Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Fort

[Wise men] have tried to understand our state of being, by grasping at its stars, or its arts, or its economics. But, if there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.

Don Rickles

When I first went to Vegas, there were just high-rollers and gamblers and the wise guys treated you great.

Clara Barton

It is wise statesmanship which suggests that in time of peace we must prepare for war, and it is no less a wise benevolence that makes preparation in the hour of peace for assuaging the ills that are sure to accompany war.

Alexander Pope

Mark what unvary'd laws preserve each state, Laws wise as Nature, and as fixed as Fate.

Alexander Pope

Fear not the anger of the wise to raise; Those best can bear reproof who merit praise.

Alexander Pope

No Senses stronger than his brain can bear. Why has not Man a microscopic eye? For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly: What the advantage, if his finer eyes Study a Mite, not comprehend the Skies?... Or quick Effluvia darting thro' his brain, Die of a Rose, in Aromatic pain? If Nature thunder'd in his opening ears, And stunn'd him with the music of the Spheres... Who finds not Providence all-good and wise, Alike in what it gives, and what denies?

Alexander Pope

Order is Heaven's first law; and this confessed, some are, and must be, greater than the rest, more rich, more wise; but who infers from hence that such are happier, shocks all common sense. Condition, circumstance, is not the thing; bliss is the same in subject or in king.

Alexander Pope

Wise wretch! with pleasures too refined to please, With too much spirit to be e'er at ease, With too much quickness ever to be taught, With too much thinking to have common thought: You purchase pain with all that joy can give, And die of nothing but a rage to live.

Alexander Pope

Coffee which makes the politician wise, and see through all things with his half-shut eyes.

Thomas Merton

For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be.

Thomas Merton

We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.

Thomas Merton

We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.

Thomas Merton

Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair.

Thomas Merton

The only thing to seek in contemplative prayer is God; and we seek Him successfully when we realize that we cannot find Him unless He shows Himself to us, and yet at the same time that He would not have inspired us to seek Him unless we had already found Him.

Thomas Merton

The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds

Thomas Carlyle

Great is wisdom; infinite is the value of wisdom. It cannot be exaggerated; it is the highest achievement of man.

Thomas Carlyle

Once the mind has been expanded by a big idea, it will never go back to its original state.

Tony Kushner

It's the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.

William Shakespeare

Patience is sottish, and impatience does become a dog that's mad.

Haruki Murakami

This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to realize it's going to be a long process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time.