Words from the Wise: Over 6,000 of the Smartest Things Ever Said
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Words from the Wise: Over 6,000 of the Smartest Things Ever Said
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628732733 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 11/17/2007 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 592 |
| File size: | 611 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
A
ABILITY
Life is like a ten-speed bike. Most of us have gears we never use.
Charles M. Schulz
I can levitate birds. No one cares.
Steven Wright
Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.
Laurence J. Peter
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Robert Heinlein
It is always our inabilities that vex us.
Joseph Joubert
Caution: Cape does not enable user to fly.
Warning label on Batman costume
The girl who can't dance says the band can't play.
Jewish proverb
What one has to do, usually can be done.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do, than what one can do.
Lin Yutang
ACCEPTANCE
Welcome death, quoth the rat, when the trap fell.
Thomas Fuller
When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.
Henry David Thoreau
It is so much easier sometimes to sit down and be resigned than to rise up and be indignant.
Ella Winter
Inaction may be the highest form of action.
Jerry Brown
Lie down and listen to the crabgrass grow, the faucet leak, and learn to leave them so.
Marya Mannes
The important thing is to know how to take all things quietly.
Michael Faraday
Wonderful maxim: not to talk of things any more after they are done.
Baron de Montesquieu
It is so. It cannot be otherwise.
Inscription on the ruins of a fifteenth-century cathedral in Amsterdam
Let It Be.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney
ACCIDENT
Nothing is accidental in the universe – this is one of my Laws of Physics – except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.
Joyce Carol Oates
There are no accidents so unfortunate from which skilful men will not draw some advantage, nor so fortunate that foolish men will not turn them to their hurt.
La Rochefoucauld
The most painful household accident is wearing socks and stepping on an upturned plug.
Peter Kay
Accident is veiled necessity.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
ACHIEVEMENT
Some of the best moments in life are not when you have achieved something but when the thought first comes to you to have a go.
Lord Hunt
Three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.
Thomas Edison
My most brilliant achievement was my ability to persuade my wife to marry me.
Winston Churchill
ACTING
Acting is a minor gift; after all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four.
Katharine Hepburn
There are five stages in the life of an actor 1) Who's Mary Astor? 2) Get me Mary Astor 3) Get me a Mary Astor type 4) Get me a young Mary Astor 5) Who's Mary Astor?
Mary Astor
Movie actors are just ordinary, mixed-up people – with agents.
Jean Kerr
If there wasn't something called acting, they would probably hospitalize people like me.
Whoopi Goldberg
There's a fine line between the Method actor and the schizophrenic.
Nicolas Cage
The question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.
Elaine Dundy
If there is a streak of ham anywhere in an actor, Shakespeare will bring it out.
Robert Benchley
Even her eyelashes acted.
Virginia Woolf on Ellen Terry
If you give audiences a chance they'll do half your acting for you.
Katharine Hepburn
We are all pretending ... The important thing is to maintain a straight face.
Maurice Valency
Every actor has a natural animosity towards every other actor, present or absent, living or dead.
Louise Brooks
ACTION
All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.
Arabian proverb
Let him that would move the world, first move himself.
Socrates
We are what we do.
Erich Fromm
First do it, then say it.
Russian proverb
The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
Oscar Wilde
It is in human nature to think wisely and to act in an absurd fashion.
Anatole France
Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.
Nicolas Chamfort
Action is the antidote to despair.
Joan Baez
What man really wishes to do he will find a means of doing.
George Bernard Shaw
It is not doing the things we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do that makes life blessed.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Either define the moment or the moment will define you.
Walt Whitman
We must scrunch or be scrunched.
Charles Dickens
Be a pianist, not a piano.
A. R. Orage
A peasant must sit in his chair with his mouth open for a very long time before a roast duck will fly in.
Chinese proverb
You'll never plough a field by turning it over in your mind.
Irish proverb
There should be less talk ... What do you do then? Take a broom and clean someone's house. That says enough.
Mother Teresa
Just do it.
Advertising slogan, Nike sportswear
ADOLESCENCE
Adolescence is just one big walking pimple.
Carol Burnett
We become adolescents when the words that adults exchange with one another become intelligible to us.
