Douglas Adams:

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."

Ansel Adams:

"Photography is a way of telling what you feel about what you see."

Ansel Adams:

"The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance."

Diane Ackerman:

"I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it."

Ansel Adams:

"To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, 'There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer'."

James Trulow Adam:

"The great use of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it."

Edward Abbey:

"When the fight begins within himself, a man’s worth something."

Edward Abbey:

"What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse."

Edward Abbey:

"May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds."

Henry David Thoreau:

"Every natural form -- palm leaves and acorns, oak leaves and sumach and dodder -- are untranslatable aphorisms."

Baltasar Gracian:

"It is better to sleep on things beforehand than lie awake about them afterwards."

Miguel de Unamuno:

"We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past."

Miguel de Unamuno:

"We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past."

Blaise Pascal:

"Having been unable to strengthen justice, we have justified strength."

Rudolf Arnheim:

"Nothing is more humbling than to look with a strong magnifying glass at an insect so tiny that the naked eye sees only the barest speck and to discover that nevertheless it is sculpted and articulated and striped with the same care and imagination as a zebra. Apparently it does not occur to nature whether or not a creature is within our range of vision, and the suspicion arises that even the zebra was not designed for our benefit."

George Eliot:

"Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact."

Stanislaw J. Lec:

"Who knows what Columbus would have discovered if America hadn't got in the way."

William Blake:

"The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind."

Bruce Barton:

"When you are through changing, you are through."

Oscar Wilde:

"The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read."

Stanislaw J. Lec:

"We are all equal before the law, but not before those appointed to apply it."

Desiderius Erasmus:

"War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it."

Henry Becque:

"What makes equality such difficult business is that we only want it with our superiors."

Cardinal De Retz:

"There are no small steps in great affairs."

Emerson:

"Machinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine. If you do not use the tools, they use you."

Montesquieu:

"Justice to others is charity for ourselves."

Maria Von Ebner-Eschenbach:

"Many priceless things can be bought."

Elizabeth Bibesco:

"To a man of the world the universe is a suburb."

Don Marquis:

"There is nothing so habit-forming as money."

Pope:

"We may see the small value God has for riches by the people he gives them to."

Kin Hubbard:

"There is one advantage of being poor - a doctor will cure you faster."

George Eliot:

"One must be poor to know the luxury of giving."

Gerald Brenan:

"Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know that it is money."

William Shenstone:

"Every single instance of a friend's insincerity increases our dependence on the efficacy of money."

Jules Renard:

"Failure is not the only punishment for laziness: there is also the success of others."

Logan Pearsall Smith:

"The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves."

Baudelaire:

"No task is a long one but the task on which one dare not start. It becomes a nightmare."

Gracian:

"For a thing to remain undone nothing more is needed than to think it done."

Carlo Dossi:

"The best way to be more free is to grant more freedom to others."

George Santayana:

"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."

Duc de La Rochefoucauld Francois:

"We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves."

George Christopher Lichtenberg:

It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.

Abba Agathon:

"I have never gone to sleep with a grievance against anyone. And, as far as I could, I have never let anyone go to sleep with a grievance against me."

Jules Renard:

"Words are the small change of thought."

Yahia Lababidi:

"Like cars in amusement parks, our direction is often determined through collisions."

Horace:

"He who postpones the hour of living is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses."

Sebastien-Roch-Nicolas de Chamfort:

"Society is composed of two great classes: those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners."

Spanish proverb:

"Whoever gossips to you will gossip about you."

Mary Pickford:

"If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not falling down but the staying down."

Amelia Earhart:

"Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace."

Christopher Morley:

"There's no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love."

Leslie Nielsen:

"Doing nothing is very hard to do - you never know when you're finished."

William James:

"Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does."

Henri Frederic Amiel:

"The fire which enlightens is the same fire which consumes."

Yahia Lababidi:

"To hurry pain is to leave a classroom still in session. To prolong pain is to remain seated in a vacated classroom and miss the next lesson."

James Richardson:

"The knife disappears with sharpening."

Yahia Lababidi:

"Wars are the side-effects of nationalism."

William Least Heat Moon:

"What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do - especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road."

