Quotables

These are quotes I have collected over the years. I started this list when I was in college, back in 1988. Yes, I'm that old…but anyway, these quotes are meaninful to me in a variety of ways, and some of them are actually profound. The one's without quotation marks are actually sayings I came up with myself. Enjoy!

• "Why do you watch a film seven times? Because somebody’s done it right and transported you to its world.” - Ridley Scott
• "Heaven is where the police are British, the chefs French, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian and it’s all organized by the Swiss. Hell is where the police are German, the chefs British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, and it’s all organized by the Italians." – Old European Joke
• "When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens would not work in 0 gravity. To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, under water, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300C. The Russians used a pencil." - Anon.
• ”All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” - Arthur Schopenhauer
• "Three Stages of Scientific Discovery: First, people deny it is true. Second, they deny it is important. Third and finally, they credit the wrong person." - Alexander Von Humbolt.
• "Avalokatesvara sez: Form is emptiness. Gate, gate, Paragate. Parsamagate Svaha!" - Heart Sutra Cliff Notes (courtesy C. Boyle)
• "Without compassion, there is no religious life at all." - Karen Armstrong
• "Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse." - Sophocles
• "That is the essential truth you learn. People die. And after you learn it, all other maters seem irrelevant. They just seem small." - Lance Armstrong
• "Its better to give a grudge than get one." - Julie Nemmers (who really knew how)
• "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." - Winston Churchill
• "When daydreams substitute for plans, when wishing seems more appropriate than work, when envy gains yet another rational, the whole society is the loser." - William A. Henry III
• "A single good book contains the fruit of the past, the flower of the present, and the seed of the future." - Lawrence Clark Powell
• "There is no point in being Buddhist! One does it for the sheer joy of swimming in the infinite!" - Robert Thurman
• "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." - Aristotle
• "Your enemies can't hurt you if you keep track of your friends." - Johnny Winters
• "We are the gods of our own universe, and I demand a human sacrifice."- M2
• "It is better to have a great deal of harm happen to one than a little; a great deal may rouse you to remove what a little will only accustom you to endure." - Greville
• "It is possible that this world could become a palace or a kingdom to you, but as its king or queen, you will be a monarch with a broken heart." - Cogyam Trungpa
• Practice precise discipline.
• "When you are as old as I, young man, you will know there is only one thing in the world worth living for, and that is sin." - Lady Sporanza Wilde
• The essence of heroism is self-trust.
• "She must have told herself that love was great, / But that the lacking of it might be as great a thing / If she held fast to it, challenging fate." - Sara Teasdale
• "My brain is trying to kill me." - Calvin
• "Science does not give us an account of origin, only of development." - T. Fullam
• "Humandoing or Human being?" - Joyce Carley
• "I'm extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end." - Margaret Thatcher
• "When you go back to bedrock, you have something to stand upon." - Isamu Noguchi
• "Mother Goddess: that same old Bitch wrapped in stinking fragments of bloody Moon." - anon.
• "Give me the livery to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience above all other liberties." - Milton
• I can tell you're a primatologist by the way you use your toes. - to Melissa
• "You can often tell where an author stands by where he sits." - Mike Serelnik
• "By no stretch of the imagination do I love to write, and I'm phenomenally lazy." - Michael Criton
• "Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life." - Bertolt Brecht
• "After ecstasy, the laundry." - Zen proverb
• "Don't send me to the Golden Gates, just send me straight to Hershey!" Cecelia Grey
• SCHNARRFFFF!!! (Thank you, Shawn!)
• "A life vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lost of walking brings us close to the actually existing world and its wholeness." - Gary Snyder
• "Gourds are a woman thing." Rapunzel (V.M.P.)
• Practice bare attention.
• BE the bubble.
• "In times like these, to escape is the only way to stay alive, and keep dreaming." - from Mediterannio
• Pleroma: the fullness of divine excellencies and power.
• "Everyone in life walks a tightrope; some of us just look down and know it." - Dorthy Gillman
• "Unless you stalk and over-run, you can't devour anyone." - Hobbes
• "I should have never eaten that frog." - Garfield "Joy is a human's noblest act." - Thomas Aquinas
• "To be naked is to be speechless." - The Wise Dogon Man
• Theodyssey or Marauding Pathetics?
• Our successes in life come to us through the creation of joy.
• "Utility makes life miserable." - The Ancient Oak
• "This is was?" Christian Perez
• "But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream." Amos 5:21