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.
Tom Robbins (American author)
There are many things worth living for, there are a few things worth dying for, but there is nothing worth killing for.
Tom Robbins (American author)
When the friendly lights go out, there is a light by which the heart sees.
Olga Rosmanith (author)
[George Bush] has the look about him of someone who might sit up and yip for a Dog Yummie.
Columnist Mike Royko on President George Bush
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
George Santayana (1863-1952, philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist)
Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.
George Santayana (1863-1952, philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist)
Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have.
Rabbi H. Schachtel, The Real Enjoyment of Living
I think, therefore I am - I think.
Howard Schneider (award-winning cartoonist, sculptor and children's book author)
Now join your hands, and with your hands your hearts.
William Shakespeare - King Henry the Sixth
Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me.
William Shakespeare - Antony and Cleopatra
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
William Shakespeare - Henry IV Part I
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.
George Bernard Shaw
The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about, and all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.
George Bernard Shaw
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
George Bernard Shaw
Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he is most likely to be creamed?
Solomon Short (author)
The art of loving matures with age and experience.
Writer Isaac Bashevis Singer
...what nature creates has eternity in it.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
I’ve seen a look in dogs’ eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.
John Steinbeck
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves.
August Strindberg (Swedish writer, playwright, and painter)
I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is: Try to please everybody.
Editor Herbert Bayard Swope
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
Henry David Thoreau
Not all who wander are lost.
J. R. R. Tolkien
Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.
Arnold Toynbee (English economic historian)
The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for 30 years she served nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.
Calvin Trillin (American journalist, humorist, and novelist)
And since the stench of death will always attract flies and vermin, the arrival of Geraldo was perhaps inevitable.
Garry Trudeau (American cartoonist, best known for Doonesbury)
Ever consider what (dogs) must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul – chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we’re the greatest hunters on earth!
Anne Tyler
It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.
Anne Tyler (1941 - ), Celestial Navigation, 1974
Listen earnestly to anything your child wants to tell you no matter what. If you don't listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won't tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff.
Catherine Wallace (teacher, poet and essayist)
We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry.
John Webster (English Jacobean dramatist)
A true friend is someone who is there for you when they would rather be someplace else.
Len Wein (American comic book writer/editor best known for co-creating Swamp Thing and Wolverine)
There are two ways of spreading light: To be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Edith Wharton
I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
E. B. White
I celebrate myself, and sing myself.
Walt Whitman
So many things have made living and learning easier. But the real things haven't changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and to be cheerful and have courage when things go wrong.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Though my soul may set in darkness,
it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too fondly
to be fearful of the night.
Sarah Williams (December 1837 – 25 April 1868), English poet and novelist
If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go.
Terry Tempest Williams (American author, naturalist, and environmental activist)
The limits of my language means the limits of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951, Austrian philosopher)
Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.
Gene Wolfe (American science fiction and fantasy writer)
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
Virginia Woolf
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
William Butler Yeats
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
Lin Yutang (Chinese writer and inventor)
