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List of quotes on different subjects beginning wit
Ability
(Consists) mainly in a high degree of solemnity.
Ambrose Bierce
(That which distinguishes) able men from dead ones.
Ambrose Bierce
The heart to conceive, the understanding to direct,
or the hand to execute. Junius
Trying all things; achieving what you can.
Adapted from Herman Melville
The art of getting credit for all the home runs
that somebody else hits. Casey Stengel
The explanation of your success.
Harry Thompson
See also Genius, Instinct, Skill, Talent, Work.
Abnormal
Not conforming to standard. In matters of thought
and conduct, to be independent is to be abnormal.
Ambrose Bierce
To have intelligence, character or genius; to be
less stupid than one's neighbor; to be better than
the worst; to be one's self. Elbert Hubbard
See also Eccentricity, Genius, Madness.
Abomination
A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed
innocent blood. A heart that devises wicked
imaginations, feet that are swift in running to
mischief, a false witness that speaks lies, and he
that sows discord among brethren.
Bible: Proverbs, VI, 16-19.
Abortion
Nothing but murder. Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Any operation which directly destroys either the
unborn child or the mother.
Decree of the Tribunal of the Holy Office, May 28,
1884
A smutty thing under any circumstances, legal or
illegal. Rustan Feroze
Infanticide. Flavius Josephus
The direct murder of the innocent.
Pope Pius 11
A capital crime. Talmud: Sanhedrin, 57b,c.
A precipitation of murder. He also is a man who is
about to be one. Tertullian
See also Birth Control, Population Explosion.
Absence
A woman's great strength. Emile C. Alain
(To be) superseded in the consideration and
affection of another. Ambrose Bierce
Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it
extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great.
Comte de Bussy-Rabutin
The pain without the peace of death.
Thomas Campbell
The common cure of love. Miguel de Cervantes
(That which) sharpens love. Thomas Fuller
The enemy of love. Italian Proverb
Absence and death are the same?only that in death
there is no suffering. Walter Savage Landor
The invisible and incorporeal mother of ideal
beauty. Walter Savage Landor
That which extinguishes small passions and
increases great ones. La Rochefoucauld
Death... to them that love. Philip Sidney
The cure for love. Spanish Proverb
That which makes the heart grow fonder?of somebody
else. Anon.
Absolute
The most fatal illusion... life is growth and
motion. Brooks Atkinson
Nothing more than the deceased spirit of theology
and thus a belief in pure phantoms.
Ludwig A. Feuerbach
The absolute is what it is, regardless of anything
else. Charles Hartshorne
Independent or neutral to relational alternatives.
Charles Hartshorne
The finalities of the earlier ages.
A. Eustace Haydon
God... all else is relative. Will Herberg
Everything absolute belongs to pathology.
Friedrich W. Nietzsche
Something all-inclusive, and not dependent upon
anything outside itself. Anon.
See also Fanaticism, Ideals, Truth.
Abstainer
A weak person who yields to the temptation of
denying himself a pleasure. Ambrose Bierce
Whereby a man refraineth from anything which he may
lawfully take. Thomas Elyot
Abstinence
A peculiarly fitting and appropriate method of
self-denial and self-discipline. John C. Ford
The best safeguard of morals and health.
Robert E. Lee
The beginning of saintliness. Moses Luzzato
The surety of temperance. Plato
Something good in its place... if forbidden food,
forbidden sexual indulgence, forbidden money
present themselves. Joseph Saiida
Something that is beneficial as long as it does not
harm anybody. Adapted from Mark Twain
The virtue of those too ill or too old to enjoy
life. Anon.
See also Abstainer, Continence, Moderation,
Self-Denial, Temperance.
Abstraction
The concreteness of Idealists.
Eugene E. Brussell
What the eye sees before habit sets up its
categories. John Ciardi
The intellectual's favorite pastime.
Aldous Huxley
See also Ideals, Philosopher, Science.
Absurdity
See Foolishness, Ridiculousness.
Abyss
The measureless gulf between literature and the
American magazine. Elbert Hubbard
The distance between a thinker and an editorial
writer. Elbert Hubbard
Academic Freedom
Simply a way of saying that we get the best results
in education and research if we leave their
management to people who know something about them.
Robert M. Hutchins
Read this to mean imposing by violence
anti-academic conditions on our schools and
universities. Dissenters are shouted down, not
allowed to speak, or the microphone is wrestled
from them. Discussion exists only among those who
agree. They demand that others follow democratic
rules that they themselves defy.
Henry J. Taylor
The right... to study, discuss, and write about
facts and ideas without restrictions, other than
those imposed by conscience and morality.
Yale University, Report Advisory Committee, 1952.
Academy
A modern school where football is taught.
Ambrose Bierce
An ancient school where morality and philosophy
were taught. Ambrose Bierce
A society promoting the love of the static,
immobile. Adapted from Elbert Hubbard
Pertaining to fossils; vegetative; parasitic?the
opposite of change. Elbert Hubbard
They commit their pupils to the theatre of the
world, with just taste enough of learning to be
alienated from industrious pursuits, and not enough
to do service in the ranks of science.
Thomas Jefferson
See also College, School, University.
Accent
A kind of chanting; all men have accent of their
own,?though they only notice that of others.
Thomas Carlyle
The soul of talk; it gives it feeling and verity.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
See also Eloquence, Language, Speech.
Acceptance
The truest kinship with humanity.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season? Robert Frost
What makes any event put on a new face.
Adapted from Henry S. Haskins
The art of making someone who has just done you a
small favor wish that he might have done you a
greater one. Russell Lynes
Accident
An inevitable occurrence due to the action of
immutable natural laws. Ambrose Bierce
An event happening unexpectedly and without fault;
if there is any fault, there is liability.
Thomas M. Cooley
A condition in which presence of mind is good, but
absence of body better. Foolish Dictionary
Accidents exist only in our heads, in our limited
perceptions. They are the reflections of the limit
of our knowledge. Franz Kafka
Accidents are accidents only to ignorance.
George Santayana
There is no such thing... What we call by that name
is the effect of some cause which we do not see.
Voltaire
A surprise arranged by nature. Anon.
See also Chance, Fortune, Life, Luck.
Accomplice
One associated with another in crime, having guilty
knowledge and complicity, as an attorney who
defends a criminal, knowing him guilty.
Ambrose Bierce
Achievement
That which is socially useful.
Adapted from Alfred Adler
The death of endeavor and the birth of disgust.
Ambrose Bierce
A bondage. It drives us to a higher achievement.
Albert Camus
Finding out what you would be; then doing what you
have to do. Adapted from Epictetus
Taking risks and making efforts. Karen Horney
To send a son to Harvard. Edgar W. Howe
Building a house, begetting a son, or writing a
book. Italian Proverb
To attempt the impossible. Anon.
See also Action, Deeds, Success.
Acquaintance
A degree of friendship called slight when its
object is poor or obscure, and intimate when he is
rich or famous. Ambrose Bierce
A person whom we know well enough to borrow from,
but not well enough to lend to.
Ambrose Bierce
Anyone who has refused us a loan.
Elbert Hubbard
A friend who has borrowed money from you.
Anon.
Acting
Consists of the ability to keep an audience from
coughing. Jean-Louis Barrault
Acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you've got
it made. George Burns
A poor traditionary fame. William Combe
A voluntary dream. William Hazlitt
The art of speaking in a loud clear voice and the
avoidance of bumping into furniture.
Adapted from Alfred Lunt
To seem natural rather than to be natural.
Alan A. Milne
The lowest of art; if it is an art at all.
George Moore
Acting isn't really a creative profession. It's an
interpretative one. Paul Newman
The ability to dream on cue. Ralph Richardson
The art of persuasion. The actor persuades himself,
first, and through himself, the audience.
Laurence Olivier
Just one version of the unreal after another.
Jack Nicholson
Just one big bag of tricks. Laurence Olivier
A masochistic form of exhibitionism. It is not
quite the occupation of an adult.
Laurence Olivier
An art which consists of keeping the audience from
coughing. Ralph Richardson
Acting is characterization, the process of two
entities merging?the actor and the role.
George C. Scott
That attempt to find universality, reality and
truth in a world of pretending. George C. Scott
To hold as `twere, the mirror up to nature.
William Shakespeare
One of the imitative arts. William Shenstone
A sad business where you crawl from hope to hope.
Walter Slezak
The moving picture of nature. William Winter
See also Actor, Hollywood, Movie, Theater.
Action
Coarsened thought?thought become concrete, obscure,
and unconscious. Henry F. Amiel
That which gives meaning to the world.
Adapted from Leon Baeck
What matters... We are present where we act.
Henri Bergson
Your business. Bhagavad-Gita
A readiness for responsibility.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Our epochs. Lord Byron
The proof, the criterion, of the Holy Spirit.
Hermann Cohen
The only things in life in which we can be said to
have any property. Charles Caleb Colton
A man's action is only a picture book of his creed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of
words. Ralph Waldo Emerson
To think. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
John Fletcher
The soul of all action is blindness. He who knows,
cannot act any longer. Knowing means foregoing
action. Egon Friedell
The proper Fruit of Knowledge. Thomas Fuller
The great end of life. Thomas Henry Huxley
The normal completion of the act of will which
begins as prayer. That action is not always
external, but it is always some kind of effective
energy. William R. Inge
The best interpreters of... thoughts.
John Locke
Man's destiny and duty in this life.
Dean Mansel
To befriend any one on God's account, and to be at
enmity with whosoever is the enemy of God.
Mohammed
Desire and force... desire causes our voluntary
acts, force our involuntary. Blaise Pascal
(That which) must be shown, by each of us in his
appointed place, not merely in the patience, but in
the activity of our hope... our labor.
John Ruskin
The only road to knowledge.
George Bernard Shaw
That which justifies itself only through morality.
Warren Goldberg
The first task of life. William G. Sumner
Simply the refuge of people who have nothing
whatever to do. Oscar Wilde
The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is
the last resource of those who know not how to
dream. Oscar Wilde
A blind thing dependent on external influences, and
moved by an impulse of whose nature it is
unconscious. Oscar Wilde
Action is transitory, a step, a blow, The motion of
a muscle?this way or that. William Wordsworth
See also Achievement, Deeds, Greatness, Hero,
Living, Morality, Religion, Work.
Actor
Rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars.
Act of Parliament, 1597.
A professional (one) is a man who can do his job
when he doesn't feel like it. An amateur is
(one)... who can't do his job when he does feel
like it. James Agate
A sculptor who carves in snow.
Lawrence Barrett
Casual laborers. Lillian Braithwaite
An actor is a guy who, if you ain't talking about
him, he ain't listening. Marlon Brando
A favored class?as they are merry folk who give
pleasure, everyone favors and protects them.
Miguel de Cervantes
The strolling tribe; a despicable race.
Charles Churchill
A wandering, careless, wretched, merry race.
George Crabbe
A nuisance in the earth, the very offal of society.
Timothy Dwight
A musician who plays on a home-made
instrument?himself. Helen Hayes
The only honest hypocrite. William Hazlitt
A paradox who plays when he works and works when he
plays. Lewis C. Henry
The best... is that man who can do nothing
extremely well. Alfred Hitchcock
No better than creatures set upon tables... to make
faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs.
