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Tag: Ambrose Bierce

Famous People Quotes #8

“Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.” – Martin Fraquhar Tupper

“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book – I’ll waste no time reading it.” – Moses Hadas (1900-1966)

“From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.” – Groucho Marx (1895-1977)

“It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.” – Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

“When ideas fail, words come in very handy.” – Goethe (1749-1832)

“In the end, everything is a gag.” – Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977)

“The nice thing about egotists is that they don’t talk about other people.” – Lucille S. Harper

“You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.” – Yogi Berra

“I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known.” – Walt Disney (1901-1966)

“He who hesitates is a damned fool.” – Mae West (1892-1980)

“Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.” – Gail Godwin

“University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” – Henry Kissinger (1923-)

“The graveyards are full of indispensable men.” – Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)

“You can pretend to be serious; you can’t pretend to be witty.” – Sacha Guitry (1885-1957)

“Behind every great fortune there is a crime.” – Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)

“If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.” – Aristotle Onassis (1906-1975)

“I am not young enough to know everything.” – Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

“Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.” – Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.” – General George Patton (1885-1945)

“Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

“There is no sincerer love than the love of food.” – George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

“I don’t even butter my bread; I consider that cooking.” – Katherine Cebrian

“I have an existential map; it has ‘you are here’ written all over it.” – Steven Wright

“Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour.” – Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)

“Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.” – Oliver Herford (1863-1935)

“I have read your book and much like it.” – Moses Hadas (1900-1966)

“The covers of this book are too far apart.” – Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” – Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964)

“Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.” – Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

“Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.” – Voltaire (1694-1778)

“When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I’ve never tried before.” – Mae West (1892-1980)

“I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.” – Elvis Presley (1935-1977)

“No Sane man will dance.” – Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

“Hell is a half-filled auditorium.” – Robert Frost (1874-1963)

“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.” – Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

“Vote early and vote often.” – Al Capone (1899-1947)

“If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?” – Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

“Few things are harder to put up with than a good example.” – Mark Twain (1835-1910)

“Hell is other people.” – Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” – Robert J. Oppenheimer (1904-1967) (citing from the Bhagavad Gita, after witnessing the world’s first nuclear explosion)

“Happiness is good health and a bad memory.” – Ingrid Bergman (1917-1982)

“Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.” – Thomas Jones

“You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.” – Al Capone (1899-1947)

“The gods too are fond of a joke.” – Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

“Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.” – Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

“The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.” – Gloria Leonard

Patience Quotes

– “Patience is the art of hoping.” – Luc De Vauvanargues

– “Patience is something you admire in the driver behind you and scorn in the one ahead.” – Mac McCleary

– “Patience is the ability to count down before you blast off.” – Unknown

– “Beware the fury of a patient man.” – John Dryden, Absolam and Achitophel, 1680

– “Patience: A minor form of despair disguised as a virtue.” – Ambrose Bierce

– “You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.” – Franklin P. Jones

– “Genius is nothing but a great aptitude for patience.” – George-Louis de Buffon

– “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

– “Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.” – John Quincy Adams

– “Patience is the companion of wisdom.” – St. Augustine

– “Patience is also a form of action.” – Auguste Rodin

Anger Quotes

– “If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?” – Sydney J. Harris

– “There is nothing more galling to angry people than the coolness of those on whom they wish to vent their spleen.” – Alexandre Dumas

– “Life is too short to hold a grudge, also too long.” – Robert Brault

– “He who angers you conquers you.” – Elizabeth Kenny

– “For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness.” – Unknown

– “Anger is one letter short of danger.” – Unknown

– “Anger ventilated often hurries toward forgiveness; and concealed often hardens into revenge.” – Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

– “People who fly into a rage always make a bad landing.” – Will Rogers

– “Never write a letter while you are angry.” – Chinese Proverb

– “Get mad, then get over it.” – Colin Powell

– “The world needs anger. The world often continues to allow evil because it isn’t angry enough.” – Bede Jarrett

– “Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.” – Phyllis Diller, Phyllis Diller’s Housekeeping Hints, 1966

– “In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.” – Mark Twain

– “Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” – Malachy McCourt

– “Take no revenge that you have not pondered beneath a starry sky, or on a canyon overlook, or to the lapping of waves and the mewing of a distant gull.” – Robert Brault

