quotes and sayings on life

A "fraternity" is the antithesis of fraternity. The first... is predicated on the idea of exclusion; the second (that is, the abstract thing) is based on a feeling of total equality. ~E.B. White, One Man's Meat, 1944



Heaven is blessed with perfect rest but the blessing of earth is toil. ~Henry van Dyke



Oft expectation fails, and most oft where most it promises; and oft it hits where hope is coldest; and despair most sits. ~William Shakespeare



It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others. ~Andrew J. Holmes, Wisdom in Small Doses



Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. ~Albert Einstein



Yoga is the perfect opportunity to be curious about who you are. ~Jason Crandell, quoted in Yoga Journal, November 2005



I didn't know I had a quarrel with him. ~Henry Thoreau in answer to the question, "Have you made your peace with God?"



The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. ~Rupert Murdoch



I have always considered tennis as a combat in an arena between two gladiators who have their racquets and their courage as their weapons. ~Yannick Noah



Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. ~Colette, Casual Chance, 1964



When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything. ~Harriet Tubman, on her first escape from slavery, 1845



The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in their way. ~William Blake



Dancers are the messengers of the gods. ~Martha Graham



Laughter is an instant vacation. ~Milton Berle



Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction. ~Dylan Thomas, letter to Vernon Watkins, March 1938



Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or that our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than we suspect of what we think. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.



Property, n. Any material thing, having no particular value, that may be held by A against the cupidity of B. Whatever gratifies the passion for possession in one and disappoints it in all others. The object of man's brief rapacity and long indifference. ~Ambrose Bierce



A gentleman need not know Latin, but he should at least have forgotten it. ~Brander Matthews



Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. ~Henry David Thoreau



Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature. ~Martin H. Fischer