Samuel Johnson
Compulsive quoters of people who originated the
ideas which they have finally come to believe are
entirely their own. Alexander King
Men who sleep till noon, and spend the afternoon
calling on women. George Jean Nathan
A man with an infinite capacity for taking praise.
Michael Redgrave
They are the abstract and brief chronicles of the
time. William Shakespeare
Actors are like politicians, and politicians are
like actors. They both spend time each day
contemplating their image. They both have a desire
to be loved. Gore Vidal
A child's prerogative. Children are born to act.
Usually, people grow out of it. Actors always seem
to be people who never did quite grow out of it.
Joanne Woodward
One who is no better than the director. Anon.
A man who can walk to the side of a stage, peer
into the wings filled with dust... and say "What a
lovely view there is from this window." Anon.
A puppet under its own power. Anon.
A person who makes faces for a living. Anon.
One who gets a glazed look in his eye when the
conversation drifts away from himself. Anon.
One who creates illusion in order to reveal
reality. Anon.
See also Acting, Hollywood, Movie, Starlet.
Adam
The luckiest man?he had no mother-in-law.
Sholom Aleichem
A man without a navel. Thomas Browne
God created Adam out of dust and then made Eve to
dampen him down. Leonard L. Levinson
(One who) sinned when he fell from Contemplation.
Since then, there has been division in man.
Jacques Maritain
The goodliest man of men. John Milton
Adam was created single to teach us that to destroy
one person is to destroy a whole world, and to
preserve one person is to preserve a whole world.
Mishna
Originally one, he has fallen, and, breaking up...
he has filled the whole earth with the pieces.
Saint Augustine
(A man who) when he said a good thing... knew
nobody had said it before. Mark Twain
The first great benefactor of our race. He brought
death into the world. Mark Twain
The first man to tell anybody about his operation.
Anon.
The only human to escape teething pains. Anon.
The only one who could not say, "Haven't we met
before?" Anon.
See also Creation (World), Man.
Admiral
That part of a war-ship which does the talking
while the figure-head does the thinking.
Ambrose Bierce
Admirals extoll'd for standing still
Or doing nothing with a deal of skill.
William Cowper
See also General, Militarism, War.
Admiration
A very short-lived passion, that immediately decays
upon growing familiar with its object.
Joseph Addison
Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to
ourselves. Ambrose Bierce
A youthful fancy which scarcely ever survives to
mature years. Josh Billings
Ignorance. Thomas Fuller
Things not understood. Thomas Fuller
A form of shamefaced flattery. Elbert Hubbard
Approbation, heightened by wonder and surprise,
constitutes the sentiment. Adam Smith
One of the most bewitching, enthusiastic passions
of the mind... it arises from novelty and surprise,
the inseparable attendants of imposture.
William Warburton
See also Fame, Reverence.
Adolescence
A phase of transition from childhood to manhood, a
phase of uprootedness and drastic change.
Eric Hoffer
A kind of emotional seasickness. Both are funny,
but only in retrospect. Arthur Koestler
Just at the age `twixt boy and youth. When thought
is speech, and speech is truth.
William Shakespeare
Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for
a boy. William Shakespeare
A house on moving day?a temporary mess.
Julius E. Warren
In America, a period of time spent as if it were
the last fling at life, rather than a preparation
for it. Anon.
That period in life in which the young feel a great
urge to answer the telephone. Anon.
That period in life when one's parents become more
difficult. Anon.
That period in life when a boy refuses to believe
that someday he'll be as stupid as his parents.
Anon.
That period when the young feel their parents
should be told the facts of life. Anon.
A stage between infancy and adultery. Anon.
When Humpty-Dumpty is replaced by hanky-panky.
Anon.
See also Children, Juvenile Delinquency, Youth.
Adolescent
One who goes from humpty-dumpty to hanky-panky.
Hyman Maxwell Berston
Those who are quickest to discern hypocrisy.
Eugene E. Brussell
One who is well informed about anything he doesn't
have to study. Marcelene Cox
(One who) looks inward; the adult can look outward.
Pamela Frankau
One who has reached the age of dissent.
Harold Leslie
The awkward age when a child is too old to say
something cute and too young to say something
sensible. Anon.
Adult
A child blown up by age. Simone de Beauvoir
When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults
and they enter society. Brian Aldiss
An obsolete child. Theodore Geisel
To be alone. Jean Rostand
(Those who) have forgotten what it is to be a
child. Randall Jarrell
A kernal of instinct surrounded by a vast husk of
education. Bertrand A. Russell
A word used to lure children to movies.
Sidney Skolsky
(When) a child... realizes he has a right not only
to be right but also to be wrong. Thomas Szasz
One who has ceased to grow vertically but not
horizontally. Anon.
See also Age, Man, Maturity, Middle-Age, Woman.
Adultery
Whosoever looks on a woman to lust after her hath
committed adultery with her already in his heart.
Bible: Matthew, V, 28.
Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for
fornication, and shall marry another, commits
adultery. Bible: Matthew, XIX, 9.
Usually an act done under cover of darkness and
secrecy, and in which the parties are seldom
surprised.
Decision of the Maryland Court of Appeals, 1931.
To set your neighbor's bed a-shaking... an ancient
and long-established custom. Juvenal
A man is guilty of adultery if he marries a
divorced woman; and so is he who divorces his wife,
save on the ground of misconduct, to marry again.
Firmianus Lactantius
The application of democracy to love.
Henry Louis Mencken
Not only when you look with... desire at a woman
who is not your wife, but also if you look in the
same manner at your wife. Pope John Paul 2
If a man leaves his wife and she marries another,
she commits adultery. Saint Augustine
To leave a wife who is sterile in order to take
another by whom children may be had. Anyone doing
this is guilty of adultery. Saint Augustine
(The) great democratic vice.
George Bernard Shaw
See also Cuckold, Lovers, Mistress, Sex (Love),
Sin.
Advantage
To seize an opportunity... to know when to forego
an advantage. Benjamin Disraeli
Recognition of opportunity. Max Gralnick
To enjoy no advantage at all.
Henry David Thoreau
See also Ancestry, Wealth.
Adventure
Rightly considered, only an inconvenience.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Something you seek for pleasure, or even for
profit, like a gold rush or invading a coun-
try... the thing you will to occur.
Katherine Ann Porter
Adventurer
An outlaw... Adventure must start with running away
from home. William Bolitho
The tremendous outsider. William Bolitho
With the woman-adventurer all is love or hate. Her
adventure is man; her type is not the prospector,
but the courtesan. That is, her adventure is an
escape, developing inevitably into a running fight
with the institution of marriage.
William Bolitho
One who has a passion to realize the impossible.
Adapted from Isaac Wise
Advertisements
The principal reason why the businessman has come
to inherit the earth. James R. Adams
The mouthpiece of business. James R. Adams
Eighty-five per cent confusion and fifteen per cent
commission. Fred Allen
The ideals of a nation. Norman Douglas
One of the most interesting and difficult of modern
literary forms. Aldous Huxley
The only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
Thomas Jefferson
Legalized lying. Herbert G. Wells
A creator of false hunger. Anon.
See also Advertising, Newspapers, Public Relations,
Television Commercial.
Advertising
A sort of tumor, that ends by killing the victim's
sympathies. Henry Adams
The great art in... finding out a proper method to
catch the reader's eye. Joseph Addison
Instruments of ambition. Joseph Addison
Advertising isn't a science. It's persuasion... an
art. William Bernbach
What you do when you can't go see somebody.
Fairfax Cone
To avoid the concrete promise... and cultivate the
delightfully vague. John Crosby
The education of the public as to who you are,
where you are, and what you have to offer in way of
skill, talent, commodity. Elbert Hubbard
An organized effort to extend and intensify
craving. Aldous Huxley
Promise?large promise?is the soul of advertising.
Samuel Johnson
The science of arresting the human intelligence
long enough to get money from it.
Stephen Leacock
The cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if
the goods are worthless. Sinclair Lewis
The place where the selfish interests of the
manufacturer coincide with the interests of
society. David Ogilvy
That essential American strategy.
Richard H. Rovere
The modern substitute for argument; its function
is to make the worse appear better.
George Santayana
The art of making whole lies out of half truths.
Edgar A. Shoaff
Millions of dollars... spent annually to entice
people to dedicate themselves to the "cult of
things," nice things which are phony, valueless,
glamorous, sinful. Rolan Simonitsch
A campaign of subversion against intellectual
honesty and moral integrity. Arnold Toynbee
A technique which makes you believe you've longed
all your life for something you've never heard of
before. Anon.
The vision which reproaches man for the paucity of
his desires. Anon.
The whip which hustles humanity up the road to the
Better Mousetrap. Anon.
A paying thought. Anon.
Bragging for profit. Anon.
See also Advertisements, Newspapers, Propaganda,
Public Relations, Television, Television Commercial.
Advice
The suggestions you give someone else which you
hope will work for your benefit.
Ambrose Bierce
To seek another's approval of a course already
decided upon. Ambrose Bierce
A drug on the market; the supply always exceeds the
demand. Josh Billings
What is best to yourself given by yourself.
Adapted from Cicero
Like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it
dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into, the
mind. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Always a confession. Emile Herzog
(Something) offensive, because it shows us that we
are known to others, as well as to ourselves.
Samuel Johnson
What we ask for when we already know the answer but
wish we didn't. Erica Jong
What a man gives when he gets too old to set a bad
example. La Rochefoucauld
A sacred thing. Plato
A thing sought by all, but taken by none, including
the one who gives it. Harry Ruby
One of those injuries which a good man ought, if
possible, to forgive. Horace Smith
A commodity more blessed to give than receive.
Anon.
Something that costs you nothing unless you act
upon it. Anon.
Affectation
A fault. Miguel de Cervantes
It is a form of affectation to emphasize the fact
that you do not indulge in it. La Rochefoucauld
An awkward and forced imitation of what should be
genuine and easy, wanting the beauty that
accompanies what is natural. John Locke
The whole aim of affectation is to cheat you.
Adapted from G. H. Powell
What spoils fine faces. Anon.
See also Hyprocrisy.
Affection
A body of enigmas, mysteries, riddles wherein two
so become one that they both become two.
Adapted from Thomas Browne
The purest affection the heart can hold is the
honest love of a nine-year old. Holman Day
These jets... which make a young world for me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A bad adviser. German Proverb
A woman's whole life. Washington Irving
See also Feeling, Happiness, Love.
After-Thought
A tardy sense of prudence that prompts one to try
to shut his mouth about the time he has put his
foot in it. Gideon Wurdz
See also Repartee.
Age
Always 15 years older than I am.
Bernard Baruch
Only a number, a cipher for the records. A man
can't retire his experience. Bernard Baruch
(Something that) doesn't matter unless you're a
cheese. Billie Burke
Succeeding stages. Thomas Campbell
A matter of feeling, not of years.
George W. Curtis
Youth is a blunder; manhood is a struggle; old age
a regret. Benjamin Disraeli
The essence of age is intellect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Childhood is ignorant, boyhood is lighthearted,
youth is rash, and old age is ill-humored.
Luis de Granada
At eighteen, one adores at once; at twenty, one
loves; at thirty, one desires; at forty, one
reflects. Paul de Kock
When a man is young he writes songs; grown up, he
speaks in proverbs; in old age he preaches
pessimism. Hebrew Proverb
A bad habit which a busy man has no time to form.
Emile Herzog
A person's age is not dependent upon the number of
years that have passed over his head, but upon the
number of colds that have passed through it.