– “If you kick a stone in anger, you’ll hurt your own foot.” – Korean Proverb

– “Not the fastest horse can catch a word spoken in anger.” – Chinese Proverb

– “Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools.” – Albert Einstein

– “No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.” – George Jean Nathan

– “Anger is short-lived madness.” – Horace

– “Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.” – George Eliot

– “Do not teach your children never to be angry; teach them how to be angry.” – Lyman Abbott

– “Anger blows out the lamp of the mind.” – Robert G. Ingersoll

– “Sometimes when I’m angry I have the right to be angry, but that doesn’t give me the right to be cruel.” – Unknown

– “Next time you’re mad, try dancing out your anger.” – Sweetpea Tyler

– “Spite is never lonely; envy always tags along.” – Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

– “Always write angry letters to your enemies. Never mail them.” – James Fallows

– “At the core of all anger is a need that is not being fulfilled.” – Marshall B. Rosenberg

– “Anger and folly walk cheek by jole.” – Benjamin Franklin

– “Temper tantrums, however fun they may be to throw, rarely solve whatever problem is causing them.” – Lemony Snicket

– “I don’t have to attend every argument I’m invited to.” – Unknown

– “Can anger survive without his hypocrisy?” – Jareb Teague

– “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.” – Buddha

– “Malice drinks one-half of its own poison.” – Seneca

– “Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before – it takes something from him.” – Louis L’Armour

– “Never strike your wife – even with a flower.” – Hindu Proverb

– “Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.” – Ambrose Bierce

– “When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.” – Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894

– “Anger is a bad counselor.” – French Proverb

– “Resentment is an extremely bitter diet, and eventually poisonous. I have no desire to make my own toxins.” – Neil Kinnock

– “The worst-tempered people I’ve ever met were people who knew they were wrong.” – Wilson Mizner

– “To carry a grudge is like being stung to death by one bee.” – William H. Walton

– “The best remedy for a short temper is a long walk.” – Jacqueline Schiff

– “When a man sends you an impudent letter, sit right down and give it back to him with interest ten times compounded, and then throw both letters in the wastebasket.” – Elbert Hubbard

– “Consider how much more you often suffer from your anger and grief, than from those very things for which you are angry and grieved.” – Marcus Antonius

Honesty Quotes

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place. ~Henry Louis Mencken, A Little Book in C Major, 1916

If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything. ~Mark Twain

Who lies for you will lie against you. ~Bosnian Proverb

No man has a good enough memory to make a successful liar. ~Abraham Lincoln

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world. ~Thomas Carlyle

A half truth is a whole lie. ~Yiddish Proverb

A lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet, strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the scrape and left out the lie. ~Charles Edward Montague, Disenchantment

Those who think it is permissible to tell white lies soon grow color-blind. ~Austin O’Malley

A truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent. ~William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence,” Poems from the Pickering Manuscript

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold. ~Aristotle

The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted. ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Dare to be true: nothing can need a lie: A fault, which needs it most, grows two thereby. ~George Herbert

With lies you may get ahead in the world – but you can never go back. ~Russian proverb

Honesty is the rarest wealth anyone can possess, and yet all the honesty in the world ain’t lawful tender for a loaf of bread. ~Josh Billings

The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff. ~Ambrose Bierce

A lie has speed, but truth has endurance. ~Edgar J. Mohn

When you stretch the truth, watch out for the snapback. ~Bill Copeland

Truth is the most valuable thing we have, so I try to conserve it. ~Mark Twain

Honesty is never seen sitting astride the fence. ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911

A lie may take care of the present, but it has no future. ~Author Unknown

We tell lies when we are afraid… afraid of what we don’t know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger. ~Tad Williams

Truth fears no questions. ~Unknown

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously. ~Thomas Sowell

Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom. ~Thomas Jefferson

Funny Quotes to make you laugh

Men are like steel; both are worthless when they loose their temper. — Source Unknown

What if “the hokey pokey” is REALLY what it’s all about? — Curtis Spencer

We are the people our parents warned us about. — Jimmy Buffett

Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them…well, I have others. — Groucho Marx

The nice part of living in a small town is that when I don’t know what I’m doing, someone else does. — Source Unknown

