Fortune resists half-hearted prayers.
—Ovid, 8
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Quotes
Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations—wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.
—Edmund Burke, 1795Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with the necessities.
—John Lothrop Motley, 1858Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.
—Jean de La Bruyère, 1688The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of a gun.
—P.G. Wodehouse, 1929The mere existence of nuclear weapons by the thousands is an incontrovertible sign of human insanity.
—Isaac Asimov, 1988To be too conscious is an illness—a real thoroughgoing illness.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1864Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
—Cormac McCarthy, 1992Fear is the foundation of most governments.
—John Adams, 1776A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t go.
—Alexander Woollcott, c. 1935The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851He laughs best who laughs last.
—French proverbThe only function of a school is to make self-education easier.
—Isaac Asimov, 1974