Woods Hutchinson
Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the
swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers
and bursts the husks. George Macdonald
Youth is fair, a graceful stag,
Leaping, playing in a park
Age is gray, a toothless hag,
Stumbling in the dark. Isaac Peretz
The first forty years of life give us the text; the
next thirty supply the commentary on it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
A matter of arteries.
Adapted from Thomas Sydenham
Youth is a garland of roses; old age a crown of
willows. Talmud: Sabbath, 152a.
A man is still young as long as women can make him
happy or unhappy. He reaches middle age when they
can no longer make him unhappy. He is old when they
cease to make him either happy or unhappy.
Anon.
At ten, a child; at twenty, wild;
At thirty, tame if ever;
At forty, wise; at fifty, rich;
At sixty, good, or never. Anon.
The only thing that comes to us without effort.
Anon.
Your length in years. Anon.
When one begins to exchange emotions for symptoms.
Anon.
See also Maturity, Middle Age, Old Age, Youth.
Aggression
An innate, independent, instinctual disposition in
man... it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to
culture. Sigmund Freud
The evil projected by the aggressor into the souls
of those he aims to destroy or oppress.
Gustave Thibon
Agnostic
One who doesn't know whether God exists, but is
afraid to say so loudly in case God might hear him.
Eugene E. Brussell
A man who doesn't know whether there is A God or
not, doesn't know whether he has a soul or not,
doesn't know whether there is a future life or not,
doesn't believe that anyone else knows any more
about these matters than he does, and thinks it a
waste of time to try to find out.
Richard Henry Dana
A confession of ignorance where honest inquiry
might easily find the truth. "Agnostic" is but
Greek for "ignoramus." Tyron Edwards
I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be
the appropriate title of "agnostic." It came into
my head as suggestively antithetic to the
"Gnostic" of Church history.
Thomas Henry Huxley
The person who admits that he does not know, and
is consequently open to learning.
David E. Trueblood
See also Agnosticism, Atheist, Free Thinkers,
Skeptic.
Agnosticism
The philosophical, ethical, and religious dry rot
of the modern world. F. E. Abbot
I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men
are sure?that is all that agnosticism means.
Clarence S. Darrow
A shadow cast by the eclipse of the supernatural...
Its meaning departs when the intellectual outlook
is directed wholly to the natural world.
John Dewey
A theory about knowledge and not about religion.
Richard Downey
Not open-mindedness; it is culpable inaction.
Nels F. Ferre
It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of
the objective truth of any proposition unless he
can produce evidence which logically justifies that
certainty. This is what agnosticism assets.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Not a creed, but a method, the essence of which
lies in the rigorous application of a single
principle... that every man should be able to give
a reason for the faith that is in him.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Simply means that a man shall not say he knows or
believes that for which he has no grounds for
professing to believe. Thomas Henry Huxley
Help for the living, hope for the dead.
Robert G. Ingersoll
The everlasting perhaps. Francis Thompson
See also Agnostic, Atheism, Skepticism.
Agreeable
A person who agrees with me.
Benjamin Disraeli
He who is endowed with the natural bent to do
acceptable things, from a delight he takes in them
merely as such. Richard Steele
Agriculture
See Farm, Farming.
Alcohol
See Drinking, Wine.
Alcoholic
See Drunkenness.
Alimony
Buying oats for a dead horse. Arthur Baer
Billing minus cooing. Mary Dorsey
A system which results when two people make a
mistake and one of them continues to pay for it.
Jimmy Lyons
Disinterest, compounded annually.
Walter McDonald
The ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
Henry Louis Mencken
The wages of sin is alimony. Carolyn Wells
Matrimonial insurance for women paid by men for
having poor judgment. Anon.
The cash surrender value of the American male.
Anon.
The act of giving comfort to the enemy. Anon.
The high cost of leaving. Anon.
The male's best proof that you have to pay for your
mistakes. Anon.
The result of marrying in haste and repenting
insolvent. Anon.
Time balm. Anon.
A form of guaranteed income. Anon.
What a woman who loved a man for all he is worth
gets. Anon.
See also Divorce, Marriage, Wife.
Allegory
Like so many tracts of light in a discourse, that
make everything about them clear and beautiful.
Joseph Addison
A man's life. John Keats
Alliance
See Treaty.
Alms
See Charity, Philanthropy.
Alone
See Loneliness, Solitude.
Altruism
Disregarding one's own cause.
Eugene E. Brussell
Inverted egotism. Jacob Cohen
The art of using others with the air of loving
them. Rene Dubreuil
Living largely for the good and happiness of
others. Adapted from Judah Moscato
Mowing your neighbor's lawn. Harry Thompson
Making the common good the mark of one's aim.
Adapted from John Wise
Slavery. Anon.
Desiring nothing for others that you do not desire
for yourself. Anon.
The art of doing unselfish things for selfish
reasons. Anon.
See also Charity, Idealist, Philanthropy, Reform.
Amateur
A public nuisance who confounds his ambition with
his ability. Ambrose Bierce
One who practices something without hope of fame
and money or of even doing it well.
Adapted from Gilbert Keith Chesterton
See also Dilettante.
Ambassador
In American politics, a person who having failed to
secure an office from the people is given one by
the Administration on condition that he leave the
country. Ambrose Bierce
(One who) should be versed in all the sciences; he
should understand hints, gestures and expressions
of the face; he should be honest, skillful and of
good family. Code of Manu, VII
A man whose vocabulary becomes three times as
extensive and twice as indistinct as any one elses.
Adapted from John Kenneth Galbraith
The eyes and ears of states.
Francesco Guicciardini
A man who had the most money and the fewest votes.
John D. Lodge
Ambassadors are, in the full meaning of the term,
titled spies. Napoleon 1
An honest man, sent abroad to lie for the
commonwealth. Henry Wotton
One who makes the world safe for hypocrisy.
Anon.
A paid political tourist. Anon.
A politician who is given a job abroad in order to
get him out of the country. Anon.
See also Diplomat.
Ambidextrous
Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket
or a left. Ambrose Bierce
Ambition
The desire of rising. Thomas Adams
(That which) raises a secret tumult in the soul; it
inflames the mind, and puts it into a violent hurry
of thought. Joseph Addison
The excrement of glory. Pietro Aretino
(That which) destroys its possessor.
Babylonian Talmud: Yoma, 86a.
Like choler, which is a humor that makes man
active, earnest, full of alacrity and stirring, if
it be not stopped. But if it be stopped, and cannot
have its way, it becomes a dust, and thereby malign
and venomous. Francis Bacon
An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies
while living and made ridiculous by friends when
dead. Ambrose Bierce
Not what man does... but what man would do.
Robert Browning
A proud covetousness, or a dry thirst of honor, a
great torture of the mind, composed of envy,
pride... a gallant madness, one defines it a
pleasant poison. Robert Burton
The only power that combats love.
Colley Cibber
An insatiable desire for honor, command, power, and
glory. Cicero
The mind's immodesty. William D'Avenant
That worst of deities... queen of wrong.
Euripides
The wings of great actions. Johann W. Goethe
A condition inspired by the wish to be first.
Max Gralnick
The desire to excel. Max Gralnick
Bondage. Ibn Gabirol
To be unhappy at home is the ultimate result of all
ambition. Samuel Johnson
The last affection a high mind can put off.
Ben Jonson
Avarice on stilts and masked.
Walter Savage Landor
This senseless chasing of rainbows.
Frederick Loewe
In a private man a vice... in a prince... virtue.
Philip Massinger
A secret poison. Saint Bernard
The shadow of a dream. William Shakespeare
Goaled rush. Ellis Stewart
(A vice which) often puts men upon doing the
meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the
same posture with creeping. Jonathan Swift
That which brings the mind into full activity.
Henry Taylor
Nets to catch the wind. John Webster
The last refuge of the failure. Oscar Wilde
Ambition has but one reward for all:
A little power, a little transient fame,
A grave to rest in, and a fading name!
William Winter
Bubbles on the rapid stream of time.
Edward Young
Achievement. Israel Zangwill
Aggravated itching of the palm. Anon.
A mental condition which compells one to work one's
self to death in order to live. Anon.
See also Fame, Success.
Ambulance
A crash and carry car. Anon.
The shuttle between a speeding car and a
wheelchair. Anon.
AMERICA
An asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.
Samuel Adams
Half-brother of the world! With something good and
bad of every land. Philip J. Bailey
A European outpost culturally and spiritually. The
whole doctrine of white supremacy comes from
Europe. James Baldwin
The country where you buy a lifetime supply of
aspirin for one dollar, and use it up in two weeks.
John Barrymore
Where humanity, for the first time in modern
history, was let loose. Hans Bendix
A place where Jewish merchants sell Zen love
beads to agnostics for Christmas.
John B. Brimer
We are not a Nation, but a Union, a confederacy of
equal and sovereign States. John C. Calhoun
A dirty chimney on fire. Thomas Carlyle
A commonwealth in which common men and women should
count for more than elsewhere. Lord Charnwood
The only nation in history which... has gone
directly from barbarism to degeneration without
the usual interval of civilization.
Georges Clemenceau
A huge rescue squad on a twenty-four hour call to
any spot on the globe where dispute... may erupt.
Eldridge Cleaver
The greatest potential force, material, moral, and
spiritual, in the world. G. Lowes Dickinson
A country of young men. Ralph Waldo Emerson
America means opportunity, freedom, power.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(A place where) the geography is sublime, but the
men are not: the inventions are excellent, but the
inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A wild democracy, the riot of mediocrities... Our
few fine persons are apt to die.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A sanctuary on the earth for individual man.
William Faulkner
An anti-paradise, but it has so much room and so
many possibilities, and in the end one does come to
belong to it. Sigmund Freud
A mistake, a magnificent mistake, but a mistake
nonetheless. Sigmund Freud
A place where an hour is forty minutes.
German Proverb
(A country which) has liberty without license and
authority without despotism. James Gibbons
The land of unlimited opportunities.
Ludwig Goldberger
The only country deliberately founded on a good
idea. John Gunther
A place where the people have the right to
complain about the lack of freedom.
Louis Hirsch
A civilization that operates its economy and
government, and satisfies most of its cultural
needs without the aid of the typical intellectual.
Eric Hoffer
(A) country (which) gives a man elbow room to do
what is nearest to his heart. Eric Hoffer
The only place where man is full-grown.
Oliver Wendell Holmes 1
The greatest law factory the world has ever known.
Charles Evans Hughes
America... may be described as a land where the
Common Man is perpetually bidding his fellow to go
to hell, and at the same time doing his best to get
him into heaven. Lawrence P. Jacks
Equal and exact justice to all men.
Thomas Jefferson
The general store for the world... Most of all,
merchants for a better way of life.
Lady Bird Johnson
Not merely a nation, but a nation of nations.
Lyndon Baines Johnson
An economic system prouder of the distribution of
its products than of the products themselves.
Murray Kempton
A nation of immigrants.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Mother of exiles. Emma Lazarus
America is a tune. It must be sung together.
Gerald S. Lee
The last abode of romance and other medieval
phenomena. Eric Linklater
She of the open soul and open door.
James Russell Lowell
A map of endlessness, of opening out, of forever
and ever. Archibald MacLeish
A land of boys who refuse to grow up.
