They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
- Andy Warhol

We cannot glimpse the essential life of a caged animal, only the shadow of [her] former beauty.
- Julia Allen Field [Reflections on the Death of an Elephant]

Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.

Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.
- Charlie Brown

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.
-Ambrose Redmoon

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect....what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? ...Death on the other hand, is the final silence...my silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.
"The Transformation of Silen into Language and Action," Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde.

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men.
-Alice Walker

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy ... neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together
- Herbert Prochnow

A closed mouth gathers no foot.

A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking.

A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant.
- D. Gries

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
-Diane Ackerman

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment, and especially on their children, than the unlived lives of the parents.
-Carl Jung

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
- William James

A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package.

A person is just about as big as the things that make them angry.

A psychiatrist is a person who will give you expensive answers that your partner will give you for free.

A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.

A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling, by Mark Twain.

For example, in Year 1 tht useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

A successful tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by its author.
- S. C. Johnson

In order to see birds its is necessary to become a part of the silence.
-Robert Lynd

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
- John Ciardi

A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without getting nervous.

After an instrument has been assembled, extra components will be found on the bench.

Air is water with holes in it.

Love me or hate me, but spare me your indifference.
-Libbie Fudim

I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
-Jose Ortega Y Gasset [Meditations on Quixote] (1883-1955)

They came for the communists, and I did not speak up because I wasn't a communist; They came for the socialists, and I did not speak up because I was not a socialist; They came for the union leaders, and I did not speak up because I wasn't a union leader; They came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up for me.
-Martin Niemoller, 1892-1984

There is no right way to do wrong.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.
-Giordano Bruno

The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
-Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts....A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.
-Sophia Loren

No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn back.
-Turkish proverb

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
-Samuel Butler

Be the master of your will and the slave of your conscience.
-Hasidic saying

Man is born to live, not to prepare to live.
-Boris Pasternak

Our task must be to free ourselves...by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.
-Albert Einstein

Friends: People who know you well, but like you anyway.

The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
-Robert Louis Stevenson

The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure.
-Henry David Thoreau

To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of the lamb for the sake of the human body. I hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man.
-Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

The "Communist Threat"

Shortly before the CIA coup [crushing Guatemala's first and last democracy, which threatened the interests of US corporations, in particular the United Fruit Company], Guatemalan Foreign Minister Toriello commented accurately that US policy amounts to:

cataloguing as `Communism' every manifestation of nationalism or economic independence, any desire for social progress, any intellectual curiosity, and any interest in progressive or liberal reforms... any Latin American government that exerts itself to bring about a truly national program which affects the interests of the powerful foreign companies, in whose hands the wealth and the basic resources in large part repose in Latin America, will be pointed out as Communist; it will be accused of being a threat to continental security and making a breach in continental solidarity, and so will be threatened with foreign intervention.

[Quoted in Noam Chomsky, _Turning the Tide_, page 52. Footnote [21] cites Connell-Smith, _Inter-American System_, 161f]

I care not for a man's religion whose dog or cat are not the better for it.
-Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

Be humble, for the worst thing in the world is of the same stuff as you; be confident, for the stars are of the same stuff as you.
-Nicholai Velimirovic

Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels good.

Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: You find the present tense and the past perfect.

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
-Oscar Levant

There is no course of life so weak and sottish as that which is managed by order, method, and discipline.
-Montaigne

Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut that held its ground.

It's all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.
-Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh

All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers ... Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born.
-Francois Fenelon

Journalism is merely history's first draft.
-Geoffrey C. Ward

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
-Alvin Toffler

You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down.
-Mary Pickford

Kind words may be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truely endless.
-Mother Theresa

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
-Marcel Proust

Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling.
-Margaret Lee Runbeck

Love is a glass that shatters if you hold it too tightly.
-Russian Proverb

Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.
-Hans Margolius

If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

Music is much to important to be left only in the hands of professionals.
-Robert Fulgam

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. -Linus Pauling

What is done well is done quickly enough.
-Augustus Caesar

I have yet to find the man, however exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than under a spirit of criticism.
-Charles Schwab

The quickest way to double your money is to fold it over and put it back into your pocket.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
-Mark Twain, U.S. Author (1835-1910)

`Automatic' simply means that you can't repair it yourself.
-Mary H. Waldrip

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne

Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands. It is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is.
-C.G. Jung (1875-1961)

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.
-Erwin Schrodinger

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
-Albert Einstein

I think where I am not, therefore I am where I think not...I am not, wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am wherever I don't think I am thinking.
-David Lodge

Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.
-Samuel Butler

When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves.
-William Arthur Ward

While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior.
-Henry C. Link

Visits always give pleasure - if not the arrival, the departure.
-Portuguese Proverb

Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.
-Albert Einstein

Listen or thy tongue will keep thee deaf.
-American Indian Proverb

Note: The source of many of these quotes is AWAD, a cool mailing list that I subscribe to.