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."