Salvador de Madariaga
A great death continent populated only with
machines and walking corpses. Jacques Maritain
A cocktail culture whose unlovely symbol is the
ring on the best mahogany. Elsa Maxwell
A nation of twenty-million bathrooms with a
humanist in every tub. Mary McCarthy
Not a nation so much as a world.
Herman Melville
(A) conservtive country without any conservative
ideology. C. Wright Mills
A dream in the constant process of realization, a
vision constantly being fulfilled. Judah Nadich
The largest shopping center in the world.
Richard Milhous Nixon
A country that has leapt from barbarism to
decadence without touching civilization.
John O'Hara
Almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.
Ezra Pound
This synagogue is our temple, this city our
Jerusalem, this happy land our Palestine.
Gustav Poznanaski
An overdeveloped urban nation with an
underdeveloped system for dealing with its city
problems. James Reston
A nation that conceives many odd inventions for
getting somewhere but can think of nothing to do
when it gets there. Will Rogers
(A land) where law and custom alike are based
upon the dreams of spinsters.
Bertrand A. Russell
A young country with an old mentality.
George Santayana
A powerful solvent. It seems to neutralise every
intellectual element, however tough and alien it
may be, and to fuse it in the native goodwill,
complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
George Santayana
A "happy-ending" nation. Dore Schary
The child society par excellence... the society
of all rights and no obligations. Karl Shapiro
This great spectacle of human happiness.
Sydney Smith
In the United States there is more space where
nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes
America what it is. Gertrude Stein
The sovereign power of the people, exercised
through their representatives in Congress, with
the concurrence of the executive.
Thaddeus Stevens
A large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every
time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.
Arnold J. Toynbee
The finest society on a grand scale that the world
has thus far produced. Alfred North Whitehead
The greatest poem. Walt Whitman
If she stands for one thing more than another, it
is for the sovereignty of self-governing people.
Woodrow Wilson
The only idealistic nation in the world.
Woodrow Wilson
The place where you cannot kill your government
by killing the men who conduct it.
Woodrow Wilson
Not a mere body of traders; it is a body of free
men. Our greatest is built upon our freedom...
moral, not material. Woodrow Wilson
The only fabulous country; it is the only place
where miracles not only happen, but where they
happen all the time. Thomas Wolfe
God's crucible, the great melting-pot.
Israel Zangwill
A country where all the people are created equal
and are free to become otherwise. Anon.
This face of many faces. Anon.
A country where they lock up juries and let
defendants out. Anon.
See also Americanism, Americans, Yankee.
American Constitution
Essentially an economic document based upon the
concept that the fundamental rights of private
property are anterior to government and morally
beyond the reach of popular majorities.
Charles Beard
Laws of heavenly origin. It was not borrowed from
Greece or Rome, but from the Bible.
Lyman Beecher
A way of ordering society, adequate for imaginative
statesmanship. Felix Frankfurter
A charter emanating directly from the people.
Arthur Goldberg
The Constitution is what the judges say it is.
Charles Evans Hughes
Our basic law... is distinctive among the basic law
of all nations, even the free nations of the West,
in that it prescribes no national dogma:
economic, social, or religious.
Lyndon Baines Johnson
The Constitution was designed to remedy existing
injustices perpetrated by the superior force of an
interested and overbearing majority.
James Madison
A superior, paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary
means. John Marshall
The charter of all that is distinctively American
in our national spirit. Edward Mooney
The most marvelously elastic compilation of rules
of government ever written.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
A Charter of Anarchism. It was not an instrument of
government: it was a guarantee to the whole
American nation that it never should be governed at
all. And that is exactly what the Americans wanted.
George Bernard Shaw
Not a mere lawyer's document; it is a vehicle of
life, and its spirit is always the spirit of the
age. Woodrow Wilson
See also America, Americans.
Americanism
To respect the rights of others.
William Jennings Bryan
Carry the American flag, and keep step to the music
of the Union. Rufus Choate
A mode of living in which we find the joy of life
and the joy of work harmoniously combined.
Albert Einstein
Deep involvement in the destiny of men everywhere.
Dwight David Eisenhower
A heritage of tolerance, moderation, and individual
liberty that was implanted from the very beginnings
of European settlement in the New World. America
has quite rightly been called a nation that was
"born free." James W. Fulbright
Liberty without license and authority without
despotism. James Gibbons
To embody human liberty in workable government.
Herbert Hoover
The uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is
the star that is not reached and the harvest that's
sleeping in the unplowed ground.
Lyndon Baines Johnson
We aspire to nothing that belongs to others. We
seek no dominion over our fellow man, but man's
dominion over tyranny and misery.
Lyndon Baines Johnson
The American system of private enterprise and
economic democracy. Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Those who are Americans and nothing else.
Theodore Roosevelt
A question of principle, or purpose, of Idealism,
of Character; it is not a matter of birthplace or
creed or line of descent. Theodore Roosevelt
Equalitarianism, love of freedom, and bounding
energy. Stephen J. Taylor
'Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent
alliances, with any portion of the foreign world.
George Washington
Consists in utterly believing in the principles of
America. Woodrow Wilson
See also America, Yankee.
Americans
Hardness and materialism, exaggeration and
boastfulness... false smartness, a false audacity,
a want of soul and delicacy. Matthew Arnold
The American mind... is not formed by books,
but... by newspapers and the Bible.
Van Wyck Brooks
A people who are still... but in the gristle, and
not yet hardened into the love of manhood.
Edmund Burke
Most Americans are born drunk... They have a sort
of permanent intoxication from within, a sort of
invisible champagne... Americans do not need to
drink to inspire them to do anything.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
A sort of queer Englishman. Agatha Christie
Fixers rather than preventers. James Doolittle
A puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation,
following are our diseases. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only the continuation of the English genius into
new conditions, more or less propitious.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A fortunate people but a very commonsensical
people, with vision high but their feet on the
earth, with belief in themselves and faith in God.
Warren G. Harding
One step forward,?and in that advancing figure you
have the American. Thomas W. Higginson
The Romans of the modern world?the great
assimilating people. Oliver Wendell Holmes 1
One who will sacrifice property, ease, and security
in order that he and his children may retain the
rights of free men. Harold Ickes
Not a thoughtful people; they are too busy to stop
and question their values. William R. Inge
They are a race of convicts, and ought to be
thankful for anything we allow them short of
hanging. Samuel Johnson
Enslaved, illogical, elate,
He greets the embarrassed Gods, nor fears
To shake the iron hand of fate
Or match with destiny for beers.
Rudyard Kipling
The desire for riches is their ruling passion.
La Rochefoucauld
(One who is) nomadic in religion, in ideas, in
morals. James Russell Lowell
People who prefer the Continent to their own
country, but (who) refuse to learn its languages.
Edward Lucas
The peculiar, chosen people?the Israel of our
time?we bear the ark of liberties of the world.
Herman Melville
Simply one who has put out of his mind all doubts
and questionings, and who accepts... the whole
body of official doctrine of his day.
Henry Louis Mencken
That singular people who know a little, and but a
little, of everything. John Neal
A primitive people camouflaged behind the latest
inventions. Jose Ortega y Gasset
(Those who) make money their pursuit.
Richard Parkinson
Cut an American into a hundred pieces and boil him
down, you will find him all Fourth of July.
Wendell Phillips
The first requisite of a good citizen in this
republic of ours is that he shall be able and
willing to pull his weight. Theodore Roosevelt
A sane and healthy man, who believes in decency
and has a wholesome mind. Theodore Roosevelt
Children of the crucible. Theodore Roosevelt
The great idealist among mankind. Leon Samson
The perfect conformist. Andre Siegfried
The most materialistic people in the world.
George W. Steevens
An Anglo-Saxon relapsed into semibarbarism.
Bayard Taylor
(An Englishman is) a person who does things because
they have been done before. (An American is) a
person who does things because they haven't been
done before. Mark Twain
One who gets mad when an alien cusses the
institutions he cusses. Anon.
Similar participants in a uniform way of life.
Anon.
See also America, Americanism, Yankee.
Amnesty
A noble world. What it stands for is the true
dictate of wisdom. Aeschines
The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it
would be too expensive to punish.
Ambrose Bierce
The most beautiful word in all human speech.
Victor Hugo
Amusement
A metaphysical trick to deceive our anguish.
Jean C. De Menasce
Its main purpose is to keep people from vice.
Adapted from Samuel Johnson
Taking your fun where you find it.
Adapted from Rudyard Kipling
The happiness of those who cannot think.
Alexander Pope
When men are rightly occupied... their work.
John Ruskin
See also Entertainer, Sports.
Analogy
The least misleading thing we have.
Samuel Butler 2
All perception of truth is the perception of
analogy; we reason from our hands to our head.
Henry David Thoreau
Anarchist
One who believes people should go about doing just
as they please?short of altering any of the things
to which he has grown accustomed.
Adapted from Max Beerbohm
One who disaffiliates himself from the machinations
of society and government in order to fulfill his
personal quest. Eugene E. Brussell
A person more interested in his own fate than in
who gets elected to Congress. Warren Goldberg
One who maps and surveys the air and constructs
dainty Utopias with the building-blocks quarried
from his... credulity. Elbert Hubbard
A militant bourgeois who has deserted both Rome and
Reason because he cannot stand the competition.
Elbert Hubbard
A bourgeois turned inside out. Nikolai Lenin
The ordinary man... wants to do as he likes. He may
want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself
doesn't want to be governed. He is mortally afraid
of government officials and policemen.
George Bernard Shaw
One who wants to be left alone. Anon.
Anarchy
The liberation of the human mind from the dominion
of religion; the liberation of the human body from
the dominion of property; liberation from the
shackles and restraints of government.
Johann W. Goethe
The possibility of organization without discipline,
fear or punishment, and without the pressure of
property. Johann W. Goethe
An adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to
society, and could be followed even if no law
existed. Peter A. Kropotkin
A name given to a... theory of life and conduct
under which society is conceived without
government. Pe tr A. Kropotkin
The doctrine that all the affairs of men should be
managed by individuals or voluntary associations,
and that the State should be abolished.
Benjamin R. Tucker
Anatomy
Anatomy is to physiology as geography to his-
tory; it describes the theater of events.
Jean F. Fernel
Something everyone has but it looks better on a
girl. Bruce Raeburn
See also Body.
Ancestry
An account of one's descent from an ancestor who
did not particularly care to trace his own.
Ambrose Bierce
The known part of the route from an arboreal
ancestor with a swim bladder to an urban descendant
with a cigarette. Ambrose Bierce
(Something that) increases in the ratio of
distance. George W. Curtis
Man is descended from a hairy-tailed quadruped,
probably arboreal in its habits.
Charles Darwin
The blending of all emotions. How... superior to
the herd is the man whose father only is famous!
Imagine then the feelings of one who can trace his
line through a thousand years of heroes and of
princes. Benjamin Disraeli
I am my own ancestor. Andoche Junot
The man who has not anything to boast of but his
illustrious ancestors is like a potato?the only
good belonging to him is underground.
Thomas Overbury
A desirable thing to have, but the glory belongs to
our ancestors. Adapted from Plutarch
A lamp to posterity. Sallust
The last people I should choose to have a visiting
acquaintance with. Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Those transparent swindles. Mark Twain
If famous, something we all take credit for as if
we had something to do with it. Anon.
The bark of a family tree. Anon.
