Skip to content

The Gist of It, 2

  • He who tells the truth must have one foot in the stirrup. — Armenian Proverb
  • If you can’t beat them, arrange to have them beaten. — George Carlin
  • A true friend stabs you in the front.
  • Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit. — Oscar Wilde
  • Once I tried to kill myself with a bungee cord. I kept almost dying.
    — Stephen Wright
  • I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain.
    — Lily Tomlin
  • He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.
    —Samuel Johnson
  • PHILOSOPHY: A study that lets us be unhappy more intelligently.
  • The best advice I can give is to ignore advice. Life is too short to be distracted by the opinions of others.
    — Russell Edson
  • I only drink to make other people seem interesting.
    — George Jean Nathan
  • “Even death is unreliable,” he said. “Instead of zero it may be some ghastly hallucination, such as the square root of minus one.”
    — Samuel Beckett
  • The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to
    grow sharper.
    — Eden Phillpotts
  • Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
    — Aldous Huxley
  • The world is so dreadfully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.
    — Ronald Firbank
  • A good listener is usually thinking about something else.
    — Kin Hubbard
  • If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.
  • God: a disease we imagine we have cured because no one dies of it nowadays.
  • We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
    — E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born
  • Usually, terrible things that are done with that excuse that progrss requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
    — Russell Baker
  • Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.
    — James Thurber
  • Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.
  • No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.
  • You side with life only when you utter — with all your heart — a banality.
  • For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.
  • What anxiety when one is not sure of one’s doubts and wonders: are these actually doubts?
    — E. M. Cioran, All Gall is Divided: Gnomes and Apothegms
  • Everything in the world may be endured except continued prosperity.
    — Goethe
  • Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
    — Don Marquis
  • The world is divided into people who do things–and people who get the credit.
    — Dwight Morrow
  • Hard work is damn near as overrated as monogamy. —Huey Long
  • I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth foregoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward. — John Mortimer
  • From new transmitters come the old stupidities.
  • Grub first, then ethics. — Bertolt Brecht
  • There ought to be a room in every house to swear in.
  • Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer. — Mark Twain
  • For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed. — Clifton Fadiman
  • History… that indecent alloy of banality and apocalypse.
  • There is only one thing worse than boredom, and that is the fear of boredom.
  • To have committed every crime but that of being a father.
  • It’s not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
    — E. M. Cioran
  • Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter. — Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Life’s a gamble and its dealer is not your friend. But folding’s a lousy option, so put on your smirk, play your hands, and ignore your shrinking stack of chips. — anyman
  • They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.
    — Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
  • The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
    — Henry Louis Mencken
  • Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be
    amused.
  • Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not. A sense of humor
    to console him for what he is.
  • An optimist is someone who tells you to cheer up when things are going his way.
  • Suicide is the sincerest form of self-criticism.
  • The average man does not know what to do with his life, yet wants another one which will last forever.
    — Anatole France
  • Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups.
    — John Kenneth Galbraith
  • No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library. — Samuel Johnson
  • A pessimist is a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist. — Elbert Hubbard
  • Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes. — Norman Douglas
  • Education… has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. — G.M. Trevelyan
  • To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost. — Gustave Flaubert
  • One of the keys to happiness is a real bad memory. — Rita Mae Brown
  • It was such a lovely day, I thought it a pity to get up. — W. Somerset Maugham
  • Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being that a belch is more satisfying. — Ingmar Bergman
  • Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta. — Brian Aldiss
  • I either want less corruption, or more chance to participate in it. — Ashleigh Brilliant
  • Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
    — Bertrand Russell
  • Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and tranistory?They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together. — George Santayana
  • A joke is an epitaph for an emotion.
  • The thought of suicide is a great comfort. It’s helped me through many a bad night.
  • Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
    — Friedrich Nietzsche
  • I can sympathize with people’s pains but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness. — Aldous Huxley
  • Is it possible to locate and position all the personae one contains in such a way as to lose all fear? He turns himself into a game of chess and plays himself to a draw. — Elias Canetti
  • All kinds of frankness and honesty are terrible crimes in the eyes of society. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  • At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there’s a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they’re returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one hardens to the truth – in other words, to silence. So let’s wait.
    — Albert Camus, The Plague
  • All things in nature are lyrical in their ideal essence, comic in their existence and tragic in their fate. — George Santayana
  • One should forgive one’s enemies, but not before they’re hanged. — Heinrich Heine
  • The right to suffer is one of the joys of a free economy. — Howard Pyle
  • Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago. — Bernard Berenson
  • Democracy consists of choosing your own dictators, after they’ve told you what you think it is you want to hear. — Alan Coren
  • Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity. — Frank Leahy
  • Up to 30 times more people are buried in the earth than presently living. — answers.com
  • Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself. — George Santayana
  • Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody. — Benjamin Franklin
  • Once one has an idea, one finds it everywhere. — Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris