100 best quotes | The World of English

100 best quotes and aphorisms by great and famous authors and writers edited for the World of English blog by Carl William Brown, a sincere literary avenger.

Aphorismus est sermo brevis, integrum sensum propositae rei scribens.
Isidore de Séville

Me, poor man, my library was a dukedom large enough!… So, of his gentleness, knowing I lov’d my books, he furnish’d me from my own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom!
William Shakespeare

In tristitia hilaris, in hilaritate tristis.
Giordano Bruno

The path to paradise begins in hell.
Dante

We fight against three giants, my dear Sancho: “injustice, fear, and ignorance.”
Miguel de Cervantes

I want to imagine death as an affectionate mother who, while holding me to her breast, instead of giving me life, for ever will take it away.
Carl William Brown

Never accept an inferior position to anyone. It is the strongest spirit that wins, not the most expensive sword.
Miyamoto Musashi

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
Zig Ziglar

We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
Friedrich Hegel

All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.
John Steinbeck

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.
Sigmund Freud

The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice.
Mahatma Gandhi

Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.
Aristotle

Knowledge is not free. You have to pay attention.
Richard Feynman

I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.
Harold Kushner

Keep silence for the most part, and speak only when you must, and then briefly.
Epictetuts

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.
Voltaire

Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.
Nikola Tesla

Once you stop learning, you start dying.
Albert Einstein

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.
Plato

Universe doesn’t even know that you exist, so relax.
Carl William Brown

What you are most interested in, that’s your religion.
David Barrie

If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.
Bruce Lee

To philosopher and historian the madness and imbecile wickedness of mankind ought to appear ordinary events.
David Hume

If you feel pain, you’re alive. If you feel other people’s pain, you’re a human being.
Lev Tolstoy

Most anthologists of quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters: first picking the best ones and winding up by eating everything.
Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort

To be old and wise, you must first be young and stupid.
Anonymous

Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.
Bruce Lee

There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.
John Adams

Smart people learn from everything and everyone; average people from their experiences; stupid people already have all the answers!
Socrates

Men usually take better care of their cars, shoes and clothes than of their earthily misfortune companions.
Carl William Brown

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou

Smart people learn from everything and everyone; average people from their experiences; stupid people already have all the answers!
Socrates

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
Albert Einstein

There is nothing so confining as the prisons of our own perceptions.
William Shakespeare

What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?
George Eliot

Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.
Matthew Arnold

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou

Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory.
Bruce Lee

I have come to discover through earnest personal experience and dedicated learning that ultimately the greatest help is self-help; that there is no other help but self-help – doing one’s best, dedicating oneself wholeheartedly to a given task, which happens to have no end but is an on-going process.
Bruce Lee

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
William Shakespeare

The greatest and most important problems in life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.
Carl Jung

There is a very fine line between ‘hobby’ and ‘mental illness.
Dave Barry

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.
Carl Jung

We cannot change anything unless we accept it.
Carl Jung

The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.
Okakura Kakuzo

Wisdom… comes not from age, but from education and learning.
Anton Chekhov

Pleasure in the job, put perfection in the work.
Aristotle

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou

Being a scholar of stupidity, how might I avoid to thank a lot of people for their existence.
Carl William Brown

Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.
Matthew Arnold

If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.
Aleister Crowley

The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
Thomas Stearns Eliot

We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.
Benjamin Franklin

The most intelligent recedes. The world domination of stupidity is based on this sad truth.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.
George Lois

Three things are needed to be happy: to be imbecile, to be selfish and to have good health. But if you miss the first, everything is over.
Gustave Flaubert

Life and art are nothing but associations of ideas and sorrows that nourish our illusory quest for the Holy Grail of the human existence.
Carl William Brown

Be nice to your siblings. They are the best link to you past and the people who likely to stick with you in the future.
Mary Schmich

Every artist was first an amateur.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Failure Is Only the Opportunity More Intelligently To Begin Again.
Henry Ford

Knowledge is not free. You have to pay attention.
R. Feynman

Trading involves a lot of discomfort. We take losses, we miss trades, good trades turn into bad trades. Unless a trader learns to tolerate these things they will never succeed.
Andrew Menaker

This avidity alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society.
David Hume

Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other.
Charles Lamb

You can beat 40 scholars with one fact, but you can beat one idiot with 40 facts.
Rumi

Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for wise men say it is the wisest course.
William Shakespeare

In my beginning is my end.
T. S. Eliot

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
T. S. Eliot

Life and art are nothing but associations of ideas and sorrows that nourish our illusory quest for the Holy Grail of the human existence.
Carl William Brown

The angry man will defeat himself in battle as well as in life.
Samurai Maxim

The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Control of mental conduct, not skill, is the sign of a matured samurai.
Japanese Proverb

The secret to living well and longer is: eat half, walk double, laugh triple and love without measure.
Tibetan Proverb

Being a scholar of stupidity, how might I avoid to thank a lot of people for their existence.
Carl William Brown

In fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm. Meet the situation without tenseness yet not recklessly, your spirit settled yet unbiased. An elevated spirit is weak and a low spirit is weak. Do not let the enemy see your spirit.
Miyamoto Musashi

Knowledge is not free. You have to pay attention.
R. Feynman

The palest ink is better than the most retentive memory.
Chinese proverb

What we frankly give, forever is our own.
George Granville

You will always have those only riches that you have donated.
Marco Valerio Marziale

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.
Leonardo da Vinci

Master YOURSELF, because you will never master the markets.
Glen Dahlen

A big part of financial freedom is having your heart and mind free from worry about the what-ifs of life.
Suze Orman

I don’t agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Voltaire

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The higher we are placed, the more humbly we should walk.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.
Plato

Theories are private property, but truth is common stock.
Charles Caleb Colton

What a terrible era in which idiots govern the blind.
William Shakespeare

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
Franz Kafka

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.
Andrei Voznesensky

Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.
Lord Byron

Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.
Benjamin Franklin

There is no sin except stupidity.
Oscar Wilde

An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.
Mahatma Gandhi

Stupidity gets up early; that is why events are accustomed to happening in the morning.
Karl Kraus

No man is an Island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main… any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee!
John Donne

We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.
Paul Gauguin

Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate’er it touches.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.
George Bernard Shaw

Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.
William Shakespeare

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
Bertrand Russell

Not necessity, not desire – no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything – health, food, a place to live, entertainment – they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Nothing is permanent in this world, not even our troubles.
Charlie Chaplin

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