See also Aristocracy, Breeding, Gentleman,
Heredity, Rank.
Ancients
The wisdom of the cradle. Thomas Browne
People who were really new in everything.
Blaise Pascal
See also Classics, History.
Angel
He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep
thee in all thy ways. Bible: Psalms, XCI, 2.
The dispensers and administrators of the Divine
beneficence toward us; they regard our safety...
and exercise a constant solicitude that no evil
befall us. John Calvin
A spiritual creature created by God without a body,
for the service of Christendom and of the Church.
Martin Luther
Everyone entrusted with a mission is an angel...
All forces that reside in the body are angels.
Moses Maimonides
Angels may become men or demons, and again from the
latter they may rise to be men or angels.
Origen
Guardians. Saint Ambrose
In heaven... nobody in particular.
George Bernard Shaw
Angels are human forms, or men, for I have
conversed with them as man to man.
Emanuel Swedenborg
Anger
A mental imbecility. Hosea Ballou
(A state that) begins with folly, and ends with
repentance. Henry G. Bohn
It is the man. Cabanis
An expensive luxury in which only men of a certain
income can indulge. George W. Curtis
(Something that) boils at different degrees.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A vulgar passion directed to vulgar ends, and it
always sinks to the level of its object.
Ernest Feuchtersleben
One of the sinews of the soul; he that wants it
hath a maimed mind. Thomas Fuller
Overheating the oven. Warren Goldberg
(A state that) starts with madness, and ends with
regret. Abraham Hasdai
Momentary insanity. Horace
Before election, the righteous wrath of a candidate
in the presence of evils that he has invented;
after election day, his wail in the presence of the
grave he did not dig. Elbert Hubbard
(Sometimes) a violent blushing and scampering up
and down of the blood upon hearing the truth about
ourselves. Elbert Hubbard
A wind which blows out the lamp of the mind.
Robert G. Ingersoll
An essential part of the outfit of every honest
man. James Russell Lowell
The seducer of thought. No man can think clearly
when his fists are clenched.
George Jean Nathan
Brief madness, and, unchecked, becomes protracted
madness, bringing shame and even death.
Petrarch
Valour's whetstone. Thomas Randolph
Like those ruins which smash themselves on what
they fall. Seneca
Supping upon one's self. Anon.
Something you never get rid of by losing. Anon.
See also Hatred.
Anglo-Saxon
(One who) carries self-government and self-de-
velopment with him wherever he goes.
Henry Ward Beecher
People who do not know how to enjoy themselves.
Adapted from Henry George
It is the outstanding mark of the Anglo-Saxon's
philosophical provincialism that he places sex on
the farcial index expurgatories along with his God,
his wife, his dog. George Jean Nathan
The qualities of the... race are industry,
intelligence, and self-confidence.
Anthony Trollope
See also America, Church of England, England,
English Language, English- men.
Animals
Agreeable friends?they ask no questions, they pass
no criticisms. George Eliot
Every man. Frederick the Great
Nothing but the forms of our virtues and vices,
wandering before our eyes, the visible phantoms of
our souls. Victor Hugo
Man in a stage of arrested development.
Christian Morgenstern
(Those who) hear about death for the first time
when they die. Arthur Schopenhauer
(Those who) never hear the clock strike... die
without any idea of death... have no theologians to
instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed
by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their
funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts
lawsuits over their wills. Voltaire
See also Cat, Dog.
Anthologist
A person who uses scissors and taste.
Philip Van Doren Stern
Praise the wise anthologist,
Who culls the best that's on the shelf.
None of us worthies shall be missed
Including his son, his wife and himself. Anon.
Anthology
A complete dispensary of medicine for the more
common mental disorders, and may be used as much
for prevention as cure. Robert Graves
Antiques
Remnants of history which have casually escaped the
shipwrecks of time. Francis Bacon
Glorified scrap. Max Gralnick
Anything that has outlived its usefulness.
Oliver Herford
Beings that had lived for centuries, or else come
back from the dead, without suffering any
impairment of their integrity. Ernest Jones
An object that has made a round trip to the attic.
Anon.
An object that fetches fancy prices for what
grandmother threw out. Anon.
Junk that had a second chance and took advantage of
it. Anon.
Anti-Semitism
(A disease that) will die only with the last Jew.
Victor Adler
The socialism of fools. August Bebel
A useful revolutionary expedient. Adolf Hitler
A form of Christian hypocrisy. The Christian
whitewashes himself by attributing his views to the
Jew. Bernard Lazare
(A belief which) diverts men from the real tasks
confronting them... diverts them from the true
causes of their woes. Jacques Maritain
The final consequence of Judaism.
Friedrich W. Nietzsche
The most dangerous survival of cannibalism.
Joseph Stalin
A noxious weed. William Howard Taft
A pathological condition, a peculiar form of sexual
perversion. Leon Tolstoy
The swollen envy of pigmy minds?meanness,
injustice. Mark Twain
One of its fundamental causes is that Jews exist...
We carry the germs of Anti-Semitism in our knapsack
on our backs. Chaim Weizmann
See also Jews, Judaism, Zionism.
Anxiety
The essence of conscience. Sigmund Freud
In psychoanalysis... it comprehends many forms and
degrees of fear, apprehensiveness, dread or even
panic. Ernest Jones
The excitement, the e lan vital which we carry
with us, and which becomes stagnated if we are
unsure about the role we have to play.
Frederick S. Perls
Fear of one's self. Wilhelm Stekel
Frustrated coitus. Anon.
See also Worry.
Apathy
See Indifference.
Ape
Man is God's ape, and an ape is zany to a man,
doing over those tricks (especially if they be
knavish) which he sees done before him.
Thomas Dekker
What is the ape to man? A laughingstock, a thing of
shame. Friedrich W. Nietzsche
Of beasts, it is confess'd, the ape
Comes nearest us in human shape;
Like man he imitates each fashion,
And malice is his ruling passion.
Jonathan Swift
An animal with the effrontery to resemble man.
Anon.
See also Evolution, Man.
Aphorism
Portable wisdom. William R. Alger
Predigested wisdom. Ambrose Bierce
Boned wisdom for weak teeth. Ambrose Bierce
The largest and worthiest portion of our
knowledge... and the greatest and best of men is
but an aphorism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Thoughts one might have... expressed... by someone
recognizedly wiser than oneself.
Marlene Dietrich
The excellence of aphorisms consists... in the
comprehension of some obvious and useful truth in a
few words. Samuel Johnson
A personal observation inflated into a universal
truth, a private posing as a general.
Stefan Kanfer
An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a
half-truth or one-and-a-half truths. Karl Kraus
To say in ten sentences what other men say in whole
books. Friedrich W. Nietzsche
Aphorisms are salted not sugared almonds at
Reason's feast. Logan P. Smith
(That which) drags from obscurity a recognizable
intuition by clothing it in words.
Adapted from Logan P. Smith
A proverb with long whiskers. Anon.
Apollo Space Program
A symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind
to explore the unknown. Edwin Aldrin
A majestic milestone of man's quest for the stars,
and it is a dramatic reminder of how far we have
yet to go in the heavens as well as here on earth.
Joseph Alioto
One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
Neil Armstrong
The finest tribute to the most dynamic people in
the world and their system. Vinod K. Bansal
A circus to distract people's minds from the real
problems which are here on the ground.
Eldridge Cleaver
A triumph of the squares. Eric Hoffer
An American triumph. Patricia Lepis
An event apart from the main flow of history.
James MacGregor
An accomplishment of middle America. Anon.
See also Astronauts, Space Program.
Apology
To lay the foundation for a future offense.
Ambrose Bierce
A very desperate habit?one that is rarely cured...
only egotism wrong side out. Nine times out of ten,
the first thing a man's companion knows of his
shortcomings is from his apology.
Oliver Wendall Holmes 1
An expression bestowed on a man if you are wrong,
on a woman if you are right. Anon.
To repeat an insult with variations. Anon.
Apostate
See Heretic.
Apostle
Fools for Christ's sake.
Bible: Corinthians, IV, 10.
A person who has grown round-shouldered from
following the spoor of another. Elbert Hubbard
Them that the Lord gave the keys of the Kingdom of
Heaven. Pope Innocent 3
The Apostles for our sake received the gospel from
the Lord Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ was sent from
God. Christ then is from God, and the Apostles from
Christ. Both therefore came in due order from the
will of God. Saint Clement
These whom Christ had set up as masters, Who were
His companions, His disciples, His intimates.
Tertullian
Apparition
See Ghost.
Appetite
The most violent appetites in all creatures are
lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon
them to propagate their kind, the latter to
preserve themselves. Joseph Addison
An instinct thoughtfully implanted by Providence
as a solution to the labor question.
Ambrose Bierce
A most direct line to the grave for the poor and
rich alike. Eugene E. Brussell
The best sauce. French Proverb
Something you always bring to another's table.
Jewish Proverb
See also Abstinence, Eating, Hunger, Stomach.
Applause
The echo of a platitude. Ambrose Bierce
The spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak
ones. Charles Caleb Colton
Sweet, seducing charms. William Cowper
The silence that accepts merit as the most natural
thing in the world is the highest applause.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The beginning of abuse. Japanese Proverb
At the start of a lecture, it is a manifestation of
faith. If it comes in the middle, a sign of hope.
At the end, it is always charity.
Adapted from Fulton J. Sheen
Often less a blessing than a snare.
Edward Young
See also Fame, Popularity.
April
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Lovely fickleness. William H. Gibson
A spirit of youth in everything.
William Shakespeare
Love's spring. William Shakespeare
The uncertain weather month. Anon.
The world growing green. Anon.
The month when the green returns to the lawn, the
lilac and the IRS. Anon.
See also Spring.
April Fool
The March fool with another month added to his
folly. Ambrose Bierce
The day upon which we are reminded of what we are
on the other 364. Mark Twain
Arabs
A man who will pull down a whole temple to have a
stone to sit on. Arabian Proverb
Oriental Italians. A gifted, noble people; a people
of wild, strong feelings, and of iron restraint
over these; the characteristic of noblemindedness,
of genius. Thomas Carlyle
Arabs are not heathens. Idolatry was eliminated
from their speech and hearts long ago, and they
affirm properly the unity of God... Those who
worship in mosques today have their hearts directed
only toward heaven. Moses Maimonides
See also Mohammed, Mohammedanism.
Archaeologist
The best husband any woman can have: the older she
gets, the more interested he is in her.
Agatha Christie
One whose career lies in ruins. Anon.
Archaeology
The science of digging a hole and spinning a yarn
about it. Ralph Alexander
The Peeping Tom of the sciences... the sand-box of
men who care not where they are going; they merely
want to know where everybody else has been.
James Bishop
Frozen history. Gregory Mason
Digging up the past. Leonard Wooley
Architect
One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a
draft of your money. Ambrose Bierce
A man who could build a church... by squinting at a
sheet of paper. Charles Dickens
The servant of society, of the style and the
mores... of the customs of the demands of the time
in which he works. Philip Johnson
A fellow who talks you into debt three or four
thousand dollars more. Abe Martin
Architecture
The art of creating a space.
Yoshinobu Ashihara
The art of significant forms in space?that is,
forms significant of their functions.
Claude Bragdon
The inner-relation and interaction of mass, space,
place, and line. Craig Ellwood
The flowering of geometry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Frozen music. Johann W. Goethe
A particle is snatched from space, rhythmically
modulated by membranes dividing it from sur-
15x620rounding chaos: that is Architecture.