Natalia Ginzburg
All Giggle, Blush, half Pertness and half Pout.
Lord Byron
Who would ever think that so much can go on in the soul of a young girl?
Anne Frank
The four stages of man are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obscolescence.
Art Linkletter
Few things are more satisfying than seeing your children have teenagers of their own.
Doug Larson
ADULT
Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
Margaret Atwood
If this was adulthood, the only improvement she could detect in her situation was that now she could eat dessert without eating her vegetables.
Lisa Alther
We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice – that is, until we have stopped saying, "It got lost," and say, "I lost it."
George Harris
When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing.
Tom Robbins
We live a protracted adolescence. At some point you must leave the party.
Don Henley
But childhood prolonged cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.
Louise A. Bogan
Being a grown-up means assuming responsibility for yourself, for your children, and – here's the big curve – for your parents.
Wendy Wasserstein
ADULTERY
I said to the wife, "Guess what I heard in the pub? They reckon the milkman has made love to every woman in this road except one." And she said, "I'll bet it's that stuck-up Phyllis at number 23."
Max Kauffmann
I know many married men, I even know a few happily married men, but I don't know one who wouldn't fall down the first open coal hole running after the first pretty girl who gave him a wink.
George Jean Nathan
A man is only as faithful as his options.
Chris Rock
Madame, you must really be more careful. Suppose it had been someone else who found you like this.
Duc de Richelieu on discovering his wife in flagrante delicto
— Why did you desert your wife for another woman?
— Because I am a bastard.
Interviewer and Ernest Hemingway
The first thrill of adultery is entering the house. Everything there has been paid for by the other man.
John Updike
As a rule, the person found out in a betrayal of love holds, all the same, the superior position of the two. It is the betrayed one who is humiliated.
Ada Leverson
There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman.
It's a thing no married man knows anything about.
Oscar Wilde
Philanderers: avoid the embarrassment of shouting out the wrong name in bed by only having flings with girls who have the same name as your wife.
Viz magazine, top tip
It can take a man several marriages to understand the importance of monogamy.
Jason Love
If you marry a man who cheats on his wife, you'll be married to a man who cheats on his wife.
Ann Landers
I could never have a mistress, because I couldn't bear to tell the story of my life all over again.
Oscar Levant
ADVENTURE
One way to get the most out of life is to look upon it as an adventure.
William Feather
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
Helen Keller
Without adventure all civilization is full of decay. Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China.
Alfred North Whitehead
The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Nobody is ever met at the airport when beginning a new adventure. It's just not done.
Elizabeth Warnock Fernea
People who go to the polar regions are statistically less likely to die than salesmen who drive on motorways in England.
Sir Ranulph Fiennes
But almost any place is Baghdad if you don't know what will happen in it.
Edna Ferber
The real adventure in Moby Dick is the one that happens inside Captain Ahab. The rest is a fishing trip.
Salman Rushdie
Adventure is the result of poor planning.
Blatchford Snell
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Mark Twain
ADVERSITY
By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.
Mark Twain
There are moments when everything goes well; don't be frightened, it won't last.
Jules Renard
If you're going through hell, keep going.
Winston Churchill
Life for most of us is full of steep stairs to go up and later, shaky stairs to totter down; and very early in the history of stairs must have come the invention of bannisters.
Louis Kronenberg
When you go in search of honey you must expect to be stung by bees.
President Kaunda of Zambia
A clay pot sitting in the sun will always be a clay pot. It has to go through the white heat of the furnace to become porcelain.
Mildred Witte Stouven
The best way out is always through.
Robert Frost
The world is full of cactus, but we don't have to sit on it.
Will Foley
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every path hath a puddle.
George Herbert
Men do not stumble over mountains, but over molehills.
Confucius
Kites rise highest against the wind – not with it.
Winston Churchill
Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger.
Friedrich Nietzsche
When any calamity has been suffered, the first thing to be remembered is how much has been escaped.
Samuel Johnson
Lost luggage is just an opportunity to start afresh.
Chris Evans
The woman who has laughed is the same one who will cry, and that is why you can tell from the way a woman is when she is happy how she will be in the face of adversity.
