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The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum. ~Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923



Curmudgeon: anyone who hates hypocrisy and pretense and has the temerity to say so; anyone with the habit of pointing out unpleasant facts in an engaging and humorous manner (source: Portable Curmudgeon Redux, Jon Winokur).



The thoughts of Plato and Machiavelli... don't seem quite enough armor for a world beset with splitting the atoms, urban guerrillas, nineteen varieties of psychotherapists, amplified guitars, napalm, computers, astronauts, and an atmosphere polluted simultaneously with auto exhaust and TV commercials. ~John Fischer



A cat bitten once by a snake dreads even rope. ~Arab Proverb



The vow that binds too strictly snaps itself. ~Alfred Lord Tennyson, "The Last Tournament," Idylls of the King



What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself. ~Lewis Mumford, "Orientation to Life," The Conduct of Life, 1951



Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what happened. ~Jennifer Yane



God gave us all a penis and a brain, but only enough blood to run one at a time. ~Robin Williams



How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten? ~Logan Smith



Near this spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed Beauty without Vanity, Strength without Insolence, Courage without Ferocity, and all the Virtues of Man, without his Vices. This Praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery if inscribed over human ashes, is but a just tribute to the Memory of Boatswain, a Dog. ~George Gordon, Lord Byron, "Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog"



For 200 years we've been conquering Nature. Now we're beating it to death. ~Tom McMillan, quoted in Francesca Lyman, The Greenhouse Trap, 1990



We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so lifelike. ~Evelyn Underhill, Letters



Live as you will wish to have lived when you are dying. ~Christian Furchtegott Gellert



Faith is believing that the outcome will be what it should be, no matter what it is. ~Colette Baron-Reid



Life has no auto-settings. No batteries. You gots to wind it up! ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com



All dress is fancy dress, is it not, except our natural skins? ~George Bernard Shaw



The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd. ~Friedrich Nietzsche



If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. ~Albert Camus



Alas, by the time Fate caught up with my life, Chance had it all planned. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com



It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers. ~Author unknown, quoted in You Said a Mouthful edited by Ronald D. Fuchs