Erno Goldfinger
The art of how to waste space. Philip Johnson
A cultural instrument. Louis I. Kuhn
The printing press of all ages.
La Rochefoucauld
A social art and only makes sense as the promoter
and extender of human relations. Denys Lasdum
The thoughtful housing of the human spirit in the
physical world. William O. Meyer
The handwriting of man. Bernard Maybeck
The will of an epoch translated into space.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
A sort of oratory of power.
Friedrich W. Nietzsche
The pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his
will to power. Friedrich W. Nietzsche
The art of resolving our needs for physical shelter
harmoniously with the environment.
Gustavo de Roza
The manly language of a people inspired by resolute
and common purpose. John Ruskin
The frame of human existence... the only record you
can read now of those civilizations which have
passed into the distance. Frank Lloyd Wright
Arguments
The longest distance between two points of view.
Dan Bennett
The tree of knowledge blasted by dispute.
John Denham
The hereditary misfortune of thought.
Elias Canetti
Something you can easily win?with yourself.
Adapted from William Feather
A discussion which has two sides and no end.
Leonard Neubauer
The worst sort of conversation. Jonathan Swift
(Something) vulgar, and often convincing.
Oscar Wilde
See also Controversy, Debate, Lawyers.
Aristocracy
The rich, the beautiful and well born.
John Quincy Adams
That form of government in which education and
discipline are qualifications for suffrage or
office-holding. Aristotle
Rectitude, platitude, high-hatitude.
Margot Asquith
A corporation of the best, of the bravest.
Thomas Carlyle
Title... fortune... position. Thomas Carlyle
It is well said, "Land is the right basis of an
aristocracy"; whoever possesses the land, he,
more... than any other, is the governor, vice-king
of the poeple of the land. Thomas Carlyle
What is left over from rich ancestors after the
money is gone. John Ciardi
A combination of many powerful men, for the purpose
of maintaining and advancing their own particular
interests. It is consequently a concentration of
all the most effective parts of a community for a
given end; hence its energy, efficiency and
success. James Fenimore Cooper
The immediate power between tyranny and democracy.
It saves the people from violating the law, and the
king from oppressing the people.
Benjamin R. Haydon
Nothing but ancient riches. George Herbert
Virtue and talents. Thomas Jefferson
A clean tradition, culture, public spirit, honesty,
honor, courage?above all, courage.
Henry Louis Mencken
A deeply worldly quality, a profound
sophistication, an informed cynicism.
William S. White
An almost disdainful private detachment, a long...
ancestral memory that rejects both too much love
and too much hate; a willingness to die quietly...
but never to be caught out in a senti- mentalism
or a cliche of thought. William S. White
See also Ancestry, Breeding, Heredity, King,
Nobility.
Aristocrat
Fellows that wear downy hats and clean
shirts?guilty of education and suspected of bank
accounts. Ambrose Bierce
Pre-eminence of high descent. Robert Blair
The democrat ripe and gone to seed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To be of such character that people do not care to
know whether you are or are not.
Jean de La Bruyere
When he fights he fights in the manner of a
gentleman fighting a duel, not in that of a
longshoreman cleaning out a waterfront saloon... he
carefully guards his amour propre by assuming
that his opponent is as decent a man as he is, and
just as honest. Henry Louis Mencken
Mere accident, and not a virtue.
Pietro Metastasio
One who speaks freely from what is dictated by a
clear conscience. Adapted from Philo
I am an aristocrat. I love liberty; I hate
equality. John Randolph
He who is by nature well fitted for virtue.
Seneca
A pedigree reaching as far back as the Deluge.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Anyone conducting himself with dignity and
truthfulness. Anon.
See also Ancestry, Aristocracy, Gentleman, Great
Man, Nobility, Rank, Superior Man.
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
A schoolboy who knows the answer to a sum, but
cannot get the figures to come to it.
Walter Bagehot
The master of them that know. Dante
This accursed, proud, knavish heathen... God sent
him as a plague for our sins. Martin Luther
(He) who has an oar in every water and meddles with
all things. Michel de Montaigne
A man of excellent genius, though inferior in
eloquence to Plato. Saint Augustine
A fore-runner of Christian truth.
Phillip Schaff
Indistinctness of ideas, confusion of mind, and a
confident use of language which led to the delusive
notion that he had really mastered his subject...
He put words in the place of things, subject in the
place of object. John Tyndall
(He) invented science, but destroyed philosophy.
Alfred North Whitehead
(He) discovered all the half-truths which were
necessary to the creation of science.
Alfred North Whitehead
Arithmetic
See Mathematics.
Arms
Adult toys. Jean Follain
(That which) makes men equal; a citizen's musket
fires as well as a nobleman's. Heinrich Heine
(That which) does more for peace than a thousand
mild apostles. Theodor Herzl
The props of peace. Latin Proverb
The principal foundations of all states.
Niccolo Machiavelli
See also War.
Army
A body of men assembled to rectify the mistakes of
the diplomats. Josephus Daniels
An instrument for bolstering, protecting and
expanding the present. Eric Hoffer
A body of humanitarians that seeks to impress on
another body of men the beauty of non-resistance?by
exterminating them. Elbert Hubbard
Two armies are two bodies which meet and try to
frighten each other. Napoleon I
The basis of power, and... power is always in the
hands of those who command the army.
Adapted from Leon Tolstoy
See also General, Militia, Soldier, War.
Art
Every art is social... the result of a relation
between the artist and his time.
James T. Adams
Chance and observation, nursed by use and
experience... improved and perfected by reason and
study. Leon Alberti
In part, art completes what nature cannot
elaborate; and in part, it imitates nature.
Aristotle
Consists in bringing something into existence.
Aristotle
Man added to nature. Francis Bacon
Man's nature; nature is God's art.
Philip J. Bailey
Nature concentrated. Honore de Balzac
Art distills sensation and embodies it with en-
hanced meaning in memorable form.
Jacques Barzun
The achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.
Saul Bellow
Art strives for form, and hopes for beauty.
George Bellows
Charm and lightness of form. Julien Benda
Not based on actuality; but on the wishes, dreams
and aspirations of a people. Bernard Berenson
Art is I; science is we. Claude Bernard
This word has no definition. Ambrose Bierce
Art is made to disturb. Science reassures. There is
only one valuable thing in art: the thing you
cannot explain. Georges Braque
Life upon the larger scale.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The one way possible of speaking truth.
Robert Browning
The history of revivals. Samuel Butler 2
To create, and in creating live a being more
intense, that we endow with form our fancy, gaining
as we give the life we image.
Adapted from Lord Byron
Abstract art? A product of the untalented, sold by
the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
Al Capp
A self-respecting search for the unknown.
Eugenio Carmi
A mould in which to imprison for a moment the
shining, elusive element which is life itself?life
hurrying past us and running away, too strong to
stop, too sweet to lose. Willa Cather
The triumph over chaos. John Cheever
Consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of
every picture is the frame.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Like morality, consists in drawing the line
somewhere. Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The conversation that best listens to itself
listening. John Ciardi
To draw from the accumulated wisdom of tradition a
reasoned and independent sentiment of my own
individuality. Gustave Courbet
An absolute mistress... she requires the most
entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand
triumphs. Charlotte Cushman
Art imitates nature as well as it can, as a pupil
follows his master; thus it is a sort of grandchild
of God. Dante
Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it.
Edgar Degas
Not what you see but what you must make others see.
Edgar Degas
The terms of an armistice signed with fate.
Bernard De Voto
The stored honey of the human soul, gathered on
wings of misery and travail. Theodore Dreiser
International possessions, for the joy and service
of the whole world. The nations hold them in trust
for humanity. Havelock Ellis
A jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for
it, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The path of the creator to his work.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
By means of appearances, to produce the illusion of
a loftier reality. Ralph Waldo Emerson
The conscious utterance of thought, by speech or
action, to any end. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is everything man is born to, and art is the
difference he makes in it. John Erskine
The increment of the power of the hand.
John Fiske
A side of phantasy-life. Sigmund Freud
Certain significant and orderly relations of form.
Roger Fry
Preoccupation with inevitable sequences of cause
and effect. Roger Fry
Either a plagiarist or a revolutionist.
Paul Gauguin
The handmaids of religion. James Gibbons
A collaboration between God and the artist, and the
less the artist does the better. Andre Gide
Consists in the employment of a... system of laws,
commensurate to every purpose within its scope, but
concealed from the eye of the spectator.
John Mason Good
That which gives a pure emotion... which invites to
neither virtue nor patriotism... nor anything but
art itself. Remy de Gourmont
The expression of an emotional experience in some
medium?stone, bronze, paint, words, or musical
tone?in such a way that it may be transferred to
other people. F. E. Halliday
That through which form becomes style.
Emile Herzog
A revolt against man's fate. Emile Herzog
The most exact transcription possible of my most
intimate impression of nature. Edward Hopper
Anything done by a man or woman on paper, canvas,
marble or a musical keyboard that people pretend to
understand, and sometimes buy. Elbert Hubbard
The antithesis of whatever becomes popular in the
cultured world. Elbert Hubbard
Love's by-product. Elbert Hubbard
The expression of man's joy in his work.
Elbert Hubbard
Not a thing: it is a way. Elbert Hubbard
An instant arrested in eternity.
James G. Huneker
(That which makes) it possible for us to know, if
only imperfectly and for a little while, what it
actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
Aldous Huxley
One of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life
which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and
largely evil. Aldous Huxley
Nothing more than the shadow of humanity.
Henry James
Anything that makes for proportion and perspective,
that contributes to a view of all the dimensions.
Henry James
(That which) registers the deformities which have
not yet penetrated our consciousness.
Franz Kafka
The truest League of Nations, speaking a language
and preaching a message understood by all peoples.
Otto H. Kahn
The expression of something one has seen which is
bigger than oneself. Oliver La Farge
The business of art is to reveal the relation
between man and his universe, at the living moment.
D. H. Lawrence
(That which happens) wherever deep experience
attains intense expression. Ludwig Lewisohn
If it sells, it's art. Frank Lloyd
The desire of man to express himself, to record the
reactions of his personality to the world he lives
in. Amy Lowell
The conveyance of spirit by means of matter.
Salvador de Madariaga
Not a caricature of creation, it continues
creation. Jacques Maritain
Always and everywhere the secret confession, and at
the same time, the immortal movement.
Karl Marx
The true function of art is to criticise, embellish
and edit nature?particularly to edit it, and so
make it coherent and lovely.
Henry Louis Mencken
A shadow of the divine perfection.
Michelangelo
The employment of the powers of nature for an end.
John Stuart Mill
Sacrifice and self-control. Alice D. Miller
The treating of the commonplace with the feeling of
the sublime. Jean F. Miller
Art is not nature. Art is nature digested. Art is a
sublime excrement. George Moore
To complete the design of the gods.
George Moore
Man's expression of his joy in labor.
William Morris
To express through the body the mystery of the
soul. Through the body?that is to say by way of
all the signs?visual, audible, mobile.
Jean Mouroux
A means of addressing humanity.
Modest P. Moussorgsky
The only permanent and immortal religion.
George Jean Nathan
What we know in terms of what we hope.