Simone Schwarz-Bart
Let us be of good cheer by remembering that the misfortunes that are hardest to bear are those that never come.
Lord Kitchener
ADVERTISING
I do not read advertisements. I would spend all my time wanting things.
Archbishop of Canterbury
Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.
John Lahr
The art of advertising – untruthfulness combined with repetition.
Freya Stark
Time spent in the advertising business seems to create a permanent deformity like the Chinese habit of foot-binding.
Dean Acheson
The deeper problems connected with advertising come less from the unscrupulousness of our 'deceivers' than from our pleasure in being deceived, less from the desire to seduce than from the desire to be seduced.
Daniel J. Boorstin
You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
Norman Douglas
When someone hands you a flier it's like they're saying, "Here, you throw this away."
Mitch Hedberg
Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark: you know what you are doing, but nobody else does.
E. W. Howe
When the client moans and sighs Make his logo twice the size. If he still should prove refractory, Show a picture of his factory. Only in the gravest cases Should you show the clients' faces.
Anon
Is it not clear that a product which must spend fortunes advertising, drawing attention to itself, is probably not one we need?
David Mamet
I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree.
Ogden Nash
ADVICE
Advice: the suggestions you give someone else which you hope will work for your benefit.
Ambrose Bierce
There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
Gore Vidal
"What would Jesus do?" may be a good philosophy of life for some, but I find that it rarely helps me decide how much to tip a hooker.
Charles Gulledge
What would Jesus do?
Christian bumper sticker
What would Cher do?
Gay bumper sticker
What would Scooby Doo?
Bumper sticker
Advice should always be consumed between two thick slices of doubt.
Walter Schmidt
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
Erica Jong
No one wants advice – only corroboration.
John Steinbeck
A never-failing way to get rid of a fellow is to tell him something for his own good.
Kin Hubbard
I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.
Harry S. Truman
The art of advice is to make the recipient believe he thought of it himself.
Frank Tyger
The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not and never persist in trying to set people right.
Hannah Whitall Smith
Strange, when you ask anyone's advice you see yourself what is right.
Selma Lagerlöf
Advice is always a confession.
André Maurois
A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice.
E. W. Howe
A woman in love never takes advice.
Rosamond Marshall
Give help rather than advice.
Marquis de Vauvenargues
Don't be troubled if the temptation to give advice is irresistible; the ability to ignore it is universal.
Anon
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
G. K. Chesterton
Swallow a toad every morning to be sure of encountering nothing more disgusting the rest of the day.
Nicolas Chamfort
Beware of long arguments and long beards.
George Santayana
Don't squat with yer spurs on.
Texas Bix Bender
Pissing in your shoes won't keep your feet warm for long.
Icelandic proverb
Don't open a shop unless you know how to smile.
Jewish proverb
Do not suck your thumb – or anybody else's, for that matter.
Forrest Gump
Do something wonderful, people may imitate it.
Albert Schweitzer
In difficult circumstances always act on first impressions.
Leo Tolstoy
If you can't convince them, confuse them.
Harry S. Truman
Nothing risqué, nothing gained.
Alexander Woollcott
Everything is personal.
Anon
Remember, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.
Teddy Roosevelt
Always stay in with the outs.
David Halberstam
Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.
Robert Frost
When in doubt, stick your left out.
Henry Cooper
Don't ever slam a door; you might want to go back.
Anon
Beware of limbo dancers.
Toilet graffiti
Always accept a breath mint if offered one.
M. Jackson Brown
Most of us would rather risk a catastrophe than read the instructions.
Mignon McLaughlin
If everything seems to be coming your way, you're probably in the wrong lane.
Anon
Distinguish between power and control, delegate, be decisive – and always remember people's first names.
Sir Alex Ferguson
When you're being stalked by an angry mob with raspberries, the first thing to do is to release a tiger.
John Cleese, Monty Python
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Words From The Wise"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Rosemary Jarski.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Dedication,
Title Page,
Copyright Page,
INTRODUCTION,
A,
B,
C,
D,
E,
F,
G,
H,
I,
J,
K,
L,
M,
N,
O,
P,
Q,
R,
S,
T,
U,
V,
W,
Y,
Z,
INDEX,