The LIFE 101 Quote Book
HABITS
First we form habits, then they form us. Conquer your bad habits, or they'll eventually conquer you.
DR. ROB GILBERT
Have a place for everything and keep the thing somewhere else; this is not a piece of advice, it is merely a custom.
MARK TWAIN
I'm glad I don't have to explain to a man from Mars why each day I set fire to dozens of little pieces of paper, and then put them in my mouth.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
Good habits, which bring our lower passions and appetites under automatic control, leave our natures free to explore the larger experiences of life. Too many of us divide and dissipate our energies in debating actions which should be taken for granted.
RALPH W. SOCKMAN
Cultivate only the habits that you are willing should master you.
ELBERT HUBBARD
Custom is the plague of wise men and the idol of fools.
THOMAS FULLER
Habit with him was all the test of truth, "It must be right: I've done it from my youth."
GEORGE CRABBE
To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.
MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO
I always keep a supply of stimulant handy in case I see a snake—which I also keep handy.
W. C. FIELDS
Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH
Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness, and small obligations given habitually, are what preserve the heart and secure comfort.
WILLIAM DAVY
HAPPINESS
Also See ENJOYMENT, JOY
The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.
WILLIAM COWPER
Happiness? A good cigar, a good meal, and a good woman—or a bad woman. It depends on how much happiness you can handle.
GEORGE BURNS
The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
My creed is that: Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
What more felicity can fall to creature, Than to enjoy delight with liberty.
EDMUND SPENSER THE FATE OF THE BUTTERFLY
Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular.
ROBERTSON DAVIES
True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self; and, in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.
JOSEPH ADDISON
INTERVIEWER: Ever meet a man that could make you happy? MAE WEST: Several times.
Happiness is the most powerful of tonics.
HERBERT SPENCER
Happiness consists in activity: such is the constitution of our nature: it is a running stream, and not a stagnant pool.
JOHN M. GOOD
A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.
PROVERBS 17:22
It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is.
ERASMUS
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY
It's good to be just plain happy; it's a little better to know that you're happy; but to understand that you're happy and to know why and how and still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss.
HENRY MILLER
Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.
JOSEPH ADDISON
Full of love for all things in the world, practicing virtue in order to benefit others, this man alone is happy.
BUDDHA
In about the same degree as you are helpful, you will be happy.
KARL REILAND
Getters generally don't get happiness; givers get it. You simply give to others a bit of yourself—a thoughtful act, a helpful idea, a word of appreciation, a lift over a rough spot, a sense of understanding, a timely suggestion. You take something out of your mind, garnished in kindness out of your heart, and put it into the other fellow's mind and heart.
CHARLES H. BURR
The roots of happiness grow deepest in the soil of service.
ANONYMOUS
Happiness lies in good health and a bad memory.
INGRID BERGMAN
When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.
The best advice on the art of being happy is about as easy to follow as advice to be well when one is sick.
ANNE-SOPHIE SWETCHINE
Happiness depends, as Nature shows, Less on exterior things than most suppose.
WILLIAM COWPER
Some day people will learn that material things do not bring happiness and are of little use in making people creative and powerful.
CHARLES STEINMETZ
[We look] for happiness in possession of the external—in money, a good time, somebody to lean on, and so on. We are impatient, hurried and fretful because we do not find happiness where we look for it.
JOHN DEWEY
Happiness depends upon ourselves.
ARISTOTLE
The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depend on himself, and not upon other men, has adopted the very best plan for living happily.
PLATO
He that is of a merry heart hath a continual feast.
PROVERBS 15:15
Happiness is in the taste, and not in the things.
FRANÇOIS LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts.
MARCUS ANTONINUS
It is not in doing what you like, but in liking what you do that is the secret of happiness.
JAMES BARRIE
Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have.
RABBI HYMAN SCHACHTEL
The Constitution of America only guarantees pursuit of happiness—you have to catch up with it yourself. Fortunately, happiness is something that depends not on position but on disposition, and life is what you make it.
GILL ROBB WILSON
Perfect happiness, I believe, was never intended by the Deity to be the lot of one of his creatures in this world, but that he has very much put in our power the nearness of our approaches to it is what I have steadfastly believed.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
Happiness seems to require a modicum of external prosperity.
ARISTOTLE
It is not the rich man you should properly call happy, but him who knows how to use with wisdom the blessings of the gods.
HORACE
May we never let the things we can't have, or don't have, or shouldn't have, spoil our enjoyment of the things we do have and can have. As we value our happiness let us not forget it, for one of the greatest lessons in life is learning to be happy without the things we cannot or should not have.
RICHARD EVANS
No enjoyment, however inconsiderable, is confined to the present moment. A man is the happier for life from having made once an agreeable tour, or lived for any length of time with pleasant people, or enjoyed any considerable interval of innocent pleasure.
SYDNEY SMITH
Happiness is the sense of having worked according to one's capacity and light to make things clear and get rid of cant and shams.
T. H. HUXLEY
Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude.
JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion if we want to be happy.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
If a man is happy in America it is considered he is doing something wrong.