USA Today has come out with a new survey-apparently, three out of every four people make up 75 percent of the population. — Dave Letterman

You know there is a problem with the education system when you realize that out of the 3 R’s only one begins with an R. — Dennis Miller

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. — Albert Einstein

Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain’t that a big enough majority in any town? — Mark Twain

A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on. — G. C. Lichtenberg

I admire the serene assurance of those who have religious faith. It is wonderful to observe the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces. — Mark Twain

Although it is generally known, I think it’s about time to announce that I was born at a very early age. — Groucho Marx

I know the answer! The answer lies within the heart of all mankind! The answer is twelve? I think I’m in the wrong building. — Charles Shulz

Convent. A place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the sin of idleness. — Ambrose Bierce

I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don’t talk politics. — Oscar Wilde

Plagiarists at least have the quality of preservation. — Benjamin Disraeli

I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers. — Mahatma Gandhi

Why do grandparents and grandchildren get along so well? They have the same enemy — the mother. — Claudette Colbert

If you think nobody cares if you’re alive, try missing a couple of car payments. — Flip Wilson

I know all those people. I have friendly, social, and criminal relations with the whole lot of them. — Mark Twain

A little girl at the wedding afterwards asked her mother why the bride changed her mind. What do you mean? responded her mother. Well, she went down the aisle with one man, and came back with another. — Source Unknown

If I held you any closer I would be on the other side of you. — Groucho Marx

The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so. — Mark Twain

He has not a single redeeming defect. — Benjamin Disraeli

When you get to my age life seems little more than one long march to and from the lavatory. — John Mortimer

Last night the creative juices were flowing but today I am merely a vast wasteland of random thoughts. — Peckeroy

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it. — Groucho Marx

In Mexico an air conditioner is called a politician because it makes a lot of noise but doesn’t work very well. — Len Deighton

My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a director. — Cole Porter

He believes that marriage and a career don’t mix. So after the wedding he plans to quit his job. — Source Unknown

Education Quotes #2

# “The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

# “Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.” – Jim Rohn

# “Education is that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.” – Ambrose Bierce

# “Getting things done is not always what is most important. There is value in allowing others to learn, even if the task is not accomplished as quickly, efficiently or effectively.” – R.D. Clyde

# “Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.” – Sir Claus Moser

# “In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

# “The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.” – Carl Rogers

# “A liberally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear.” – James B. Stockdale

# “An educational system isn’t worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn’t teach them how to make a life.” – Unknown

# “Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.” – Henry Peter Broughan

# “It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.” – Alec Bourne, A Doctor’s Creed

# “It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.” – J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

# “The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.” – Edward Bulwer-Lytton

# “A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary.” – Thomas Carruthers

# “The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.” – Cicero

# “An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” – Anatole France

# “I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.” – Socrates

# Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.” – Chinese Proverb

# “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.” – C. S. Lewis

# “Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they don’t know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.” – Sir William Haley

# “I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.” – Anne Sullivan

# “Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.” – Malcolm Forbes

Education Quotes

# “I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.” — Edith Ann, [Lily Tomlin]

# “You teach best what you most need to learn.” — Richard David Bach

# A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions. – Anonymous

# A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep. – Anonymous

# A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students. – John Ciardi

# A university professor set an examination question in which he asked what is the difference between ignorance and apathy. The professor had to give an A+ to a student who answered: I don’t know and I don’t care. – Richard Pratt, Pacific Computer Weekly, 20 July 1990

# “Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.” — (Louis) Hector Berlioz

# Academy: A modern school where football is taught. – Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) – The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911

# An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field. – Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

# Education … has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. – G. M. Trevelyan

# Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices. – Laurence J. Peter

# An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less. – Nicholas Murray Butler

# Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. – Will Durant

# Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school. – Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

# Experience is a good school, but the fees are high. – Heinrich Heine

# Experience is a great advantage. The problem is that when you get the experience, you’re too damned old to do anything about it. – Jimmy Connors

# Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you. – Aldous Huxley

# “Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.” – John Cotton Dana

# “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” – Henry Brooks Adams

# “What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.” –George Bernard Shaw

# “Good teachers are those who know how little they know. Bad teachers are those who think they know more than they don’t know.” – R. Verdi

