100 awesome great quotes | The World of English

100 awesome great quotes, a collection of great aphorisms by famous authors to stimulate your thoughts, ideas, reflections and ways of dealing with reality.

Vulgus (Mundus o Populus) vult decipi, ergo decipiatur. (The world wants to be deceived, and so it is.)

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.
Marcus Aurelius

Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.
Jack London

Why is it that people with the most narrow of minds seem to have the widest of mouths?
Lewis Carroll

The art of politics and war serve above all to provide concrete empirical evidence for the understanding of human imbecility.
Carl William Brown

Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river. When the ocean is searching for you, don’t walk into the river. Listen to the ocean.
Rumi

Art is the incessant effort to compete with the beauty of flowers and never succeed.
Marc Chagall

Pain is a strange thing, you feel like you’ve reached the top and then you realize you’ve just started the climb. Pain has no limit, endurance does.
Andros

In loneliness, the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd, the many eat him. Now choose.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.
Voltaire

Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the society of intelligent women.
Leo Tolstoy

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
Abraham Maslow

Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.
Harry Emerson Fosdick

A sign of intelligence is an awareness of one’s own ignorance.
Niccolo Machiavelli

The whole world is a small place and has always been a big mess, so be prepared.
Carl William Brown

The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.
Joseph Joubert

When the listener does not understand the speaker and the speaker does not know what he is saying: this is philosophy.
Voltaire

Don’t get so tolerant that you tolerate intolerance.
Bill Maher

When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.
Viktor E. Frankl

The great and tragic problem about artificial intelligence is that it is strongly influenced by natural stupidity.
Carl William Brown

We are all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.
Rudyard Kipling

The time you enjoy waisting is not wasted time.
Bertrand Russell

Most people when they come to you for advice, come to have their own opinions strengthened, not corrected.
Josh Billings

The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, and perverts its liberty.
Immanuel Kant

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
Joseph Addison

A philosopher who says: “There are no truths, but only interpretations” risks the retort: “Is that true, or only an interpretation?.”
Roger Scruton

Where pain, risk, anxiety, memories, dissatisfaction and death roam, there my destiny was forged.
Carl William Brown

Don’t be pushed around by the fears in your mind. Be led by the dreams in your heart.
Roy. T. Bennett

One day machines will be able to solve all problems, but none of them will ever be able to pose a problem.
Albert Einstein

I desire to go to Hell and not to Heaven. In the former I shall enjoy the company of popes, kings and princes, while in the latter are only beggars, monks and apostles.
Niccolò Machiavelli

Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy.
Aristotle

Rest, nature, books, music, such is my idea of happiness.
Leo Tolstoy

Once a disease has entered the body, all parts which are healthy must fight it: not one alone, but all. Because a disease might mean their common death. Nature knows this; and Nature attacks the disease with whatever help she can muster.
Philippus A. Paracelsus

Without literature, life is hell.
Charles Bukowski

Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists of putting too high a value on time. In eternity there is no time. Eternity is a moment, just long enough for a joke.
Hermann Hesse

The raging fire which urged us on was scorching us; it would have burned us had we tried to restrain it.
Giacomo Casanova

“Classic”: A book which people praise and don’t read.
Mark Twain

The thing about smart people is they sound like crazy people to stupid people.
Albert Einstein

I hate victims who respect their executioners.
Jean-Paul Sartre

All passions are good when one masters them; all are bad when one is a slave to them.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Tolerance become a crime when applied to evil.
Thomas Mann

To win any battle, you must fight as if you are already dead.
Miyamoto Musashi

It’s not true that I had nothing on. I had the radio on.
Marilyn Monroe

The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become.
Heraclitus

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.
Niccolò Machiavelli

The paradox is a telescope for the stars and a microscope for the minimal bodies.
Lèon Bloy

There must be someone who keeps pushing the boundaries of the ridiculous.
Ennio Flaiano

