Quotes

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates

“I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, I am a mischievous person.” Socrates

“The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways--I to die and you to live. Which is the better, only God knows.” Socrates

“ Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.” John Updike

“Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.” John Updike

“We are most alive when we're in love.” John Updike

“A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.” John Updike

“ America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.” John Updike

“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.” Kurt Vonnegut

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.” Kurt Vonnegut

“If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.” Kurt Vonnegut

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.” Kurt Vonnegut

“Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.” Kurt Vonnegut

“Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!” Kurt Vonnegut

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand” Kurt Vonnegut

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before... He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.” Kurt Vonnegut

“ One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.” Kurt Vonnegut

“Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.” Kurt Vonnegut

“There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.” Kurt Vonnegut

“If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.” Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

“The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.” Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

“It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.” Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

“A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.” Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

“At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.” Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

“Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious.” Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

“Give me the children until they are seven and anyone may have them afterwards.” Francis Xavier

“A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.” Lin Yutang

“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.” Lin Yutang

“Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.” Lin Yutang

“If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.” Lin Yutang