Santorini, Greece - 2006
1. ”A drama critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.”
2. “A family is a tyranny ruled over by it's weakest member.”
3. "A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education."
4. "A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul."
5. “A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
6. “A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.“
7. “All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships.”
8. "All great truths begin as blasphemies."
9. "A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself; indeed, he progresses in all things by making a fool of himself."
10. “A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself. When you are a child your vessel is not yet full; so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or an explorer and adventurer. In old age the vessel dries up: there is no overflow: you are a child again.”
11. “A miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles. Frauds deceive. An event which creates faith does not deceive: therefore it is not a fraud, but a miracle.”
12. "Any man who is not a communist at the age of twenty is a fool. Any man who is still a communist at the age of thirty is an even bigger fool."
13. “A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.”
14. ”As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.”
15. “Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.”
16. “A thing that nobody believes cannot be proved too often.”
17. “A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.”
18. ”Beauty is all very well at first sight, but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?”
19. “Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.”
20. “Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.”
21. “Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.”
22. “Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever when they are only wasting their time.”
23. “Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is Genius.”
24. “Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life.”
25. “Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.”
26. "[Dancing is] a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.”
27. ”Do not follow where the path my lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
28. “Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.”
29. “Do you know what a pessimist is? A man who thinks everybody as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.”
30. “Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true;: they are the only things that are true.”
31. “Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.”
32. “Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.”
33. “Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.”
34. “Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.”
35. “Food and houses and clothes can be produced by human labor, but when they are produced they can be stolen... What you do to a horse or a bee, you can also do to a man or a woman or a child. You can get the upper hand of them by force, or trickery of any sort, or even by teaching them that it is their religious duty to sacrifice their freedom to ours.”
36. "Forget about likes and dislikes. They are of no consequence. Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness."
37. “Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.”
38. “Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.”
39. “He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.”
40. “Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.”
41. ”Hell is paved with good intentions, not bad ones. All men mean well.”
42. “Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.”
43. “He who has never hoped can never despair.”
44. “How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?”
45. “I am a woman of the world, Hector; and I can assure you that if you will only take the trouble always to do the perfectly correct thing, and to say the perfectly correct thing, you can do just what you like.”
46. “I am not a teacher---only
a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way.
I pointed ahead---
ahead of myself
as well as of you.”
47. “I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.”
48. “I claim to be a conscientiously immoral writer.”
49. “I don't believe in morality. I am a disciple of Bernard Shaw.”
50. "I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind."
51. “I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.”
52. “If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.”
53. "If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience?"
54. “If other worlds are inhabited, this world must be their lunatic asylum.”
55. “If there was twenty ways of telling the truth and only one way of telling a lie, the Government would find it out. It’s the nature of governments to tell lies.”
56. “If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”
57. “If you strike a child take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.”
58. "I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it."
59. “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.”
60. “Immorality does not necessarily imply mischievous conduct: it implies conduct, mischievous or not, which does not conform to current ideals.”
61. “I'm one of the undeserving poor . . . up ugen middle-class morality all the time . . . . What is middle-class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.”
62. “Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.”
63. “I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.”
64. "In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular."
65. “In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine.”
66. “In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.”
67. ”I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.”
68. “Is the devil to have all the passions as well as all the good tunes?”
69. “It amuses me to talk to animals in a sort of jargon I have invented for them; and it seems to me that it amuses them to be talked to, and they respond to the tone of the conversation, though its intellectual content mayto some extent escape them.”
70. ”It gives me extraordinary gratification to find a wild bird treating me with confidence, as robins sometimes do.”
71. “It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.”
72. “It is easy -- terribly easy -- to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work.”
73. ”I want my rapscallionly fellow vagabond. I want my dark lady. I want my angel - I want my tempter. I want my Freia with her apples. I want the lighter of my seven lamps of beauty, honour, laughter, music, love, life and immortality.. I want my inspiration, my folly, my happiness, me divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my final sanity and sanctification, my transfiguration, my purification, my light across the sea, my palm across the desert, my garden of lovely flowers, my million nameless joys, my day's wage, my night's dream, my darling and my star.”
74. “I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a splendid torch, which I've got a hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
75. "Just as the historian can teach no real history until he has cured his readers of the romantic delusion that the greatness of a queen consists in her being a pretty woman and having her head cut off, so the playwright of the first order can do nothing with his audience until he has cured them of looking at the stage through the keyhole, and sniffing round the theatre as prurient people sniff round the divorce court."