Churton Collins:

"Never claim as a right what you can ask as a favour."

Bernard Shaw:

"What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering."

John Oliver Hobbes:

"A man with a career can have no time to waste upon his wife and friends; he has to devote it wholly to his enemies."

Naploean:

"The best way to keep one's word in not to give it."

La Bruyere:

"The shortest and best way to make your fortune is to let people see clearly that it is in their interests to promote yours."

Shakespeare:

"Men shut their doors against a setting sun."

Lord Chesterfield:

"Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishment add lustre, and many more people see than weigh."

Ben Jonson:

"Avoid shame, but do not seek glory; nothing so expensive as glory."

Benjamin Desraeli:

"Nobody is forgotten when it is convenient to remember him."

Elizabeth Bibesco:

"Attributing our own temptations to others, we give them credit for victories they have never won."

Chateaubriand:

"One is not superior merely because one sees the world in an odious light."

Hazlitt:

"Everyone in a crowd has the power to throw dirt; nine out of ten have the inclination."

D. H. Lawrence:

"Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions."

Lord Chesterfield:

"The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one's self to be acquainted with it."

Prince De Ligne:

"As soon as we attract enough attention in the world to play a part in it, we are set rolling like a ball which will never be at rest."

Emerson:

"No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it, he must serve it too."

Albert Camus:

"To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others."

Lichtenberg:

"To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation."

Eric Hoffer:

"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other."

Stendhal:

"One can acquire anything in solitude except character."

Albert Guinon:

"People who cannot bear to be alone are generally the worst company."

Lord Shaftesbury:

"When men are easy in themselves, they let others remain so."

Leo Shestov:

"If you want people to envy you your sorrows or your shame, look as if you were proud of it. If you have enough of the actor in you, rest assured, you will become the hero of the day."

Sydney Smith:

"A great deal of talent is lost to the world for the want of a little courage."

Vauvenargues:

"When we feel that we lack whatever is needed to secure someone else's esteem, we are very close to hating him."

Marquis De La Grange:

"When we ask advice we are usually looking for an accomplice."

La Rochefoucauld:

"Sometimes we think we dislike flattery, but it is only the way it is done that we dislike."

Marcus Aurelius:

"I often marvel that while each man loves himself more than anyone else, he sets less value on his own estimate than on the opinion of others."

Confucius:

"When you meet someone better than yourself, turn your thoughts to becoming his equal. When you meet someone not as good as you are, look within and examine yourself."

Amiel:

"Tell me what you think you are and I will tell you what you are not."

Jung:

"Wherever an inferiority complex exists, there is good reason for it. There is always something inferior there, although not just where we presuade ourselves that it is."

Cervantes:

"It is one thing to praise discipline, and another to submit to it."

Emerson:

"People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character."

Thomas Fuller:

"A stumble may prevent a fall."

"Our years, our debts, and our enemies are always more numerous than we imagine."

Dr. Samuel Johnson:

"Almost every man wastes a part of his life in attempts to display qualities which he does not possess, and to gain applause which he cannot keep."

Jean Rostand:

"We alone know that those whom we really resemble are not at all those whom we seem to resemble."

Vauvenargues:

"We discover in ourselves what others hide from us, and we recognise in others what we hide from ourselves."

Elizabeth Bowen:

"The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all around."

Cesare Pavese:

"When one has made mistake, one says: ' Another time I shall know what to do,' and what one should say is: 'I already know what I shall do another time'."

W.B. Yeats:

"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry."

Robert Mallet:

"It is not impossibilities which fill us with the deepest despair, but possibilities which we have failed to realize."

Elias Canetti:

"People love as self-recoginition what they hate as an accusation."

F.H. Bradley:

"Up to a certain point every man is what he thinks he is."

Vauvenargues:

"There are many things we despise in order that we may not have to despise ourselves."

Mark Twain:

"When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his heart no man much respects himself."

Pierre Reverdy:

"One is vain by nature, modest by necessity."

Vauvenargues:

"Men sometimes feel injured by praise because it assigns a limit to their merit."

La Rochefoucauld:

"Self-love is subtler than the subtlest man in the world."

