Saturday, March 7, 2009

The Manual of Life

Albert Camus
"Don't wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day"
"Freedom is nothing else but the chance to be better"
"In our society, any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral is liable to be condemned to death"
"Nobody realizes that some people extend tremendous energy merely to be normal"

Albert Einstein
"Before God we are all equally wise. And equally foolish"
"I don't know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones"
"I never think of the future. It will come soon enough"
"I want to know the thoughts of God. Everything else is just details"
"Imagination is more important than knowledge"
"Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else, unless it's an enemy"
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted"
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind"

Aristotle
"It is the mark of the educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it"
"The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead"
"The gods too are fond of a joke"
"The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other persons"

Francis Bacon
"A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well"
"It is impossible to love and be wise"
"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in proportion"
"Truth comes out of error more easily than out of confusion"

Henry Ford
"Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently"
"Money is like an arm or leg. Use it or lose it"
"Whether you think that you can or can't, you are usually right"
"You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do"

Honore de Balzac
"Behind every great dortune there is a crime"
"Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies"

Jorge Luis Borges
"Any time something is written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself."
"I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved, all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors... Perhaps I would have liked to be my father, who wrote but had the decency of not publishing"
"My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges"
"There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless"

Thomas Alva Edison
"Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration"
"Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something"
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work"

Winston Churchill
"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject"
"An aphorism is not an aphorism unless you know what it means"
"I have taken more good from alcohol than alcohol has taken from me"
"Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on"
"When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite"

Woody Allen
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality by living forever" "It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, and certainly not desireable, as one's hat keeps blowing off" "Love is the answer. But while you wait for the answer, sex brings up some pretty good questions" "Marriage is the death of hope"