100 superlative quotes | The World of English

100 superlative quotes, some of the best aphorisms written by great and famous authors during the centuries to help us understanding the world where we live in.

Those who have compared our life to a dream were right… we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep.
Michel de Montaigne

Books are useless. A man needs someone… to be by his side.
John Ernst Steinbeck

Certainly money won’t solve all your problems, but at least it will solve your money problems.
Naval Ravikant

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
Adam Smith

The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.
Diogenes

The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.
Anais Nin

Eyes and ears are bad witnesses for men who have barbarian souls.
Heraclitus

Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Liberty of thought is the life of the soul.
Voltaire

Be silent, or let thy words be worth more than silence.
Pythagoras

It is not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.
Epictetus

Selfishness is the greatest curse of the human race.
William E. Gladstone

Devoted to our politicians. “Why is it that people with the most narrow of minds seem to have the widest of mouths?
Lewis Carroll

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
William Shakespeare

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

Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.
Ezra Pound

A man however well behaved, is a monkey shaved.
Charles Darwin

If you start to think about your physical or moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There is but one thing of real value – to cultivate truth and justice, and to live without anger in the midst of lying and unjust men.
Marcus Aurelius

All your religious conclusions have no meaning. You must be able to look at this life that you lead every day and be able to see it exactly as it is.
Krishnamurti

Sadness is caused by intelligence. The more you understand certain things, the more you wish you didn’t understand them.
Charles Bukowski

Quid est quod est? Ipsum quod fuit. Quid est quod fuit? Ipsum quod est. Nihil sub sole novum.
Giordano Bruno

At Christmas everyone is better. It’s what happens before and after that worries me.
Lucy van Pelt

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

Chi si illude di creare spesso distrugge e chi soffre distruggendo, talvolta crea.
Carl William Brown

Vi è un modo di ritornare dalla fantasia alla realtà e questo modo è l’arte.
Sigmund Freud

Knowledge that is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold in the mind.
Plato

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
Bertrand Russell

People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.
Soren kierkegaard

Believe those who are finding truth. Doubt those who find it.
Andre Gide

Politics have no relation to morals.
Niccolò Macchiavelli

If there is something that can replace love, it is memory.
Joseph Brodski

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

Attack is the secret of defense; defense is the planning of an attack.
Sun Tzu

I await your sentence with less fear than you pass it. The time will come when all will see what I see.
Giordano Bruno

A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
Thomas Mann

Love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is only your aversion to it that hurts, nothing else.
Hermann Hesse

Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.
Isaac Asimov

I await your sentence with less fear than you pronounce it. The time will come when everyone will see what I see.
Giordano Bruno

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Knowing how to die in one century means living for all the centuries to come.
Giordano Bruno

The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.
H.L. Mencken

Evil comes up softly like a flower.
Charles Baudelaire

There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.
Dante Alighieri

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
Marcel Proust

I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.
Jean-Paul Sartre

The greatest teacher is not the one who imparts knowledge, but the one who inspires curiosity.
Timotheus of Miletus

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.
Fyodor Dostoevsky

True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.
Karl R. Popper

He who is not a good servant will not be a good master.
Plato

The majority of mankind is lazyminded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith.
TsS. Eliot

The less talent they have, the more pride, vanity, arrogance they have. All these madmen, however, find other madmen who applaud them.
Erasmus

People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
Hermann Hesse

I libri non servono a niente. A un uomo occorre qualcuno… che gli stia accanto.
John Ernst Steinbeck

Knowledge is no guarantee of good behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior.
Martha C. Nussbaum

Si ripaga male un maestro, se si rimane sempre e solo un discepolo.
Friedrich Nietzsche

As Fyodor Dostoyevsky used to say in “The Idiot”, the Russian soul is a dark place, and I would add that it also a very stupid and cruel one.
Carl William Brown

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.
Guy de Maupassant

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
Oscar Wilde

The Russian soul is a dark place.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”
Bertrand Russell

To know how to die in one century, is to live for all centuries to come.
Giordano Bruno

Books are useless. A man needs someone… to be by his side.
John Ernst Steinbeck

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King Jr.

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

On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.
Michel de Montaigne

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
Bertrand Russell

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made school boards.
Mark Twain

There are people who are filled with knowledge, but empty with mercy and love.
Jonathan Edwards

The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
Samuel Johnson

Poetry comes to man as consolation in the form of beauty and allows even the horrid to be loved and contemplated: it makes the disgusting and the sublime compatible, in the perfection of the figure.
Salvatore Natoli

Tragedy, arising from the deep source of compassion, is in its essence pessimistic. In it, existence is something supremely terrible, man is something supremely foolish.
Friedrich Nietzsche

What has been is what will be. And what has been done is what will be done. There is nothing new under the sun.
Giordano Bruno

This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.
George V. Higgins

Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In fact, complete happiness cannot silence the pain. Less than ever can the art that consoles, the technique that produces, the virtue that administers.
Salvatore Natoli

All cruelty springs from weakness.
Seneca

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Brutal men with unlimited power are the same all over the world.
Mary Boykin Chestnut

Empathy may be the single most important quality that must be nurtured to give peace a fighting chance.
Arundhati Roy

It is a wise man who knows where courage ends and stupidity begins.
Jerome Cady

The worst of all deceptions is self-deception.
Plato

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Edith Wharton

There are actually many who read so they don’t have to think.
Lichtenberg

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.
Socrates

Laughing faces do not mean that there is absence of sorrow! But it means that they have the ability to deal with it.
William Shakespeare

Make yourself sheep and the wolves will eat you.
Benjamin Franklin.

There’s no system foolproof enough to defeat a sufficiently great fool.
Edward Teller

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Don’t just say that you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better.
Epictetus

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

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.
Voltaire

To live without philosophizing is in truth the same as keeping the eyes closed without attempting to open them.
Rene Descartes

No ornament of a house can compare with books; they are constant company in a room, even when you are not reading them.
Harriet Beecher Stowe

Education means development of the mind so that it will work for you and not against you. All education is self-acquired because no one can educate another.
Napoleon Hill

The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.
Ezra Pound

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

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

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

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