Elizabeth Bibesco:

"To others we are not ourselves but a perfomer in their lives cast for a part we do not even know that we are playing."

Thoreau:

"We are more anxious to speak than to be heard."

James Russel Lowell:

''Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this: that you are dreadfully like other people.''

Gracian:

"You should aim to be independent of any one vote, of any one fashion, of any one century."

Robert Musil:

"One does what one is; one becomes what one does."

W.B. Yeats:

"When I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me preparation for something that never happens."

Oscar Wilde:

"One's real life is often the life that one does not lead."

Robert Mallet:

"How many pessimists end up by desiring the things they fear, in order to prove that they are right.

Gerard Bauer:

''The voice is a second face.''

Joseph De Maistre:

"In the course of my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians; I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be a Persian; but man I have never met."

Oscar Wilde:

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

Blake:

"No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings."

Hermann Hesse:

''Everything is worthy of notice, for everything can be interpreted.''

Jung:

"The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it."

Cesare Pavese:

"One must look for one thing only, to find many."

Goethe:

"If you wish to advance into the infinite, explore the finite in all directions."

Henry De Montheriant:

"A life, admirable at first sight, may have cost so much in imposed liabilities, chores and self-abasement that brilliant though it appears, it cannot be considered as other than a failure. Another, which seems to have misfired, is in reality a triumphant success, because it has cost so little."

T.S. Eliot:

"It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things."

Oliver Wendell Holmes:

''A man may fulfil the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.''

Jean Cocteau:

"What are the thoughts of the canvas on which a masterpiece is being painted? 'I am being soiled, brutally treated and concealed from view.' Thus men grumble at their destiny, however fair."

Nietzsche:

"Not every end is a goal. The end of melody is not its goal, but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either."

Robert Frost:

"The best way out is always through."

Elias Canetti:

''He would like to start from a scratch. Where is scratch?''

Vauvenargues:

''Necessity relieves us from the embarrasment of choice.''

Elizabeth Bowen:

''Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.''

Thoreau:

''There is always some accident in the best of things, whether thoughts or epxressions or deeds. The memorable thought, the happy expression, the admirable deed are only partly ours.''

William James:

''If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkeness would be the superemly valid human experience.''

Pope:

''To be angry is to revenge the faults of others upon ourselves.''

Thomas Fuller:

''Had Narcissus himself seen his own face when he had been angry, he could never have fallen in love with himself.''

Schopenhauer:

''Whoever is abandoned by hope has also been abandoned by fear; this is the meaning of the word 'desperate'.''

Vauvenargues:

''The most absurd and the most rash hopes have sometimes been the cause of extraordinary success.''

Anon:

''As cowardly as a coward is, it is not safe to call a coward a coward.''

Sophocles:

''To the man who is afraid everything rustles.''

Elizabeth Bibesco:

''We often call a certainty a hope, to bring luck to it.''

Thomas Hardy:

The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfilment of that hope never entirely removes.

Aristotle:

Hope is a waking dream.

Chamfort:

All passions exaggerate: it is only because they exaggerate that they are passions.

Hazlitt:

To great evils we submit; we resent little provocations.

Nietzsche:

At times, our strength propel us so far forward we can no longer endure our weaknesses and perish from them.

Joseph Conrad:

I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make despair pause. For in truth we who are creatures of impulse are not creatures of despair.

Kafka:

Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair.

Hazlitt:

I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it raging and roaring like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free and ending just where it began.

Goethe:

Whatever liberates our spirits without giving us mastery over ourselves is destructive.

Anatole France:

The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.

Nietzsche:

The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it - what it costs us.

Lord Chesterfield:

Many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request.

Samuel Butler:

We grow weary of those things (and perhaps soonest) which we most desire.

Nietzsche:

Possessions are generally diminished by possessions.

Gerald Brenan:

The things we are best acquainted with are often the things we lack. This is because we have spent so much time thinking of them.

Seneca:

What nature requires is obtainable, and within easy reach. It's for the superfluous we sweat.

Blake:

He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.

Pascal:

Our nature consists in movement; absolute rest is death.