George Jean Nathan
A kind of subconscious madness expressed in terms
of sanity. George Jean Nathan
A reaching out into the ugliness of the world for
vagrant beauty and the imprisoning of it in a
tangible dream. George Jean Nathan
The gross exaggeration of natural beauty.
George Jean Nathan
A form of catharsis. Dorothy Parker
All art does but consist in the removal of
surplusage. Walter Pater
Nothing but the highest quality to your moments as
they pass. Walter Pater
A lie that makes us realize the truth.
Pablo Picasso
There are three arts which are concerned with all
things: one which uses, another which makes, and a
third which imitates them. Plato
The reproduction of what the senses perceive in
nature through the veil of the soul.
Edgar Allan Poe
A kind of illness. Giacomo Puccini
The economy of feeling; it is emotion cultivating
good form. Herbert Read
An expansion of monkey imitativeness.
W. Winwood Reade
(Something that) lies hid and works its effect,
itself unseen. Joshua Reynolds
That in which the hand, the head and heart go
together. John Ruskin
Sensations of peculiar minds, sensations occurring
to them only at particular times, and to a
plurality of mankind perhaps never.
John Ruskin
Experience of thoughts which could only rise out of
a mass of the most extended knowledge, and of
dispositions modified in a thousand ways by
peculiarity of intellect. John Ruskin
Simply a right method of doing things. The test of
the artist does not lie in the will with which he
goes to work, but in the excellence of the work he
produces. Saint Thomas Aquinas
A delayed echo. George Santayana
An enjoyment which requires no appreciable effort,
which costs no sacrifice, and which we need not
repay with repentance. Johann C. Schiller
All great art... is propaganda.
George Bernard Shaw
A vice, a pastime which differs from some of the
most pleasant vices and pastimes by consolidating
and intensifying the organs which it exercises.
Walter Sickert
One long roll of revelation... revealed only to
those whose minds are... vacant... not for those
whose minds are muddied with the dirt of politics,
or heated with the vulgar chatter of society.
Walter Sickert
To let one's self go?that is what art is always
aiming at. Joel E. Spingarn
Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Thomas Stoppard
Artlessness. Henry David Thoreau
A human activity consisting of this, that one man,
usually by means of external signs, hands on to
others feelings he has lived through, and that
other people are infected by these feelings, and
also experience them. Leon Tolstoy
The business of art lies just in this?to make that
understood and felt which, in the form of an
argument, might be incomprehensible and
inaccessible. Leon Tolstoy
Religion is the everlasting dialogue between hu-
manity and God. Art is its soliloquy.
Franz Werfel
Art has nothing to do with communication be- tween
person and person, only with communi cation between
different parts of a person's mind.
Rebecca West
Nothing less than a way of making joys perpetual.
Rebecca West
A goddess of dainty thought?reticent of habit,
abjuring all obtrusiveness, purposing in no way to
better others. James McNeill Whistler
The imposing of a pattern on experience, and our
esthetic enjoyment in recognition of the pattern.
Alfred North Whitehead
The perfect use of an imperfect medium.
Oscar Wilde
(Something that) never expresses anything but
itself. Oscar Wilde
The most intense mode of individualism that the
world has known. Oscar Wilde
Lying, and telling of beautiful untrue things, this
is the proper aim of art. Oscar Wilde
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.
Oscar Wilde
The unique result of a unique temperament. Its
beauty comes from the fact that its author is what
he is. Oscar Wilde
A corner of creation seen through a temperament.
Emile Zola
A weapon in the class struggle. Anon.
See also Beauty, Criticism, Literature, Music,
Painting, Poetry, Writing.
Artists
(One whose) work outlives him,?there's his glory.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
The simplifier. Henry F. Amiel
Not a man of action but a maker, a fabricator of
objects. Wystan H. Auden
(One who) dips his brush into his own soul, and
paints his own nature into his pictures.
Henry Ward Beecher
A man who carries his happiness within him.
Ludwig van Beethoven
His art is a storehouse of values, because he gives
body and vitality to what else would remain inert
and lifeless. Eric Bentley
The man who never in his mind and thought travelled
to heaven, is no artist... Mere enthusiasm is the
all in all... Passion and expression are beauty
itself. William Blake
One whose works are expensive posthumously.
Eugene E. Brussell
(He who) must penetrate into the world, feel the
fate of human beings, of peoples, with real love.
There is no art for art's sake. Marc Chagall
The artist appeals to that part of our being which
is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is
a gift and not an acquisition... He speaks to our
capacity for delight, and wonder, to the sense of
mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of
pity, and beauty, and pain. Joseph Conrad
He renders clear the sensations that things arouse
within us, and which the great run of men, in the
presence of nature, only vaguely see and hear.
Euge ne Delacroix
(Those who) have a perception not only of the
pastness of the past but of its presence.
Thomas Stearns Eliot
The true artist has the planet for his pedestal;
the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing
broader than his shoes. Ralph Waldo Emerson
A bad husband, and an ill provider.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
One who is urged on by instinctual needs... He
longs to attain to honor, power, riches, fame, and
the love of women; but he lacks the means of
achieving these gratifications. So, like any other
with an unsatisfied longing, he turns away from
reality and transfers all his interest... to the
creation of his wishes in the life of phantasy.
Sigmund Freud
He possesses the mysterious ability to mould his
particular material until it expresses the ideas of
his phantasy faithfully. Sigmund Freud
The artist, like the neurotic, has withdrawn from
an unsatisfying reality into this world of
imagination; but, unlike the neurotic, he knew how
to find a way back from it and once more to get a
firm foothold in reality. His... works of art were
the imaginary gratifications of unconscious wishes.
Sigmund Freud
A man for whom the visible world exists.
Theophile Gautier
An exhibitionist by profession.
Vincent van Gogh
(One who) sees the harmony, the wholeness, the
tendencies toward perfection in things everywhere.
Richard Guggenheimer
Fellows with odd haircuts who are partial to floors
rather than chairs as sitting places. Ben Hecht
A dissatisfied person. Eric Hoffer
Scratch an artist and you surprise a child.
James G. Huneker
Someone like the God of creation, remaining within
or behind or beyond or above his handi work,
invisible, refined out of existence, indif-
ferent, paring his fingernails.
Adapted from James Joyce
A solitary figure... In pursuing his perceptions of
reality he must often sail against the currents of
his time. This is not a popular role.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
He who draws the things as he sees it for the God
of things as they are. Rudyard Kipling
(One who) places more value on the powers which do
the forming than on the final forms themselves.
Paul Klee
To draw a moral, to preach a doctrine, is like
shouting at the north star... The great artist sets
down his vision of it and is silent.
Ludwig Lewisohn
One to whom all experience is revelation.
Ludwig Lewisohn
A sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue pen-
cilling the bad spelling of God.
Henry Louis Mencken
A man who won't prostitute his art, except for
money. Henry Meyers
The unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Jonathan Miller
The artist creates the work of art... to free his
nervous system from a tension... The artist writes,
paints, sings or dances the burden of some idea or
feeling off his mind. Max Nordau
He... who can carry his most shadowy precepts into
successful application. Edgar Allan Poe
Almost the only men who do their work with
pleasure. Auguste R. Rodin
He... who has embodied in the sum of his works, the
greatest number of the greatest ideas.
John Ruskin
A dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
George Santayana
A moralist, though he need not preach.
George Santayana
The only one who has normal vision.
George Bernard Shaw
A regenerative force. George Bernard Shaw
A neurotic who continually cures himself with his
art. Leon Simonson
The essence of an artist is that he should be
articulate. Algernon C. Swinburne
Mediocre people who are patient and industrious
(enough) to revise their stupidity, to edit them-
selves into something like intelligence.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
One whose career always begins tomorrow.
James McNeill Whistler
The master of eternity. Oscar Wilde
This is the reason that the artist lives and works
and has his being: that from life's clay and his
own nature... he may distil the beauty of an
everlasting form. Thomas Wolfe
(He who makes) comprehensible to mortals the genius
of mankind. Stefan Zweig
One who doesn't see things as they are, but as he
is. Anon.
See also Author, Composer, Crea tivity, Painter,
Poet, Writer.
Asceticism
May be a mere expression of organic hardihood,
disgusted with too much ease. William James
The vilest blasphemy?blasphemy towards the whole of
the human race. Richard Jefferies
The sacrifice of one's personal inclinations... the
heart of the Christian religion and of all great
religions. Henry C. Link
The sacrifice of one part of human nature to
another, that it may live more completely in what
survives of it. Walter Pater
The sacrifice most acceptable to God... complete
renunciation of the body... the only real piety.
Saint Clement
The denial of the will to live.
Arthur Schopenhauer
A disease. Voltaire
Aspirations
One long effort to escape from the common-places of
existence. Arthur Conan Doyle
My only friends. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The thing we long for, that we are
For one transcendent moment.
James Russell Lowell
To love the beautiful, to desire the good, to do
the best. Moses Mendelssohn
Aspiration is achievement. Israel Zangwill
Stretching your appetite beyond your natural
sphere. Anon.
See also Power, Success.
Assassin
Those who have received money to murder.
Antonio Escobar
The extreme form of censorship.
George Bernard Shaw
Assimilation
A makeshift freedom, resulting from a deliberate
loss of memory that never quite lets one forget.
Eugene E. Brussell
An attempt to be on the biggest side.
Eugene E. Brussell
The public admission of a private inferiority.
Eugene E. Brussell
Accepting, either voluntarily or by force, among
the duties of citizenship, an obligation of
amnesia, of becoming oblivious of oneself, of
erasing one's memories, one's past, one's intimate
group relationships.
Adapted from Hayyim Greenberg
An entrance card into the community.
Heinrich Heine
The only chance of life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness to... unbeloved stock.
Earnest Hooton
The guise of apes and fools. Ludwig Lewisohn
Any place but home. Any people except one's own.
Any God except the God of one's fathers.
Ludwig Lewisohn
An act of social emancipation. Franz Mehring
Loss of identity. Solomon Schechter
Estrangement from the self. Paul Weinberger
Evaporation... dissolution. Israel Zangwill
See also Conversion.
Astrology
An adjunct and ally to astronomy.
Johann Kepler
Astrology fosters astronomy. Mankind plays its way
up. Georg C. Lichtenberg
(Something) framed by the Devil to the end that
many people may be scared from entering into the
state of matrimony, and from every divine and human
office and calling. Martin Luther
A disease, not a science... it is a tree under the
shadow of which all sorts of superstitions thrive.
Moses Maimonides
The excellent foppery of the world.
William Shakespeare
See also Stars.
Astronauts
Space activists. Frank Borman
(Those who) often seem to be interchangeable
parts of a vast mechanism.
Time Magazine, July 25, 1969.
The first men who went to the airport on a business
trip without their wives pleading, "Take me along."
Anon.
Envoys from mankind. Anon.
The Questers. Anon.
Atheism
Atheism must define itself by theism; it is
a?theism, that is... not theism.
George A. Buttrick
The three great apostles of practical atheism...
are wealth, health and power.
Charles Caleb Colton
A religion in effect in fair weather.
English Proverb
Philosophically, it is religious, for it makes a
huge religious ceremony of denying God.
