Quotes

Ein einziger dankbarer Gedanke gen Himmel ist das vollkommenste Gebet .

No person must have to.

None of you [men] ask for anything—except everything, but just for so long as you need it.

Of two friends, one is always the other’s slave.

I was traveling post from Tiflis. My cart’s entire load consisted of one small valise, which was half filled with travel notes about Georgia. Of these, the greater part, fortunately for you, have been lost.

[ Text accompanying sketch of man with parachute :] If a man have a tent made of linen of which the apertures have all been stopped up, and it be twelve braccia across and twelve in depth, he will be able to throw himself down from any height without sustaining any injury.

A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.

If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don’t marry and have kids, and above all, don’t die. But if you have to die, commit suicide.

He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.

The king was pregnant.

I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system—that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up.

You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.

Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy . . . but sing their heart out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.

But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court.

Proverbs contradict each other. That is the wisdom of a nation.

If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would be pretty much left with “Let’s Make a Deal.”

Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.

Your responsibility as a parent is not as great as you might imagine. You need not supply the world with the next conqueror of disease or a major movie star. If your child simply grows up to be someone who does not use the word “collectible” as a noun, you can consider yourself an unqualified success.

The Owl looked up to the Stars above

Sleep is death without the responsibility.

[ Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge :] An Archangel a little damaged.

And the sun sank again on the grand Australian bush—the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird, and of much that is different from things in other lands.

O Time! arrest your flight, and you, propitious hours, stay your course.

Only one being is wanting, and your whole world is bereft of people.

If you have learned anything at all from us [wild geese], Tummetott, you no longer think that the humans should have the whole earth to themselves.

In a few minutes he will go downstairs, join the party, his family. But for now his mother is distracted, laughing at a story a friend is telling her, unaware of her son’s absence. For now, he starts to read.

I bend but do not break.

You were singing? I’m very glad, very well, start dancing now.

Up out of the lampshade, startled by the overhead light, flew a large nocturnal butterfly that began circling the room. The strains of the piano and violin rose up weakly from below.

The common people have scarcely any culture, the great have no soul. . . . Were I to choose between the two, I should select, without hesitation, being a plebeian.

Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.

There is no more unfortunate creature under the sun than a fetishist who yearns for a woman’s shoe and has to settle for the whole woman.

Intercourse with a woman is sometimes a satisfactory substitute for masturbation. But it takes a lot of imagination to make it work.

I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.

In the yard across the street we saw a snowman holding a garbage can lid smashed into a likeness of the mad English king, George the Third.

[Richard Nixon] would have been a great, great man had somebody loved him.

We’ve had some very caustic writings

[ Remark after the invasion of Cambodia, 1970 :] We are all the President’s men.

A conventional army loses if it does not win.

Every nation, like every individual, walks in a vain show—else it could not live with itself—but I never got over the wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had ever done, honestly believed that they were a godly little New England community, setting examples to brutal mankind.

we have not the time to meet you.

It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,

The Cat That Walked by Himself.

When you get to a man in the case,

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,