Favorite Quotes

“Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics. I can assure you that mine are still greater." — Albert Einstein.

"Music is the pleasure that the human soul encounters from counting without knowing that it is counting." — Gottfried Leibniz.

"Why are numbers beautiful? It's like asking why is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is." — Paul Erdös.

"No matter what part of the world we come from, we are all basically the same human beings. We all seek happiness and try to avoid suffering." — His Holiness the Dalai Lama in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

"As a youth I prayed, 'Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.'" — St. Augustine of Hippo in Confessiones, VIII, 7.

"There are no bad soliders, only bad generals." — Napoléon Bonaparte.

"Every strike brings me closer to the next home run." — Babe Ruth.

"What is important is that sex was not only a question of sensation and pleasure, of law and interdiction, but also of the true and the false." — Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge.

"We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it 'excludes', it 'represses', it 'censors', it 'abstracts', it 'masks', it 'conceals'. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth." — Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." — Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

"Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea,
And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
And I am Marie of Roumania." — Comment by Dorothy Parker.

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics." — Franklin D. Roosevelt in his second inaugural address.

"I am extraordinarily patient provided I get my own way in the end." — Margaret Thatcher.

"If you want to do good, work on the technology, not on getting power." — John McCarthy, computer scientist and discoverer of the Lisp programming language.

"Everything reminds Milton Friedman of the money supply. Everything reminds me of sex, but I try to keep it out of my papers." — Robert Solow, Nobel Prize-winning economist.

"I feel comfortably qualified to talk about anything, but that's a personal problem and I'm dealing with it." — Max Barry, satirist.

"There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning." — Warren Buffett.

"If I give food to the poor, they call me saint; if I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist." — Dom Helder Camara, Roman Catholic archbishop.

"The heart wants what it wants. There's no logic to those things. You meet someone and you fall in love and that's that." — Woody Allen.

"If one asks to be allowed to govern, one had better believe in government." — Henry Fairlie, British journalist.

“If the triangles were to make a God they would give him three sides.” — Montesquieu in Lettres Persanes.

"It is a strange desire, to seek power and to lose liberty: or to seek power over others and to lose power over a man’s self. The rising unto place is laborious; and by pains men come to greater pains; and it is sometimes base; and by indignities men come to dignities. The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall, or at least an eclipse, which is a melancholy thing. Cum non sis qui fueris, non esse cur velis vivere [When a man feels that he is no longer what he was, he has no reason to live longer]." — Francis Bacon in Essays, Civil and Moral.

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." — Galileo Galilei.

"If I like chocolate it won't surprise you that I have a few chocolates in my fridge, but if you find out I've got 16 warehouses full of chocolate, you'd think I was insane. All these rich guys are insane, obsessive compulsive twits obsessed with money — money is all they think about — they're all nuts." — John Cleese.

"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" — John Maynard Keynes.

"I've worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions. In short, fate's distribution of long straws is wildly capricious." — Warren Buffett.

"I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion." — Jack Kerouac.

"My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don't really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don't believe in God and they can prove He doesn't exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it's about who is smarter, and honestly I don't care." — "Blue Like Jazz" by Donald Miller.

"O, do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks! Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God." — Rev. Phillips Brooks, Episcopal bishop and former rector of Church of the Holy Trinity.

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." — William Faulkner in "Requiem for a Nun."

"I perceived that a man, in America, is a failed boy." — John Updike in "The Coup."

"If my music is fucking up your life, change the station, dude. At the end of the day, I'm just some guy who sings in a rock-and-roll band. I'm not Hitler." — Chad Koeger, Nickelback frontman, in an interview in "Playboy."

"The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." — theologian Frederick Buechner in "Wishful Thinking."

"Therefore do not seek to understand in order to believe, but believe that thou mayest understand." — St. Augustine.

"The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me." — poet W.H. Auden in "Hic et Ille."

"Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration – that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather." — Bill Hicks.

"Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon." — G.K. Chesterton in "Tremendous Trifles."

"Sometimes I think I have felt everything I'm ever gonna feel. And from here on out, I'm not gonna feel anything new. Just lesser versions of what I've already felt." — Theodore in "Her."