Charles W. Ferguson
An inhuman, bloody ferocious system, equally
hostile to every useful restraint and to every
virtuous action... Its first object is to dethrone
God. Robert Hall
Atheism of the heart consists in the living
rejection of what we have here found to be God's
command and promise to man. John Hutchison
To dispute what God can do. James 1
That individualism which makes a man feel alone and
isolated in a world against which he must defend
himself. John Macmurray
By positive atheism I mean an active struggle
against everything that reminds us of God?that
is... anti-theism rather than atheism.
Jacques Maritain
Starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a
full-blown religious commitment... it proclaims
that all religion must... vanish away, and it is
itself a religious phenomenon.
Jacques Maritain
The equal toleration of all religions... is the
same thing as atheism. Pope Leo 13
My atheism... is true piety towards the universe
and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own
image, to be servants of their human interests.
George Santayana
(Something) that endeavors itself to play the god,
and decide what will be good for mankind and what
bad. Herbert Spencer
Usually a screen for repressed religion.
Wilhelm Stekel
The attempt to remove any ultimate concern?to
remain unconcerned about the meaning of one's
existence. Paul Tillich
All things must speak of God, refer to God, or they
are atheistic. Henry P. Van Dusen
The vice of a few intelligent people. Voltaire
Selfishness is the only real atheism.
Israel Zangwill
See also Agnostic, Agnosticism, Skepticism.
Atheist
All that impugn a received religion or superstition
are... branded with the name of atheists.
Francis Bacon
The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.
Bible: Psalms, XIV, I
The atheist does not say, "There is no God," but he
says, "I know not what you mean by God;" the word
God is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct
affirmation. Charles Bradlaugh
A man who has no invisible means of support.
John Buchan
A guy who watches a Notre Dame?SMU foot- ball game
and doesn't care who wins.
Dwight David Eisenhower
He only is a true atheist to whom the predicates of
the Divine Being?for example, love, wisdom and
justice?are nothing. Ludwig A. Feuerbach
One point beyond the Devil. Thomas Fuller
A religious person. He believes in atheism as
though it were a new religion. Eric Hoffer
A man who destroys the chimeras which afflict the
human race, and so leads men back to nature, to
experience and to reason. Paul H. Holbach
One who sees no reason for believing in the
existence of any supernatural Being and who feels
no emotional need for such a belief.
Adapted from Ernest Jones
There are only practical atheists. Their atheism
consists, not in the denying the truth of God's
existence, but in failing to realize God in their
actions. Jules Lagneau
(Those who) have chosen to stake their lives
against divine Transcendence and any vestige of
Transcendence whatsoever. Jacques Maritain
An orphaned heart, which has lost the greatest of
fathers. Jean Paul Richter
(One who) is always alone. Ignazio Silone
All atheists are rascals, and all rascals are
atheists. August Strindberg
A man who believes himself an accident.
Francis Thompson
Impudent and misguided scholars who reason badly,
and who, not being able to understand the Creation,
the origin of evil... have recourse to the
hypothesis of the eternity of things and of
inevitability. Voltaire
Frequently... a philosophical optimist. Having
given up all hope in the very existence of a human
soul, he pretends to a glowing faith in man's
innate goodness. Franz E. Winkler
One who can be a moral human being by choosing to
live on earth rather than in the air. Anon.
A believer in man as the highest being. Anon.
A man related to God without being conscious of the
relation. Anon.
See also Agnostic, Free Thinkers, Skeptic.
Athlete
Th' athletic fool, to whom what Heaven denied of
soul, is well compensated in limbs.
Adapted from John Armstrong
A dignified bunch of muscles unable to split wood
or sift the ashes. Anon.
One who basks in glory for the moment. Anon.
See also Sports.
Atom
A specter threatening us with annihilation.
Max Born
Atomic energy bears that same duality ...
expressed in the Book of Books thousands of years
ago: "See, I have set before thee this day life and
good, and death and evil ... therefore choose
life." David Lilienthal
The conception of the atom stems from the concepts
of subject and substance: there has to be
"something" to account for any action. The atom is
the last descendant of the concept of the soul.
Friedrich W. Nietzsche
Atonement
The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from
all sin. Bible: John 1, 7.
To be at one with God, to sink self into the
not-self, to achieve a mystic unity with the source
of being, wiping out all error and finding peace in
self-submergence. Issac Goldberg
An immunity both in preparation for transgressions
to come. Elbert Hubbard
To raise a sin from a vice to a virtue.
Elbert Hubbard
On the day of Atonement the pious Jew becomes
forgetful of the flesh and its wants and, banishing
hatred, ill-feeling and all ignoble thoughts, seeks
to be occupied exclusively with things spiritual.
The Jewish Encyclopedia, 11, 1909.
The process of recovering the sinful personality
into a life with God, and of neutralizing the moral
wrong done by man to man, through the power of
self-sacrificing love. Eugene W. Lyman
Atones for sins against God, not for sins against
man, unless the injured man has been appeased.
Mishna: Yoma, VIII,9.
See also Christ, Cross, Forgiveness, Sin.
Attorney
See Lawyers.
Auctioneer
The man who proclaims with a hammer that he has
picked a pocket with this tongue.
Ambrose Bierce
One who appreciates the full cost of junk.
Eugene E. Brussell
One who sees esthetics in attic furniture.
Eugene E. Brussell
One who admires all schools of art.
Adapted from Oscar Wilde
A man who incites a mob for profit. Anon.
See also Antiques.
Author
A man with an advantage over all the masters
because he can multiply his originals... can make
copies of his works... which shall be as valuable
as the originals themselves.
Adapted from Joseph Addison
He, with his copy-rights and copy-wrongs, in his
squalid garret, in his rusty coat; ruling from his
grave... whole nations and generations who would,
or would not, give him bread while liv- ing,?is a
rather curious spectacle. Thomas Carlyle
The light of the world; the world's Priest; guiding
it, like a sacred pillar of fire, in its dark pil-
grimage through the waste of time.
Thomas Carlyle
A person who has a good memory and hopes ... other
people haven't. Irwin S. Cobb
The author is of peculiar organization. He is a
being born with a predisposition which with him is
irresistible, the bent of which he cannot in any
way avoid. Benjamin Disraeli
A little like the old court jester. He's supposed
to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in
them, but he isn't part of whatever the fabric is
that makes a nation. William Faulkner
Not those who advance what is new, but those who
know how to put what they have to say as if it had
never been said before. Johann W. Goethe
A person who you can silence by shutting his book.
Max Gralnick
He who tells us what he heard and saw with
veracity. Thomas Gray
We male authors write for or against something, for
or against an idea, for or against a party; but
women always write for or against one particular
man, or... on account of one particular man.
Heinrich Heine
Something of a black sheep, like a village fiddler.
Occasionally a fiddler becomes a violinist, and he
is a credit to his family; but as a rule he would
have done better had his tendency been toward
industry and saving. Edgar W. Howe
A baker; it is for him to make the sweets, and
others to buy and enjoy them. Leigh Hunt
(One whose power) we estimate... by his worst
performance; and when he is dead, we rate them by
his best. Samuel Johnson
The chief glory of every people.
Samuel Johnson
(One) skilled equally with voice or pen to stir the
hearts or mould the minds of men.
James Russell Lowell
A fool who, not content with having bored those who
have lived with him, insists on boring future
generations. Charles de Montesquieu
A person who departs; he does not die.
Dinah M. Mulock
(One who) possesses not only his own intellect,
but also that of his friends.
Friedrich W. Nietzsche
The Faust of modern society, the sole surviving
individualist in a mass age. Boris Pasternak
An ordinary guy who happens to write well.
John O'Hara
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, persons of mere
address, perseverance, effrontery?in a word,
busy-bodies, toadies, quacks. Edgar Allan Poe
Three classes?shooting stars, planets, and fixed
stars. Arthur Schopenhauer
The engineer of the human soul. Joseph Stalin
A venerable name; How few deserve it, and what
numbers claim! Edward Young
One who has his head in the clouds and his feet
behind the sales-counter. Anon.
See also Book, Classics, Fiction, Literature,
Novel, Pen, Poet, Writers.
Authority
A halter. Adelard of Bath
What is founded on tradition or prophetic
inspiration. Solomon Adret
The negation of liberty. Mikhail A. Bakunin
The living Christ speaking through the Holy
Spirit. H. H. Farmer
The longing for the father that lives in each of us
from his childhood days. Sigmund Freud
The collective general sense of the wisest men
living in the department to which they belong.
James A. Froude
The people. Thomas Jefferson
The exercise of power toward some morally affirmed
end and in such a reasonable way as to secure
popular acceptance and sanction.
Irving Kristol
The only general persuasive in matters of
conduct... a judgment which we feel to be superior
to our own. John Henry Newman
Big Brother. George Orwell
It is reason. James B. Pratt
The Government. John Ruskin
Tyranny unless tempered by freedom.
Stefan Zweig
See also Classes, Democracy, Government, Law,
Masses, People.
Autobiography
The most respectable form of lying.
Humphrey Carpenter
Recollections of gentlemen who tell us what they
please, and amuse us, in their old age, with the
follies of their youth. George Crabbe
An obituary in serial form with the last
installment missing. Quentin Crisp
The next thing like living one's life over again.
Benjamin Franklin
An unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about
other people. Phillip Guedalla
(A book about) things which no one else will say
about you, and which therefore you have to say
about yourself. Elbert Hubbard
Books which I give away. Charles Lamb
Its title should be simple?a few plain words?"My
Heart Laid Bare." But?this little book must be true
to its title. Edgar Allan Poe
An I-witness account. Anon.
Plausible fiction. Anon.
See also Biography.
Automation
A phenomenon which causes long lines to form at
unemployment offices, the unions to rant, pink
slips to rain?all for the good of the country.
Anon.
A modern day phenomenon that replaces everyone but
the boss's son. Anon.
Something that breathes instant firing. Anon.
Automobile
A walking-stick; and one of the finest things in
life is going on a journey with it.
Robert Holliday
An invention which makes people go fast and money
faster. Jimmy Lyons
A secular sanctuary for the individual, his shrine
to the self, his mobile Walden Pond.
Edward McDonagh
Man's greatest invention?until he got into the
driver's seat. Anon.
Man's most successful effort to produce the mule.
Anon.
The first sight that strikes you in any large
American city. Anon.
Autumn
The melancholy days are come, the
saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods,
and meadows brown and sear.
William Cullen Bryant
A second spring when every leaf's a flower.
Albert Camus
Harvest season of the Goddess of Death. Horace
The beautiful and death-struck year.
Alfred Edward Housman
(A season which) repays the earth the leaves which
summer lent it. Georg C. Lichtenberg
Trees leaves dropping on their neighbors.
O. W. Piette
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in
the shock. James Whitcomb Riley
Leave-taking... the swallows are chattering of
destination and departure. Mary Webb
Avarice
(A state) which dissipates energy in war and
trade. Brooks Adams
A mere madness, to live like a wretch, and die
rich. Robert Burton
Mother of crimes, greedy for more the more she
possesses, every searching open-mouthed for gold.
Claudian
A universal passion, which operates at all times,
at all places, and upon all persons.
David Hume
The spur of industry. David Hume
The last passion of those lives of which the first
part has been squandered in pleasure, and the
second devoted to ambition. Samuel Johnson
The last corruption of degenerate man.
Samuel Johnson
The besetting vice of a propertied society.
Max Radin
An itching palm. William Shakespeare
Species of madness. Baruch Spinoza
See also Covetousness, Miserliness.
Axiom
See Belief.
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