good quotes about life and love and friends

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them. ~Stephen King



In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semi human. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog. ~Edward Hoagland



I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then. ~Bob Seger, "Against the Wind"



He showed that fame may be won and what services be rendered by a plain son of the people unaided by any gifts of fortune. ~James Bryce



Teacher appreciation makes the world of education go around. ~Helen Peters



Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons. ~Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 1875



Excuses are the nails used to build a house of failure. ~Don Wilder and Bill Rechin



How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours. ~Wayne Dyer



Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. ~George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, "Maxims: Liberty and Equality," 1905



I fear vastly more a futile, incompetent old age than I do any form of death. ~William Allen White



And withal they learn to be idle, wandering about from house to house; and not only idle, but tattlers also and busybodies, speaking things which they ought not. ~I Timothy 5:13



Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth. ~Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses



The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..." ~Isaac Asimov



Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm living public opinion. ~Wendell Phillips



If you cannot be a poet, be the poem. ~David Carradine



God loved the flowers and invented soil. Man loved the flowers and invented vases. ~Variation of a saying by Jacques Deval (God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages.) God loves an idle rainbow, no less than laboring seas. ~Ralph Hodgson



A statesman of the school of sound common sense, and a philanthropist of the most practical type, a patriot without a superior - his monument is a country preserved. ~C.S. Harrington



It is the same in love as in war; a fortress that parleys is half taken. ~Marguerite de Valois



Yes, this is what good is: to forgive evil. There is no other good. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin



While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will be up to, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician. ~Arthur Conan Doyle