CLARENCE DARROW
A great obstacle to happiness is to anticipate too great a happiness.
BERNARD FONTENELLE
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
HATE
I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals; I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants.
A. WHITNEY BROWN
He loved me absolutely; that's why he hates me absolutely.
FRIEDA (MRS. D.H.) LAWRENCE
People hate me because I am a multifaceted, talented, wealthy, internationally famous genius.
JERRY LEWIS
I'm so busy loving everybody, I don't have any time to hate anybody.
DALE EVANS
It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.
ANDRÉ GIDE
Hate must make a man productive. Otherwise one might as well love.
KARL KRAUS
Hating people is like burning your own house down to get rid of a rat.
HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK
I never hated a man enough to give him his diamonds back.
ZSA ZSA GABOR
HEALING
See also CURE, ILLNESS, MEDICINE, PHYSICIANS
When an emotional injury takes place, the body begins a process as natural as the healing of a physical wound. Let the process happen. Trust that nature will do the healing. Know that the pain will pass and, when it passes, you will be stronger, happier, more sensitive and aware.
HOW TO SURVIVE THE LOSS OF A LOVE
Pleasant words are a honeycomb sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.
PROVERBS 16:24
Happiness, grief, gaiety, sadness, are by nature contagious. Bring your health and your strength to the weak and sickly, and so you will be of use to them. Give them, not your weakness, but your energy, so you will revive and lift them up. Life alone can rekindle life.
HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
HEALTH
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
W. H. AUDEN
Positive attitudes—optimism, high self—esteem, an outgoing nature, joyousness, and the ability to cope with stress—may be the most important bases for continued good health.
HELEN HAYES
The first wealth is health.
Without health, life is not life; it is only a state of languor and suffering.
FRANÇOIS RABELAIS
A healthy body is a guest-chamber for the soul; a sick body is a prison.
FRANCIS BACON
Look to your health; and if you have it, praise God, and value it next to a good conscience, for health is the second blessing that we mortals are capable of; a blessing that money cannot buy.
IZAAK WALTON
O, health! health! The blessings of the rich! the riches of the poor! Who can buy thee at too dear a rate, since there is no enjoying the world without thee?
BEN JOHNSON
Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and Spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature, if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you, know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
There's lots of people in this world who spend so much time watching their health, that they haven't the time to enjoy it.
JOSH BILLINGS
I've never met a healthy person who worried much about his health, or a good person who worried much about his soul.
JOHN HALDANE
Long life to you! Good health to you and your household! And good health to all that is yours!
1 SAMUEL 25:6
HEAVEN
God forbid that I should go to any heaven in which there are no horses.
ROBERT BONTINE
My idea of heaven is eating pâtés de foie gras to the sound of trumpets.
SYDNEY SMITH
HOMOSEXUALITY
Dear Miss Manners, What am I supposed to say when I am introduced to a homosexual couple? Gentle Reader, "How do you do?" "How do you do?"
JUDITH MARTIN
HOPE
Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.
FRANCIS BACON
A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died: Johnson said, it was the triumph of hope over experience.
JAMES BOSWELL
There is nothing so well known as that we should not expect something for nothing—but we all do and call it Hope.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent.
JEAN KERR
It is natural to man to indulge in the illusion of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts.
PATRICK HENRY
In the factory we make cosmetics; in the store we sell hope.
CHARLES REVSON
Hope is the most treacherous of human fancies.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
Just as dumb animals are snared by food, human beings would not be caught unless they had a nibble of hope.
PETRONIUS
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
I suppose it can be truthfully said that Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
A man will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body—the wishbone.
ROBERT FROST
Many of us spend half of our time wishing for things we could have if we didn't spend half our time wishing.
ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT
Hope springs eternal in the human breast. Man never is, but always to be blest.
ALEXANDER POPE
This wonder we find in hope, that she is both a flatterer and a true friend. How many would die did not hope sustain them; how many have died by hoping too much!
OWEN FELTHAM
The man who lives only by hope, will die with despair.
ITALIAN PROVERB
He that lives upon hope, dies fasting.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN The prestigious Harper Book of American Quotations had one of the most amusing typos we've discovered. It quoted Mr. Franklin as saying, "He that lives upon Hope, dies farting."
Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
MOTTO ON GATES OF HELL, ACCORDING TO DANTE
HUMAN POTENTIAL
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
What one has to do, usually can be done.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
The truth is that all of us attain the greatest success and happiness possible in this life whenever we use our native capacities to their greatest extent.
DR. SMILEY BLANTON
When people say to me: "How do you do so many things?" I often answer them, without meaning to be cruel: "How do you do so little?" It seems to me that people have vast potential. Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people don't. They sit in front of the telly and treat life as if it goes on forever.
PHILIP ADAMS
HUMANITY
Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one's well-being.
ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN
Man is slightly nearer to the atom than to the star. From his central position man can survey the grandest works of Nature with the astronomer, or the minutest works with the physicist.
ARTHUR STANLEY
Man is his own star, and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man Commands all light, all influence, all fate.
JOHN FLETCHER
Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves.
GENE FOWLER
We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles—you don't reconcile the poles, you just recognize them.
ORSON WELLES
We are the products of editing, rather than authorship.
GEORGE WALD
Give them great meals of beef and iron and steel, they will eat like wolves and fight like devils.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
He was a poor weak human being like themselves, a human soul, weak and helpless in suffering, shivering in the toils of the eternal struggle of the human soul with pain.
LIAM O'FLAHERTY
It is possible that our race may be an accident, in a meaningless universe, living its brief life uncared for, on this dark, cooling star: but even so—and all the more—what marvelous creatures we are! What fairy story, what tale from the Arabian Nights of the Jinns, is a hundredth part as wonderful as this true fairy story of simians! It is so much more heartening, too, than the tales we invent. A universe capable of giving birth to many such accidents is—blind or not—a good world to live in, a promising universe. We once thought we lived on God's footstool; it may be a throne.
CLARENCE DAY
The tendency of man's nature to good is like the tendency of water to flow downwards.
MENCIUS
From a distance the earth looks blue and green and the snow-capped mountains white. From a distance the ocean meets the stream and the eagle takes to flight. From a distance there is harmony and it echoes through the land. It's the voice of hope. It's the voice of peace. It's the voice of every man.
JULIE GOLD
I love humanity; it's people I can't stand.
ANONYMOUS
MR. SPOCK: May I point out that I had an opportunity to observe your counterparts quite closely. They were brutal, savage, unprincipled, uncivilized, treacherous—in every way, splendid examples of Homo sapiens. The very flower of humanity. I found them quite refreshing. CAPTAIN KIRK [To Dr. McCoy]: I'm not sure, but I think we've been insulted.
STAR TREK
Adam was human; he didn't want the apple for the apple's sake; he wanted it because it was forbidden.
MARK TWAIN
Is not man himself the most unsettled of all the creatures of the earth? What is this trembling sensation that is intensified with each ascending step in the natural order?
UGO BETTI
Joy, interrupted now and again by pain and terminated ultimately by death, seems the normal course of life in Nature. Anxiety and distress, interrupted occasionally by pleasure, is the normal course of man's existence.
JOSEPH KRUTCH
The deepest principle in human nature, is the craving to be appreciated.
Consider that people are like tea bags. They don't know their own strength until they get into hot water.
DAN MC KINNON
People become who they are. Even Beethoven became Beethoven.
RANDY NEWMAN
The only normal people are the ones we haven't gotten to know yet.
Harold H. Bloomfield, M.D.
HUMILITY
Only the untalented can afford to be humble.
SYLVIA MILES
What the world needs is more geniuses with humility. There are so few of us left.
OSCAR LEVANT
HUMOR
He deserves Paradise who makes his companions laugh.
KORAN
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
W. H. AUDEN
Humor is something that thrives between man's aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth.
VICTOR BORGE
One is healthy when one can laugh at the earnestness and zeal with which one has been hypnotized by any single detail in one's life.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Humor is emotional chaos, remembered in emotional tranquility.
JAMES THURBER
Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.
ROMAIN GARY
I am sincere about life, but I'm not serious about it.
ALAN WATTS
Shall I crack any of those old jokes, master, at which the audience never fail to laugh?
ARISTOPHANES
Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.
QUENTIN CRISP
Laughter is inner jogging.
NORMAN COUSINS
Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.
BRENDAN GILL
Imagination is a quality given a man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.
OSCAR WILDE
The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.
MARGOT FONTEYN
Laughter is an orgasm triggered by the intercourse of reason with unreason.
JACK KROLL
Humor is vague, runaway stuff that hisses around the fissures and crevices of the mind, like some sort of loose physic gas.
JONATHAN MILLER
Laughter is man's most distinctive emotional expression. Man shares the capacity for love and hate, anger and fear, loyalty and grief, with other living creatures. But humor, which has an intellectual as well as an emotional element, belongs to man.
MARGARET MEAD
Life's more amusing than we thought.
ANDREW LONG
Don't take yourself too seriously. And don't be too serious about not taking yourself too seriously.
HOWARD OGDEN
A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
GEORGE ELIOT
Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
OSCAR WILDE
Humor must be one of the chief attributes of God. Plants and animals that are distinctly humorous in form and characteristics are God's jokes.
MARK TWAIN
For some of the large indignities of life, the best remedy is direct action. For the small indignities, the best remedy is a Charlie Chaplin movie.
CAROL TAVRIS
Laughter is the tonic, the relief, the surcease for pain.
CHARLIE CHAPLIN
Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.
LANGSTON HUGHES
Humor, in all its many-splendored varieties, can be simply defined as a type of stimulation which tends to elicit the laughter reflex.
ARTHUR KOESTLER
If an idea is important enough it is worth laughing at.
ALAN PLATER
Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.
ELBERT HUBBARD
Humor is a prelude to faith and Laughter is the beginning of prayer.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR
Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.
G. K. CHESTERTON
HYPOCRISY
Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, "Let me take the speck out of your eye," when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.
JESUS OF NAZARETH Matthew 7:3-5
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