Quotes by Writers - Page 22

Gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid but which none have a right to expect.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Every nation has the government that it deserves.
Joseph de Maistre
How can you govern a country with two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?
Charles de Gaulle
Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.
George Burns
For a country to have a great writer is to have another government.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.
Voltaire
Wise men appreciate all men for they see the good in each and know how hard it is to make anything good.
Baltasar Gracián
No man deserves to be praised for his goodness unless he has the strength of character to be wicked. All other goodness is generally nothing but indolence or impotence of will.
La Rochefoucauld
Generosity is the vanity of giving.
La Rochefoucauld
There are bad people who would be less dangerous if they were quite devoid of goodness.
La Rochefoucauld
I have found men more kind than I expected and less just.
Samuel Johnson
Is not a patron one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help?
Samuel Johnson
Good things when short are twice as good.
Baltasar Gracián
An act of God was defined as "something which no reasonable man could have expected."
A.P. Herbert
God speaks to all individuals through what happens to them moment by moment.
J. P. DeCaussade
God is an unutterable sigh planted in the depths of the soul.
Jean Paul Richter
The most beautiful of all emblems is that of God whom Timaeus of Locris describes under the image of "A circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."
Voltaire
God that dumping ground of our dreams.
Jean Rostand
If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.
Voltaire
If God made us in his image we have certainly returned the compliment.
Voltaire
The Vatican is against surrogate mothers. Good thing they didn't have that rule when Jesus was born.
Elayne Boosler
God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere.
Voltaire
The most absurd and reckless aspirations have sometimes led to extraordinary success.
Vauvenargues
The business of life is to enjoy oneself everything else is a mockery.
Norman Douglas
Pleasure is the object duty and the goal of all rational creatures.
Voltaire
A windmill is eternally at work to accomplish one end although it shifts with every variation of the weathercock and assumes ten different positions in a day.
Charles Caleb Colton
Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don't be afraid to follow it.
Joseph Campbell
Life has a meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Before we set our hearts too much upon anything let us examine how happy they are who already possess it.
La Rochefoucauld
Every ceiling when reached becomes a floor upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right.
Aldous Huxley
We can always redeem the man who aspires and strives.
Goethe
The only thing to know is how to use your neuroses.
Arthur Adamov
If there were no God it would be necessary to invent him.
Voltaire
I make presents to the mother but think of the daughter.
Goethe
Action makes more fortunes than caution.
Vauvenargues
It is in your act that you exist not in your body. Your act is yourself and there is no other you.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Nothing at all will be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.
Samuel Johnson
The opportunity is often lost by deliberating.
Publilius Syrus
We don't have enough time to premeditate all our actions.
Vauvenargues
Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more think less and stop watching ourselves live.
Nicolas de Chamfort
We have too many sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.
Abigail Adams
Shun idleness. It is a rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals.
Voltaire
You cannot contribute anything to the ideal condition of mind and heart known as Brotherhood however much you preach posture or agree unless you live it.
Faith Baldwin
The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.
Baltasar Gracián
Why always "not yet"? Do flowers in spring say "not yet"?
Norman Douglas
To make a fine gentleman several trades are required but chiefly a barber.
Oliver Goldsmith
The true genius is a mind of large general powers accidentally determined to some particular direction.
Samuel Johnson
Genius develops in quiet places character out in the full current of human life.
Goethe
My doctor said I look like a million dollars - green and wrinkled.
Red Skelton
Friendship peculiar boon of Heaven The noble mind's delight and pride To men and angels only given To all the lower world denied.
Samuel Johnson
Most of our misfortunes are comments of our friends upon them.
Charles Caleb Colton
The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef.
Samuel Johnson
Friend: One who knows all about you and loves you just the same.
Elbert Hubbard
Friends are a second existence.
Baltasar Gracián
Friendship like credit is highest where it is not used.
Elbert Hubbard
That friendship may be at once fond and lasting there must not only be equal virtue on each part but virtue of the same kind not only the same end must be proposed but the same means must be approved by both.
Samuel Johnson
Men only become friends by community of pleasures.
Samuel Johnson
The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.
Cyril Connolly
To associate with other like-minded people in small purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction.
Aldous Huxley
Friendship is only a reciprocal conciliation of interests.
François de La Rochefoucauld