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.