Archives - May 2006

The only means of strengthening one's intelligence is to make up one's mind about nothing --- to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

I always read the last page of a book first so that if I die before I finish, I'll know how it turned out.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

There are two kinds of light --- the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.

Oh! do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.

You can cage the singer but not the song.

Life doesn't make any sense, and we all pretend it does. Comedy's job is to point out that it doesn't make sense, and that it doesn't make much difference anyway.

Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent.

Isn't elegance forgetting what one is wearing?

Women know the way to rear up children (to be just). They know a simple, merry, tender knack of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes, and stringing pretty words that make no sense. And kissing full sense into empty words.

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is the progressive discovery of our ignorance.

Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands --- and then eat just one of the pieces.

At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they hope it can be done, then they see it can be done --- then it is done and the whole world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.

If you can't make a mistake, you can't make anything.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same kind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.

Traveling in the company of those we love is home in motion.

When I say beautiful things, I'm not necessarily living them; when I live them, the beautiful thing is that words aren't necessary.

The only way most people recognize their limits is by trespassing on them.

In creating, the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.

Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.

Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.

Without heroes, we are all plain people, and don't know how far we can go.

What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.

Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly.

Although no sculptured marble should rise to their memory, nor engraved stone bear record of their deeds, yet will their remembrance be as lasting as the land they honored.

It is remarkable how similar the pattern of love is to the pattern of insanity.

Life is tough, and if you have the ability to laugh at it you have the ability to enjoy it.

We invent what we love, and what we fear.