smile quotes and sayings

For my part I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance. ~Adlai Stevenson



A bad grade is only one letter in the Essay of life. ~Lee Drake



The name of Jesus is the one lever that lifts the world. ~Author Unknown



Losing is the great American sin. ~Jerome Holtzman



Ideas have become far more important to us than action - ideas so cleverly expressed in books by the intellectuals in every field. The more cunning, the more subtle, those ideas are the more we worship them and the books that contain them. We are those books, we are those ideas, so heavily conditioned are we by them. We are forever discussing ideas and ideals and dialectically offering opinions. Every religion has its dogma, its formula, its own scaffold to reach the gods, and when inquiring into the beginning of thought we are questioning the importance of this whole edifice of ideas. We have separated ideas from action because ideas are always of the past and action is always the present - that is, living is always the present. We are afraid of living and therefore the past, as ideas, has become so important to us. ~J. Krishnamurti Ideas should be clear and chocolate thick. Las cosas claras y el chocolate espeso. ~Spanish Proverb



One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark, its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time, one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase - some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse - into the dustbin where it belongs. ~George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," Shooting an Elephant, 1950



We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies. ~Roderick Thorp, Rainbow Drive



Oil prices have fallen lately. We include this news for the benefit of gas stations, which otherwise wouldn't learn of it for six months. ~William D. Tammeus



I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake. ~Rene Descartes, "Meditations on First Philosophy"



I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden. ~John Erskine



The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was. ~Author unknown, but probably a secretary!



I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, "Mother, what was war?" ~Eve Merriam



The body must be credited with an immense fund of know-how. ~Deepak Chopra



When they start the game, they don't yell, "Work ball." They say, "Play ball." ~Willie Stargell, 1981



The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself. ~Rita Mae Brown, Venus Envy



You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it. ~Art Buchwald



It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive. ~Earl Warren



Extract: a passage from a literary work.



It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth. ~Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy



Thrift is not an affair of the pocket, but an affair of character. ~S.W. Straus