# “Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.”
— Perelman

# “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” – Albert Einstein

# “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” – Mark Twain

# “Education is not the answer to the question. Education is the means to the answer to all questions.” – William Allin

# “Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward.” – Vernon Law

# “I may have said the same thing before… But my explanation, I am sure, will always be different.” – Oscar Wilde

# “Anyone can steer the ship when the sea is calm.” – Publilius Syrus

Funny Wisdom Quotes

A word to the wise ain’t necessary. It’s the stupid ones who need the advice. – Bill Cosby

Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives. – Abba Eban

I am not young enough to know everything. – Oscar Wilde

Cabbage: A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man’s head. – Ambrose Bierce

Some folk are wise, and some are otherwise. – Tobias Smollett

Along with success comes a reputation for wisdom. – Euripides

Cleverness is not wisdom. – Euripides

Silence is true wisdom’s best reply. – Euripides

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. – Bertrand Russell

It’s so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don’t say it. – Sam Levenson

Nothing would more contribute to make a man wise than to have always an enemy in his view. – Lord Halifax

Morning Quotes

– “If you’re going to do something tonight that you’ll be sorry for tomorrow morning, sleep late.” – Henny Youngman

– “Lose an hour in the morning, and you will be all day hunting for it.” – Richard Whately

– “The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.” – Jean Kerr, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, 1957

– “I’d like mornings better if they started later.” – Unknown

– “For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?” – Thornton Wilder

– “Through the blackest night, morning gently tiptoes, feeling its way to dawn.” – Robert Brault

– “Be pleasant until ten o’clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself.” – Elbert Hubbard

– “The older generation thought nothing of getting up at five every morning – and the younger generation doesn’t think much of it either.” – John J. Welsh

– “If people were meant to pop out of bed, we’d all sleep in toasters.” – Unknown

– “Sadness flies on the wings of the morning and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.” – Jean Giraudoux

– “The sun is but a morning star.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

– “There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast.” – Unknown

– “There is no hope for a civilization which starts each day to the sound of an alarm clock.” – Unknown

– “I can see the orange haze on the horizon as the morning exhales a yawn, and seems to be ready to rise.” – Jeb Dickerson

– “I have a “carpe diem” mug and, truthfully, at six in the morning the words do not make me want to seize the day. They make me want to slap a dead poet.” – Joanne Sherman

– “Never work before breakfast; if you have to work before breakfast, eat your breakfast first.” – Josh Billings

– “The plans that I made when horizontal are working out now that I’m vertical.” – Betsy Cañas Garmon

– “Luxury is an ancient notion. There was once a Chinese mandarin who had himself wakened three times every morning simply for the pleasure of being told it was not yet time to get up.” – Argosy

– “One key to success is to have lunch at the time of day most people have breakfast.” – Robert Brault

– “The sun has not caught me in bed in fifty years.” – Thomas Jefferson

– “I’ll tell you how the sun rose a ribbon at a time.” – Emily Dickinson

– “To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.” – Henry David Thoreau

– “Dawn: When men of reason go to bed.” – Ambrose Bierce

– “No human being believes that any other human being has a right to be in bed when he himself is up.” – Robert Lynd

– “Early morning cheerfulness can be extremely obnoxious.” – William Feather

– “Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience – unless they are still up.” – Ellen Goodman

– “I don’t think jogging is healthy, especially morning jogging. If morning joggers knew how tempting they looked to morning motorists, they would stay home and do sit-ups.” – Rita Rudner

Funny Motivational Quotes

– “Some people develop a wish bone where their back bone should be.” – Unknown

– “Some people not only expect opportunity to knock, they expect it to beat down the door.” – Unknown

– “Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.” – Ambrose Bierce

– “Start off every day with a smile and get it over with.” – W. C. Fields

– “Success comes in cans, failure in can’ts.” – Unknown

– “Success is simply a matter of luck. Ask any failure.” – Earl Nightingale

– “The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.” – Arthur C. Clarke

– “The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning, and does not stop until you get into the office.” – Robert Frost

– “The difference between a mountain and a molehill is your perspective.” – Al Neuharth

– “The difference between an optimist and a pessimist is that an optimist thinks this is the best possible world. A pessimist fears that this is true.” – Unknown