Words Worth Keeping

My philosophy is that not only are you responsible for your life, but doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.

A rumor without a leg to stand on will get around some other way.

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

I am in earnest; I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single inch; and I will be heard.

There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.

He deserves Paradise who makes his companions laugh.

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

Each handicap is like a hurdle in a steeplechase, and when you ride up to it, if you throw your heart over, the horse will go along, too.

To love what you do and feel that it matters - how could anything be more fun?

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

A stitch in time would have confused Einstein.

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.

You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.

To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am.

It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Exercise ferments the humors, casts them into their proper channels, throws off redundancies, and helps nature in those secret distributions, without which the body cannot subsist in its vigor, nor the soul act with cheerfulness.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

Houses are built to live in, not to look on; therefore, let use be preferred before uniformity, except where both may be had.

A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life; he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.

The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.

Good company and good discourse are the very sinews of virtue.

The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star.

A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top.

We need men who can dream of things that never were.

Bacchus hath drowned more men than Neptune.

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.

Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

A witty saying proves nothing.

The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.

Man seeketh in society comfort, use and protection.

Friendship make prosperity more shining and lessens adversity by dividing and sharing it.

The happiest is the person who suffers the least pain; the most miserable who enjoys the least pleasure.

Man is the artificer of his own happiness.

Health is not valued till sickness comes.

Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.

Health is worth more than learning.

We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.

For certain people after 50, litigation takes the place of sex.

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid; you must also be well-mannered.

Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.

Nothing is as certain as that the vices of leisure are gotten rid of by being busy.

Parades should be classed as a nuisance and participants should be subject to a term in prison.

If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.

I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

The amount of noise which anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity.

Journalism is the ability to meet the challenge of filling space.

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

It does not matter much what a man hates provided he hates something.

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

When an opera star sings her head off, she usually improves her appearance.

Even paranoids have real enemies.

My only aversion to vice, is the price.

If you are an author and give one of your books to a member of the upper class, you must never expect him to read it.

I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement.

Principles have no real force except when one is well fed.

Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.

Know thyself? A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever observes himself arrests his own development. A caterpillar who wanted to know itself well would never become a butterfly.

Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.

The way to fight a woman is with your hat. Grab it and run.

The world began when I was born and the world is mine to win.

Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.

Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

An optimist is a man who has never had much experience.

My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.

My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated, but not signed.

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.

I would like to take you seriously but to do so would affront your intelligence.

Understand that legal and illegal are political, and often arbitrary, categorizations; use and abuse are medical, or clinical, distinctions.

Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly.

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

A government is the only known vessel that leaks from the top.

Man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.

Virtue is insufficient temptation.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others.

I have given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself.

Golf is a good walk spoiled.

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

Wit is so shining a quality that everybody admires it; most people aim at it, all people fear it, and few love it unless in themselves.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

It may not be that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong - but that is the way to bet.

California is the only state in the union where you can fall asleep under a rose bush in full bloom and freeze to death.

Start every day with a smile and get it over with.

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.

The husband who wants a happy marriage should learn to keep his mouth shut and his checkbook open.

No good deed goes unpunished.

It is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

The more one is hated, I find, the happier one is.

Brevity is the soul of lingerie.

Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded.

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

You never realize how short a month is until you pay alimony.

The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.

Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think laughable.

Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.

Dinner theater is anti-culture.

Virtue has never been as respectable as money.

Sex: the thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most amount of trouble.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man.

Humanity is not a gift of nature, it is a spiritual achievement to be earned.

There is nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation.

Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anybody else.

The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.

Laugh at yourself first, before anyone else can.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

One of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity.

Children should neither be seen nor heard from - ever again.

Television is for appearing on - not for looking at.

The country has charms only for those not obliged to stay there.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

The Irish are a fair people - they never speak well of one another.

I envy people who drink - at least they know what to blame everything on.

If your sexual fantasies were truly of interest to others, they would no longer be fantasies.

I do not care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.

The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone.

The average trade book has a shelf life of between milk and yogurt, except for books by any member of the Irving Wallace family - they have preservatives.

Chastity: the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.

A man must properly pay the fiddler. In my case it so happened that a whole symphony orchestra had to be subsidized.

Democracy: The substitution of election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

New York: where everyone mutinies but no one deserts.

England has forty-two religions and only two sauces.

My heart is pure as the driven slush.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

God heals, and the doctor takes the fee.

Humility is no substitute for a good personality.

I find that when I do not think of myself I do not think at all.

Sex: the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.

I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

A chic type, a rough type, an odd type - but never a stereotype.

When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?

That all men should be brothers is the dream of people who have no brothers.

There is one difference between a tax collector and a taxidermist - the taxidermist leaves the hide.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.

Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for movie stars.

One of these days, the people are going to demand peace of the government, and the government is going to have to give it to them.

God must hate common people, because he made them so common.

Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.

Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of other pessimists.

Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers.

If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.

Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.

The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

Sexual enlightenment is justified insofar as girls cannot learn too soon how children do not come into the world.

Nothing spoils a confession like repentance.

In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it.

Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.

Communism is like one big phone company.

Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.

Men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time.

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

The bonds that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each others life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.

Health food makes me sick.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.

Grub first, then ethics.

I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.

Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality the cost becomes prohibitive.

Wife: one who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

It has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake.

Accident, n.: A condition in which presence of mind is good, but absence of body is better.

Knowledge is power.

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

Whosoever shall not fall by the sword or by famine, shall fall by pestilence, so why bother shaving?

The wicked at heart probably know something.

Whosover loveth wisdom is righteous, but he that keepeth company with fowl is weird.

My Lord, my Lord! What hast Thou done, lately?

I do not believe in God. I believe in cashmere.

To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge.

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

Grief is a species of idleness.

It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new ones.

Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy, wealthy and dead.

Democracy: The worship of jackals by jackasses.

Perhaps God is not dead; perhaps God is himself mad.

War is like love; it always finds a way.

There are three terrible ages of childhood - 1 to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 to 30.

There is no great concurrence between learning and wisdom.

Finance is the art of passing currency from hand to hand until it finally disappears.

Anybody caught selling macrame in public should be dyed a natural color and hung out to dry.

Wife: a former sweetheart.

Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and time is running out.

Oh God, how do the world and heavens confine themselves, when our hearts tremble in their own barriers!

It is not enough to succeed; others must fail.

The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

Curiosity killed the cat, but for awhile I was a suspect.

The only difference between genius and stupidity is that genius is limited.

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.

Laughter, while it lasts, slackens and unbraces the mind, weakens the faculties, and causes a kind of remissness and dissolution in all the powers of the soul.

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

DISCLAIMER: A society where such disclaimers are needed is saddening.

In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward mobile.

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

The music at a wedding procession always reminds me of the music of soldiers going into battle.

I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.

Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great.

The entire sum of existence is the magic of being needed by just one person.

The only possible form of exercise is to talk, not to walk.

Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.

We all learn by experience but some of us have to go to summer school.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.

The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.

Sex is the biggest nothing of all time.

Canada: A few acres of snow.

We succeed only as we identify in life, or in war, or in anything else, a single overriding objective, and make all other considerations bend to that one objective.

If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.

Sleep is lovely, death is better still, not to have been born is of course the miracle.

Creator: a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

I was never ruined but twice: once when I lost a lawsuit, and once when I won one.

The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.

Paying alimony is like feeding hay to a dead horse.

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

Insanity: a perfectly rational adjustment to the insane world.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.