76. “Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”
77. ”Life is a flame that is always burning itself out, but it catches fire again every time a child is born.
78. “Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
79. “Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage -- it can be delightful.”
80. “Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”
81. “Life is no brief candle for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
82. “Life was driving at brains -- at its darling object: an organ by which it can attain not only self-consciousness but self-understanding.”
83. "Life would be tolerable but for its amusements."
84. ”Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.”
85. "Manners are more important than laws and upon them, to a great deal, the law depends...."
86. "Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity."
87. “Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both.”
88. “Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.”
89. “My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.”
90. “My way of joking is to tell the truth. It is the funniest joke in the world.”
91. “NAPOLEON: What shall we do with this soldier,
Guiseppe? Everything he says is wrong.
GIUSEPPE: Make him a general, Excellency, and then everything he says will be right.”
92. “Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.”
93. “No child would ever dream of a statue being indecent if it had not been taught so.”
94. “No doubt it is natural to a snail to think that any evolution which threatens to do away with shells will result in general death from exposure.”
95. "No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious."
96. "Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man."
97. “Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.”
98. “Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.”
99. “Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.”
100. “Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.”
101. ”People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, they make them.”
102. “People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.”
103. “Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.”
104. ”Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.”
105. “Rich men without convictions are more dangerous in modern society than poor women without chastity.”
106. “Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.”
107. “Take care to get what you like, or you will be forced to like what you get.”
108. “The artist’s work is to show us ourselves as we really are.”
109. “The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolators. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.”
110. “The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.”
111. "The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one."
112. “The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.”
113. “The greatest of our evils and the worst of our crimes is poverty.”
114. “The liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he cannot be believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.”
115. "The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time."
116. “The man who listens to Reason is lost: Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.”
117. “The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.”
118. “The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man”.
119. “The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.”
120. “The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.”
121. “The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.”
122. “The open mind never acts: when we have done our utmost to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, we still. . . must close our minds for the moment with a snap, and act dogmatically on our conclusions.”
123. “The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn't want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.”
124. “The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.”
125. “The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.”
126. "There are two tragedies in life: one is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it."
127. “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.”
128. “There is no love sincerer than the love of food.”
129. ”There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.”
130. “There is only one true morality for every man; but every man has not the same true morality.”
131. "The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood."
132. “The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.”
133. “The seven deadly sins ... Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven milestones from man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the milestones are lifted.”
134. "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place"
135. “The slave of fear: the worst of slaveries.”
136. “The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.”
137. ”The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.”
138. “The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.”
139. “The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist.”
140. "The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity."
141. “This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”
142. “Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so.”
143. “To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.”
144. “Two starving men cannot be twice as hungry as one; but two rascals can be ten times as vicious as one.”
145. “Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.”
146. “Virtue is insufficient temptation.”
147. “We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.”
148. "We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins."
149. “We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.”
150. “Whatever is contrary to established manners and customs is immoral. An immoral act or doctrine is not necessarily a sinful one: on the contrary, every advance in thought and conduct is by definition immoral until it has converted the majority.”
151. "What really flatters a man that you think him worth flattering."
152. “What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.”
153. ”What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.”
154. “When a man wants to murder a tiger, it's called sport; when the tiger wants to murder him it's called ferocity.”
155. “When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.”
156. “When you loved me I gave you the whole sun and stars to play with. I gave you eternity in a single moment, strength of the mountains in one clasp of your arms, the volume of all the seas in one impulse of your soul. A moment only; but was it not enough? Were you not paid then for all the rest of your struggle on earth? . . . When I opened the gates of paradise, were you blind? Was it nothing to you? When all the stars sang in your ears and all the winds swept you the heart of heaven, were you deaf? were you dull? was I no more to you than a bone to a dog? Was it not enough? We spent eternity together; and you ask me for a little lifetime more. We possessed all the universe together; and you ask me to give you my scanty wages as well. I have given you the greatest of all things; and you ask me to give you little things. I gave you your own soul: you ask me for my body as a plaything. Was it not enough? Was it not enough?”
157. “Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.”
158. “You cannot be a hero without being a coward.”
159. "You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'"
160. “You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.”
161. “When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.”
162. "When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth."
163. “When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”
164. “You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.”
165. “Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.”
