Quotes Pertaining to Wit and Wisdom
"If I'm who I am because I'm who I am and you're who you are because you are who you are, then I'm who I am and you're who you are. If, on the other hand, I'm who I am because you're who you are, and if you're who you are because I'm who I am, then I'm not who I am and you're not who you are." — from Art by Yasmina Reza, translated by Christopher Hampton
"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." — T.S. Eliot
"Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen." —John le Carre, from "The Chancellor Who Agreed to Play Spy"
"Happiness is not something
that happens….It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how
we interpret them." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Flow: The Psychology
of Optimal Experience
"Optimal experience is thus
something that we make happen." — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
"How we feel about ourselves,
the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how the mind
filters and interprets everyday experiences." — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
"We are always getting to live,
but never living." — Ralph Waldo Emerson, as quoted by Csikszentmihalyi
"186,000 miles per second: It's not just a good idea — it's THE LAW!" (Einstein t-shirt, worn by the late Stuart Mayper)
"There is no coming to consciousness without pain." — Jung
"One test is worth a thousand expert opinions." — Anon
"Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy." — The Eagles, "Take It Easy"
"Who rules our symbols, rules us." — Alfred Korzybski
"The pursuit of excellence is the proper vocation of man." — Cassius J. Keyser
"The present is no more exempt from the sneer of the future than the past has been." — Cassius J. Keyser
"The next-most difficult thing in the world is to get perspective. The most difficult is to keep it." — Cassius J. Keyser
"It is commonly, but erroneously, believed that it is easy to ask questions. A fool, it is said, can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer. The fact is that a wise man can answer many questions that a fool cannot ask." — Cassius J. Keyser
"If people would stop objectifying abstractions (which they probably never will), or if they would stop objectifying the abstractions they make consciously (which they might learn to do), at least half the pseudo-questions befuddling the world today — as they have befuddled it since time immemorial — would vanish. And that would be a very, very great gain." — Cassius J. Keyser
"How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?" — Henry David Thoreau
"To a mouse, cheese is cheese. That's why mousetraps work." — Wendell Johnson
"The true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not by what he says about it." — P.W. Bridgman
"If your language is confused, your intellect, if not your whole character, will almost certainly correspond." — Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
"God may forgive your sins. But your nervous system won't." — Alfred Korzybski
"It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed." — Albert Einstein
"The world we have created today as a result of our thinking thus far has problems which cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them." — Albert Einstein
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." — Albert Einstein
"Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits." — Mark Twain
"There is only one way to happiness
and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of
our will." — Epictetus
"The self explorer, whether
he wants to or not, becomes an explorer of everything else." - Elias
Canetti
"You don’t get meaning, you
respond with meaning." — Charles Sanders Peirce
"Ultimately, we attach meaning
to experience." — an instructor in a Gifford Pinchot class
"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimation of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment." — Marcus Aurelius
"We cannot command the wind, but we can adjust our sails." — Author unknown
"We tend to discriminate against
people to the degree that we fail to distinguish between them." —
Irving
Lee
"You can’t make me what you
call me!" — Al Fleishman
"I lived with the terrible knowledge
that one day I would be an old man, still waiting for my real life to start."
- Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides
"A great many people think
they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." -
William James
"Out of time we cut "days" and "nights," "summers" and "winters." We say what each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience orignially comes." — William James, "The World We Live In"
"Writing about music is
like dancing about architecture." — Elvis Costello
"Time is but the stream I go
fishing in." — Henry David Thoreau
"It ought to be remembered that
there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct,
or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction
of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those
who have done well under the old conditions, and only lukewarm defenders
among those who may do well under the new." — Machiavelli
"The reasonable man adapts himself
to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world
to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." — George Bernard Shaw
The only man who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measure anew each time he sees me, whilst all the rest go on with their old measurements and expect them to fit me."
— George Bernard Shaw (More Shaw Quotes)
"To progress, man must re-make himself, and he cannot re-make himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor." — Alexis Carrel
"Laughter is the only thing
that'll cut trouble down to a size where you can talk to it." — Dan
Jenkins, Semi-Touch
"There can be no transforming
of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion." -
Carl Jung
"If the minimum wasn't good enough,
it wouldn't be the minimum. (If the minimum isn't good enough, it shouldn't
be the minimum.)" — Air Force Academy aphorism c.1972
"A ship in the harbor is safe.
But that is not what ships are for." —Anonymous, from a poster c.1972
"You can't sail on a still day." —Anonymous
"If 'ifs' and 'buts' were candy
and nuts, we'd all have a Merry Christmas." — repeated by Dandy Don
Meredith on "Monday Night Football"
"Act as if the future of the
universe depends on what you do, while laughing at yourself for thinking
that your actions make any difference." — Buddhist saying
"Keep company with those who
make you better." — English Saying
"If you aren't getting flak,
you aren't over the target." — Gifford Pinchot
"If a thing is worth doing,
it's worth doing poorly." — Gifford Pinchot, attributed to G.K. Chesterton
"Your task it is, amid confusion,
rush, and noise, to grasp the lasting, calm and meaningful, and finding
it anew, to hold and treasure it." - Paul Hindemith
3 Questions: "What?"........."So
what?"........."Now what?" — Coro wisdom
"The most potent weapon of the
oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." — Steve Biko
"Every man dies. But not every
man really lives." — Braveheart, the movie
"More than any other time in
history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter
hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom
to choose correctly." — Woody Allen
"While the doctors consult,
the patient dies." — old English proverb
"The man who makes no mistakes
does not usually make anything." — 19th century U.S. diplomat Edward
John Phelps
"The certainty of misery is
better than the misery of uncertainty." — Pogo
"He who rejects change is the
architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is
the cemetery." — former British prime minister Harold Wilson
"Progress has not
followed a straight, ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress
and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution." — Goethe
"Never do too well that which you don't want to do again." — Anonymous, first heard uttered by Steve McGonigle
"Life has a way of demanding that you live it." — Nora Percival, heard on NPR's "Storycorps" series.
"The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution." — Bertrand Russell
"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." — Sir Arthur S. Eddington
Quotes Pertaining to Wit and Wisdom