Life is not worth living unless it is lived for someone else.
Albert Einstein

Before the internet we thought that stupidity was due to a lack of information. Today we know it wasn’t for that.
Carl William Brown

Summer afternoon – summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
Henry James

The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.
Jonathan Swift

It is a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it.
John Steinbeck

He who considers disease results to be the disease itself, and expects to do away with these as diseases, is insane. It is an insanity in medicine, an insanity that has grown out of the milder forms of mental disorder in science, crazy whims.
James Tyler Kent

I know a cure for everything. Salt water […] in one form or another, sweat, tears or the salt sea.
Karen Blixen

I am a human being, I think that nothing is alien to me. (Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.)
Terenzio

One-quarter of what you eat keeps you alive. The other three-quarters keeps your doctors alive.
Ancient Egyptian proverb

POLITICS is the ONLY profession where you can LIE, CHEAT, and STEAL, and still be respected.
Mark Twain

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
Albert Einstein

The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Give it up and you will be free.
Margaret Atwood

Born this way, in a place where the masses turn idiots into successful heroes.
Charles Bukowski

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Just as the largest library, badly arranged, is not so useful as a very moderate one that is well arranged, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if not elaborated by our own thoughts, is worth much less than a far smaller volume that has been abundantly and repeatedly thought over.
Arthur Schopenhauer

The reward of sin is death? That’s hard. Si peccasse negamus, fallimur, et nulla est in nobis veritas. If we say that we have no sin, We deceive ourselves, and there’s no truth in us.
Christopher Marlowe

All my life to find the center, and in the end the circumference explodes.
Carl Willliam Brown

Teach someone to be a writer and he will be poor for the rest of his life.
Anonymous

The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
Plato

There’s no coming to conciousness without pain.
Carl Jung

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.
Voltaire

My Crown is in my heart, not on my head: Not deck’d with Diamonds, and Indian stones: Nor to be seen: my Crown is call’d Content, A Crown it is, that seldom Kings enjoy.
William Shakespeare

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
Bertrand Russell

The intelligent man solves problems. The wise man avoids them. The stupid man creates them. And if the world is full of problems, there must be a reason.
Albert Einstein

The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
Soren Kierkegaard

If you see everything gray in front of you, move the elephant.
Indian proverb

A wise man never knows all. Only fools know everything.
African proverb

I am a foe to tyrants, and my country’s friend.
William Shakespeare

Commitment is an act, not a word.
Jean-Paul Sartre

I have great faith in fools, self-confidence, my friends will call it.
Edgar Allan Poe

Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities.
Ludwig von Mises

Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex.
Frank Zappa

Do not be so open-minded that your brain falls out.
G.K. Chesterton

There is absolutely no common sense, it is common non-sense.
Henry David Thoreau

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
Friedrich Nietzsche

If they are wise, do not quarrel with them; if they are fools, ignore them.
Epictetus

Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.
Anton Chekhov

The ability to sit and do nothing when there is no trade is a skill.
Golden rule

So in everything: power lies with those who control finance, not with those who know the matter upon which the money is to be spent.
Bertrand Russell

When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.
Voltaire

Focus on effort, not results.
Marcus Aurelius

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.
William Shakespeare

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.
Noam Chomsky

There is a kind of sadness that comes from knowing too much, from seeing the world as it truly is.
Virginia Woolf

Eros seizes and shakes my very soul like the wind on the mountain shaking ancient oaks.
Sappho

I have turned my life upside down. Before I was sad and depressed; now I am depressed and sad.
David Frost

Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.
Woody Allen

The world has suffered more from the ravages of ill-advised marriages than from virginity.
Ambrose Bierce

Agree or Disagree? It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
Italo Calvino

The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.
Laurence Sterne

Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.
Jonathan Swift

In politics, virtues should be flaunted, never put to the test.
Roberto Gervaso

What does not deserve the name of generosity is nothing more than one of the many forms of ostentation and pomp.
Arturo Graf

Life is a pill that no one can swallow unless it is golden.
Samuel Johnson

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