quotes for everyone

I don't go for this auto-cannibalism. Very damaging. ~Peter O'Toole, on psychoanalysis



Labor gives birth to ideas. ~Jim Rohn



I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or rat in a trap. I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked. I felt if I could take one lyncher with me, this would even up the score a little bit. ~Ida B. Wells



Death a friend that alone can bring the peace his treasures cannot purchase, and remove the pain his physicians cannot cure. ~Mortimer Collins



The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom. ~Michel de Montaigne, translated



Obstacles are like wild animals. They are cowards but they will bluff you if they can. If they see you are afraid of them... they are liable to spring upon you; but if you look them squarely in the eye, they will slink out of sight. ~Orison Swett Marden



I'm a slow walker, but I never walk back. ~Abraham Lincoln



Slight not what's near through aiming at what's far. ~Euripides



A pure hand needs no glove to cover it. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter



And mothers are their daughters' role model, their biological and emotional road map, the arbiter of all their relationships. ~Victoria Secunda



Wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an anxious man. ~Albert Camus



An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence. ~Honore de Balzac, "Scnes de la vie Parisienne," La Maison Nucingen, 1838



I hooked up my accelerator pedal in my car to my brake lights. I hit the gas, people behind me stop, and I'm gone. ~Steven Wright



But make no mistake: the weeds will win; nature bats last. ~Robert M. Pyle



Mankind has invested more than four million years of evolution in the attempt to avoid physical exertion. Now a group of backward-thinking atavists mounted on foot-powered pairs of Hula-Hoops would have us pumping our legs, gritting our teeth, and searing our lungs as though we were being chased across the Pleistocene savanna by saber-toothed tigers. Think of the hopes, the dreams, the effort, the brilliance, the pure force of will that, over the eons, has gone into the creation of the Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Bicycle riders would have us throw all this on the ash heap of history. ~P.J. O'Rourke



Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Chapter XV "Hester and Pearl"



Skipping makes me a kid again - not just feel like a kid - a KID again. ~John-Hans Melcher, as posted on iskip.com



Trees are much like human beings and enjoy each other's company. Only a few love to be alone. ~Jens Jensen, Siftings, 1939



A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much. ~Homer



I put down my book, The Meaning of Zen, and see the cat smiling into her fur as she delicately combs it with her rough pink tongue. "Cat, I would lend you this book to study but it appears you have already read it." She looks up and gives me her full gaze. "Don't be ridiculous," she purrs, "I wrote it." ~Dilys Laing, "Miao"