Quotes
Quotes about Wit
Self-esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.
Courtship to marriage, as a very witty prologue to a very dull play.
Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.
You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive.
Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us.
He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.
Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.
He who has imagination without learning has wings and no feet.
What a strange machine man is! You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out comes sighs, laughter, and dreams.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.
Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge: fitter to bruise than polish.
To confront a person with his own shadow is to show him his own light.
Those who failed to oppose me, who readily agreed with me, accepted all my views, and yielded easily to my opinions, were those who did me the most injury, and were my worst enemies, because, by surrendering to me so easily, they encouraged me to go too far... I was then too powerful for any man, except myself, to injure me.
The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.
Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons. It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the sense shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations--such is a pleasure beyond compare.
I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself.
It is a difficult matter to argue with the belly since it has no ears.
Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.
