100 magnificent quotes | The World of English

100 magnificent quotes, great aphorisms, ideas, maxims and quotations by various famous authors selected for the World of English by Carl William Brown, the literary avenger.

Oh, love isn’t there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.
Hermann Hesse

Madness is something rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.
Plato

The mirror is my best friend because when I cry it never laughs.
Charlie Chaplin

Aphorisms are the true form of the Universal Philosophy and containe the greatest quantity of thought in the smallest space.
Friedrich von Schlegel

Educate the children and it won’t be necessary to punish the men.
Pythagoras

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
Isaac Asimov

Without goals, the very concept of intelligence is meaningless.
Steven Pinker

I suppose that in no educational institution can one become an educated person.
Mikhail Bulgakov

No one’s fate is of any interest to you except your own.
Mikhail Bulgakov

Respond intelligently even to unintelligent treatment.
Sun Tzu

The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.
George Carlin

A fool contributes nothing worth hearing and takes offence at everything.
Aristotle

By now humanity has become so imbecile that we often tend to mortify intelligence, in order not to offend stupidity.
Carl William Brown

Show respect to people who don’t even deserve it; not as a reflection of their character, but as a reflection of yours.
Dave Willis

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
Bertrand Russell

It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the number of bad books.
Voltaire

The more real you get, the more unreal the world gets.
John Lennon

The more intelligence you have, the more you will suffer.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most.
Abraham Lincoln

The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.
Bertrand Russell

Love on one side is not enough, love is a dialogue, not a monologue.
Oriana Fallaci

Interacting with people that don’t like you it’s a fundamental process to study human stupidity.
Carl William Brown

The measure of a man is what he does with power.
Plato

No matter how you feel, get up, dress up, show up, and never give up.
Regina Brett

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.
Socrates

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.
Victor Hugo

A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.
Montaigne

From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.
Karl Marx

There is nothing in the world so much admired as a man who knows how to bear unhappiness with courage.
Seneca

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Isaac Asimov

A man’s manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.
Goethe

I was ashamed of myself when I realized life was a costume party and I attended with my real face.
Franz Kafka

Without love living is easy; but it’s meaningless.
Leo Tolstoy

Nobody is going to pour truth into your brain. It’s something you have to find out for yourself.
Noam Chomsky

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds!
Bob Marley

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
Plato

Those who look for the bad in people will surely find it.
Lincoln

It is not the man who has too little, but ht eman who craves more, that is poor.
Seneca

You can’t get much done in life if you only work on days when you feel good.
Jerry West

The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.
Mark Twain

In our society logics is intertwingled with nonsense, good things with evils ones, and most of the time you can’t tell which is which, therefore there is nothing more truly realistic than stupidity.
Carl William Brown

Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing.
Thales

To destroy war, destroy patriotism.
Leo Tolstoy

I don’t trust anyone who’s nice to me, but rude to a waiter because they would treat me the same if I were in that position.
Muhammad Ali

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
Pablo Picasso

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.
Seneca

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Alber Camus

Non serve a niente essere vivi, se bisogna lavorare.
André Breton

All cruelty spring from weakness.
Seneca

Be careful what you tolerate, you are teaching people how to treat you.
Dr. Phil McGraw

Better to die fighting for freedom then be a prisoner all the days of your life.
Bob Marley

For the Putrid President of Russia, remember Sun Tzu wise words, that is to say, the greatest victory is that which requires no battle.
Carl William Brown

Get busy with life’s purpose, toss aside empty hopes, get active in your own rescue.
Marcus Aurelius

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
Marshall McLuhan

Life is such a great a teacher that when we don’t learn a lesson, it will repeat it.
Anonymous

Fishes live in the sea, as men do on land: the great ones eat up the small one.
Pericles

A bad system will beat a good person every time.
W. Edwards Deming

Our life is what our thoughts make it, used to say Marcus Aurelius, but I would add that sometimes it is even worse!
Carl William Brown

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Simplicity is not a mere idea. To be simple demnds a great deal of intelligence and sensitivity.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.
Epictetus

Disturbance comes only from within, from our own perceptions.
Marcus Aurelius

All higher humor begins with ceasing to take oneself seriously.
Herman Hesse

The longer I live, the more convinced I am that this planet is being used by other planets as a madhouse of the universe.
George Bernard Shaw

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.
C.S. Lewis

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
C.S. Lewis

A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.
Bruce Lee

We have freedom of thought, now we need thought.
Carl Kraus

I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.
Albert Camus

No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.
Charles Dickens

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large group.
Geroge Carlin

The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them knows anything about the subject.
Marcus Aurelius

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.
William Shakespeare

Never depend on the admiration of others. There is no strength in it. Personal merit cannot be derived from an external source.
Epictetus

The old world is dying, the new world is slow to appear and in this chiaroscuro the monsters arise.
Antonio Gramsci

In most men, intelligence is a field which remains uncultivated for most of life.
Eugène Delacroix

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
Albert Camus

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
Helen Keller

Wise men speak when they have something to say, fools speak because they have to say something.
Aristotle

What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.
Eugene Delacroix

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
Helen Keller

An honest man is always a child.
Socrates

Open your mind before your mouth.
Aristophanes

Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process.
William B. Yeats

Why should we feel anger at the world? As if the world would notice.
Marcus Aurelius

Love is the state in which man sees things most decidedly as they are not.
Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
Sigmund Freud

I no longer know if I wish to drown myself in love, wodka or the sea.
Franz Kafka

The first thing that reading teaches us is how to be alone.
Jonathan Franzen

There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness and truth are absent.
Leo Tolstoy

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.
Sigmund Freud

The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.
Charles Darwin

Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first and the lesson afterward.
Oscar Wilde

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.
Soren Kierkegaard

Each of us assumes everyone else knows what he is doing. They all assume we know what we are doing. We don’t.
Philip K Dick

Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.
Benjamin Franklin

Nothing shows a man’s character more than what he laughs at.
Goethe

He who knows all the answers has not been asked all the questions.
Confucius

Gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force.
Herman Hesse

Better to die fighting for freedom then be a prisoner all the days of your life.
Bob Marley

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of individualism that the world has known.
Oscar Wilde

Everyday is like a fashion show and the whole world is the runway. Elegance is when the inside is as beautiful as the outside.
Coco Chanel

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
Friedrich Nietzsche

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

If you wish another to keep your secret, first keep it to yourself.
Seneca the Younger

When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them.
Confucius

It takes a minute to have a crush on someone, an hour to like someone, and a day to love someone… but it takes a lifetime to forget someone.
Kahlil Gibran

He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at.
Epictetus

Love is the art that you never learn and always know.
Benito Pérez Galdós

The more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.
Marcus Aurelius

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.
Vincent Van Gogh

The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.
Sun Tzu

Facts or opinions which are to pass through the hands of so many, to be misconceived by folly in one, and ignorance in another, can hardly have much truth left.
Jane Austen

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.
Epicurus

People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.
Thomas Merton

For we are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky

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