Quotes by American Authors - Page 98

My theology briefly Is that the universe Was dictated But not signed.
Christopher Morley
An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.
Fulton Sheen
Infidel n: in New York one who does not believe in the Christian religion in Constantinople one who does.
Ambrose Bierce
If you talk to God you are praying if God talks to you you have schizophrenia.
Thomas Szasz
With soap baptism is a good thing.
Robert G. Ingersoll
For the wonderful thing about saints is that they were human. They lost their tempers got angry scolded God were egotistical or testy or impatient in their turns made mistakes and regretted them. Still they went on doggedly blundering toward heaven.
Phyllis McGinley
Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy.
H.L. Mencken
A gentle Quaker hearing a strange noise in his house one night got up and discovered a burglar busily at work. He went and got his gun came back and stood quietly in the doorway. 'Friend ' he said 'I would do thee no harm for the world but thou standest where I am about to shoot.'
James Hines
Don't be agnostic - be something.
Robert Frost
We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.
Omar Bradley
I think if you ask people what their concept of heaven is they would say if they are honest that it is a big department store with new things every week - all the money to buy them and maybe a little more than the neighbours.
Erich Fromm
Nothing in human life least of all in religion is ever right until it is beautiful.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
Men are idolaters and want something to look at and kiss and hug or throw themselves down before they always did they always will and if you don't make it of wood you must make it of words.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Faith means intense usually confident belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person.
Walter Kaufmann
Mystic: a person who is puzzled before the obvious but who understands the non-existent.
Elbert Hubbard
The merit claimed for the Anglican Church is that if you let it alone it will let you alone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The good news is that Jesus is coming back. The bad news is that he's really pissed off.
Bob Hope
Each religion by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.
George Santayana
Zen is a way of liberation concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous but what is.
Alan Watts
The idea that He would take his attention away from the universe in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds is just so unlikely I can't go along with it.
Quentin Crisp
My own mind is my own church.
Thomas Paine
Heathen n. A beknighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel.
Ambrose Bierce
A minister is coming down every generation nearer and nearer to the common level of the useful citizen - no oracle at all but a man of more than average moral instincts who if he knows anything knows how little he knows.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A firm belief atthracts facts. They come out iv holes in the ground an' cracks in th' wall to support belief but they run away fr'm doubt.
Finley Peter Dunne
The ultimate indignity is to be given a bedpan by a stranger who calls you by your first name.
Maggie Kuhn
Make yourself necessary to somebody.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Science may have found a cure for most evils: but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings.
Helen Keller
At bottom the world isn't a joke. We only joke about it to avoid an issue with someone to let someone know that we know he's there with his questions to disarm him by seeming to have heard and done justice to his side of the standing argument.
Robert Frost
It is always safe to assume that people are more subtle and less sensitive than they seem.
Eric Hoffer
When the man is at home his standing in society is well known and quietly taken but when he is abroad it is problematical and is dependent on the success of his manners.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The easiest kind of relationship for me is with 10 000 people. The hardest is with one.
Joan Baez
Hindsight is always zo/20.
Billy Wilder
Whatever with the past has gone the best is always yet to come.
Lucy Larcom
This is another day! Are its eyes blurred with maudlin grief for any wasted past? A thousand thousand failures shall not daunt! Let dust clasp dust death death I am alive!
Don Marquis
Yesterday's errors let yesterday cover.
Susan Coolidge
The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it. If I had to live my life again I'd make the same mistakes only sooner.
Tallulah Bankhead
They say you should not suffer through the past. You should be able to wear it like a loose garment take it off and let it drop.
Eva Jessye
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I have always found that each step we take in life is to be regretted-if we once begin to wonder how many other steps might have been possible.
John Oliver Hobbes
Should-haves solve nothing. It's the next thing to happen that needs thinking about.
Alexandra Ripley
Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
Sydney J. Harris
Were it not better to forget Than to remember and regret?
L. E. Landon
Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead that is where your future lies.
Ann Landers
When one door closes another opens. But we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we fail to see the one that has opened for us.
Alexander Graham Bell
An indefinable something is to be done in a way nobody knows how at a time nobody knows when that will accomplish nobody knows what.
Thomas B. Read
The hole and the patch should be commensurate.
Thomas Jefferson
Reform must come from within not from without. You cannot legislate for virtue.
James Cardinal Gibbons
We are reformers in Spring and Summer in Autumn and Winter we stand by the old reformers in the morning conservers at night.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
At twenty a man is full of fight and hope. He wants to reform the world. When he's seventy he still wants to reform the world but he knows he can't.
Clarence S. Darrow
Breaks balance out. The sun don't shine on the same old dog's rear end every day.
Darrell Royal
The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.
Bret Harte
Luck is largely a matter of paying attention.
Susan M. Dodd
I was born lucky and I have lived lucky. What I had was used. What I still have is being used. Lucky.
Katharine Hepburn
Luck is a combination of confidence and getting the breaks.
Christy Mathewson
Motivation triggers luck.
Mike Wallace
Luck is believing you're lucky.
Tennessee Williams
It's funny but... you're sort of a moving target for fortune and you never know when it will befall you.
Thomas McGuane
When something bad happens to me I think I'm able to deal with it in a pretty good way. That makes me lucky. Some people fall apart at the first little thing that happens.
Christie Brinkley
To get it right be born with luck or else make it.
Ruth Gordon
Probably any successful career has "X" number of breaks in it and maybe the difference between successful people and those who aren't superachievers is taking advantage of those breaks.
Joan Ganz Cooney