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If you're going to do something tonight that you'll be sorry for tomorrow, sleep late.
Author: Henny Youngman
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Implicit in the activist conception of government is the assumption that you can take the good things in a complex system for granted, and just improve the things that are not so good. What is lacking in this conception is any sense that a society, an institution, or even a single human being, is an intricate system of fragile inter-relationships, whose complexities are little understood and easily destabilized.
Author: Thomas Sowell
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Informal relationships are not mere minor interstitial supplements to the major institutions of society. These informal relationships not only include important decision-making processes, such as the family, but also produce much of the background social capital without which the other major institutions of society could not function nearly as effectively as they do.
Author: Thomas Sowell
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Every animal is sad after coitus except the human female and the rooster.
Author: Claudius Galen
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A line runs from the meditations of the heart to the words of the mouth. The meditations are not clear to us until the mouth utters its words. If what the mouth utters is unclear or foolish or mendacious, it must be that the meditations are the same. But the line runs both ways. The words of the mouth will become the meditations of the heart, and the habit of loose talk loosens the fastenings of our understanding.
Author: Richard Mitchell
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Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.
Author: Margaret Halsey
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One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
Author: Schopenhauer
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Insanity -- a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
Author: R. D. Lang
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A wonderful discovery--psychoanalysis. Makes quite simple people feel they're complex.
Author: Samuel N. Behrman
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I have heard it said that the first ingredient of success -- the earliest spark in the dreaming youth -- if this; dream a great dream.
Author: John A. Appleman
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If there were dreams to sell, what would you buy?
Author: Thomas Lovell Beddoes
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I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.
Author: John Cheever
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Instinct is the nose of the mind.
Author: Madame De Girardin
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In a mad world, only the mad are sane.
Author: Akiro Kurosawa
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The true function of art is to...edit nature and so make it coherent and lovely. The artist is a sort of impassioned proofreader, blue-penciling the bad spelling of God.
Author: H.l. Mencken
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It is only doubt that creates. It is only the minority that counts.
Author: H.l. Mencken
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We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.
Author: Livy
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Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
Author: H.l. Mencken
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There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
Author: H.l. Mencken
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Any man who inflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.
Author: H.l. Mencken
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The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera- a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them. The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars. In so far as that heritage is apprehended, it is viewed with enmity. But in the main it is not apprehended at all.
Author: H.l. Mencken
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The primary sign of a well-ordered mind is a man's ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company.
Author: Seneca
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Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.
Author: H.l. Mencken
Source: None
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The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.
Author: H.l. Mencken
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Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.
Author: Golda Meir
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A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
Author: Umberto Eco
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When we can't dream any longer, we die.
Author: Goldman Emma
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Firmness of purpose is one of the most necessary sinews of character, and one of the best instruments of success. Without it genius wastes its efforts in a maze of inconsistencies.
Author: Lord Chesterfield
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Habits... the only reason they persist is that they are offering some satisfaction. You allow them to persist by not seeking any other, better form of satisfying the same needs. Every habit, good or bad, is acquired and learned in the same way -- by finding that it is a means of satisfaction.
Author: Juliene Berk
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The more deeply the path is etched, the more it is used, and the more it is used, the more deeply it etched.
Author: Jo Coudert
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Any act often repeated soon forms a habit; and habit allowed, steady gains in strength, At first it may be but as a spider's web, easily broken through, but if not resisted it soon binds us with chains of steel.
Author: Tryon Edwards
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I am what is mine. Personality is the original personal property.
Author: Norman O. Brown
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Any young person who has studied Heidegger; or seen Ionesco's 'plays'; or listened to the 'music' of John Cage; or looked at Andy Warhol's 'paintings'- has experienced that feeling of incredulous puzzlement: But this is nonsense! Can I really be expected to take this seriously?In fact, of course, it is necessary for it to be nonsense; if it made sense, it could be evaluated. The essence of modern intellectual snobbery is the 'emperor's new cloths' approach. Teachers, critics, our self-appointed intellectual elite, make it quite clear to us that if we cannot see the superlative nature of this 'art'- why, it merely shows our ignorance, our lack of sophistication and insight. Of course, they go beyond the storybook emperor's tailors, who dressed their victim in nothing and called it fine garments. The modern tailors dress the emperor in garbage.
Author: Ron Merrill
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...we are entitled to make almost any reasonable assumption, but should resist making conclusions until evidence requires that we do so.
Author: Steve Allen
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To take an unequivocal stand, it seems to me, is of greater heuristic value and far more likely to stimulate constructive criticism than to evade the issue.
Author: Ernst Mayr
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When an elephant is in trouble even a frog will kick him.
Author: Hindu Proverb
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There is only one step from fanaticism to barbarism.
Author: Denis Diderot
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A man is never more his single separate self than when he sets out on a journey.
Author: John Dos Passos
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He who can take no interest in what is small will take false interest in what is great.
Author: John Ruskin
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Men who love wisdom should acquaint themselves with a great many particulars.
Author: Heraclitus
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...definitions are temporary verbalizations of concepts, and concepts- particularly difficult concepts- are usually revised repeatedly as our knowledge and understanding grows.
Author: Ernst Mayr
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New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
Author: John Locke
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Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.
Author: Rollo May
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Responsibility and danger do not tend to free or stimulate the average person's mind- rather the contrary; but wherever they do liberate an individual's judgement and confidence we can be sure that we are in the presence of exceptional ability.
Author: Carl Von Clausewitz
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When under the pretext of fraternity, the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who gains from this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating.
Author: Frederic Bastiat
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Sometimes the subconscious mind manifests a wisdom several steps or even years ahead of the conscious mind, and has its own way of leading us toward our destiny.
Author: Nathaniel Branden
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It is very good for a man to talk about what he does not understand; as long as he understands that he does not understand it.
Author: Gilbert Keith Chesterton
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The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.
Author: Baruch Spinoza
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Veracity is the heart of morality.
Author: Thomas Henry Huxley
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In that the wisdom of the few becomes available to the many, there is progress in human affairs; without it, the static routine of tradition continues.
Author: Jospeh Jastrow
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