Chekhov:

When all is said and done, no literature can outdo the cynicism of real life, you won't intoxicate with one glass someone who has already drunk up a whole barrel.

Pope:

The vanity of human life is like a river, constantly passing away, and yet constantly coming on.

Diderot:

What a fine comedy this world would be if one did not play a part in it!

Ronald Firbank:

The world is disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.

George Sand:

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

Lord Chesterfield:

We read every day, with astonishment, things which we see everyday, without surprise.

Cardinal De Retz:

We learn from experience that not everything which is incredible, is untrue.

Emerson:

Everything intercepts us from ourselves.

Goethe:

There are so many fine and substantial things in the world at any one time, but they are not in touch with each other.

Lichtenberg:

Just as people find water whenever they dig, man everhwere finds the incomprehensible, sooner or later.

Rabbinic saying:

The stone fell on the pitcher? Woe to the pitcher. The pitcher fell on the stone? Woe to the pitcher.

Aldous Huxley:

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

Mark Twain:

The human race consists of the dangerously insane and such as are not.

Archbishop Whately:

It is a folly to expect men to do all that they may reasonably be expected to do.

Vauvenargues:

Contempt for human nature is an error of human reason.

Lichtenberg:

That man is the noblest of all creatures may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet denied him the title.

Blake:

The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.

Samuel Butler:

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

Goethe:

Everyone has something in his nature which, if he were to express openly, would of necessity give offence.

Charles Caleb Colton:

Of all the marvellous works of the Diety, perhaps there is nothing that angels behold with such supreme astonishment as a proud man.

Lichtenberg:

Man is a masterpiece of creation, if only because no amount of determinism can prevent him from believing that he can act as a free being.

Keats:

I go among the fields and catch a glimpse of a stoat or a fieldmouse peeping out of the withered grass - the creature hath a purpose and its eyes are bright with it. I go amongst the buildings of a city and see a man hurrying along - to what? the Creature has a purpose and his eyes are bright with it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.:

The ultimate good is better reached by free trade in ideas.

George Bernard Shaw:

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

Mark Twain:

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind, it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

Josh Billings:

There is nothing so easy to learn as experience and nothing so hard to apply.

Charles Lamb:

My motto is: Contented with little, yet wishing for more.

Antoine Fabre D'olivet:

Man is a plant which bears thoughts, just as a rose-tree bears roses and an apple-tree bears apples.

Oscar Wilde:

The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analyses disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.

Valery:

God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.

Comtesse Diane:

You have to be very religious to change your religion.

Emerson:

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

Chamfort:

The only thing that stops God sending a second flood is that the first one was useless.

Emily Dickinson:

They say God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat a recluse.

Mendel of Kotzk:

God dwells wherever man lets him in.

Samuel Butler:

God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.

The Koretser Rabbi:

I love to pray at sunrise - before the world becomes polluted with vanity and hatred.

Voltaire:

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

Napolean Bonaparte:

A man cannot become an atheist merely be wishing it.

Emerson:

The religions we call false were once true.

Santayana:

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

Lichtenberg:

Probably no invention came more easily to man than Heaven.

Goethe:

Individuality seems to be Nature's whole aim - and she cares nothing for individuals.

A. N. Whitehead:

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

Samuel Butler (II):

A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.

Kin Hubbard:

Bees are not as busy as we think they are. They just can't buzz any slower.

G.K. Chesterton:

Anything that is deliberate, twisted, created as a trap and a mystery, must be discovered at last; everything that is done naturally remains mysterious.

Freud:

The principal task of civilization, it's actual raison d' etre, is to defend us against nature.

Meister Eckhart:

Even stones have a love, a love that seeks the ground.

Emerson

All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle.

Emerson

Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.

J.B.S. Haldane

My suspicion is that the universe in not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

Prince De Ligne

The only way to read a book of aphorisms without being bored is to open it at random and, having found something that interests you , close the book and meditate.

Nietzsche

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what other men say in whole books - what other men do not say in whole books.

George Bernard Shaw:

"We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility of the future."

Voltaire:

"The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease."

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.:

"The ultimate good is better reached by free trade in ideas."

Louisa May Alcott:

" I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship."