He ranged his tropes, and preached up patience; Backed his opinion with quotations.

MATTHEW PRIOR

I hate quotations.

I stopped believing in Santa Claus when my mother took me to see him in a department store, and he asked for my autograph.

SHIRLEY TEMPLE

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination.

The person who sows seeds of kindness enjoys a perpetual harvest.

ANONYMOUS

It's what each of us sows, and how, that gives to us character and prestige. Seeds of kindness, goodwill, and human understanding, planted in fertile soil, spring up into deathless friendships, big deeds of worth, and a memory that will not soon fade out. We are all sowers of seeds—and let us never forget it!

GEORGE MATTHEW ADAMS

For it is in giving that we receive.

FRANCIS OF ASSISI

The first small sacrifice of this sort leads the way to others, and a single hand's turn given heartily to the world's great work helps one amazingly with one's own small tasks.

LOUISA M. ALCOTT

Service to a just cause rewards the worker with more real happiness and satisfaction than any other venture of life.

CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT

Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

JESUS OF NAZARETH Luke 6:37–38

Charity is twice blessed—it blesses the one who gives and the one who receives.

ANONYMOUS

There never was a person who did anything worth doing who did not receive more than he gave.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

The quality of mercy is not strained, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The greatest reward for serving others is the satisfaction found in your own heart.

ANONYMOUS

The art of acceptance is 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

Blessed are those who can give without remembering and take without forgetting.

ELIZABETH BIBESCO

I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.

ANTONIO PORCHIA

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heros. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

HENRY MILLER

I can believe anything, provided it is incredible.

OSCAR WILDE

Try everything once except incest and folk dancing.

THOMAS BEECHAM

Let your hook always be cast. In the pool where you least expect it, will be a fish.

OVID

Always keep a window in the attic open; not just cracked: open.

HENRY JAMES

I only have "yes" men around me. Who needs "no" men?

MAE WEST

Let us open up our natures, throw wide the doors of our hearts and let in the sunshine of good will and kindness.

O. S. MARDEN

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.

SYDNEY J. HARRIS

When such as I cast out remorse So great a sweetness flows into the breast We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest.

W. B. YEATS

I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody. Instead of a bum, which is what I am.

MARLON BRANDO

Regret for time wasted can become a power for good in the time that remains, if we will only stop the waste and the idle, useless regretting.

ARTHUR BRISBANE

Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can't build on it; it's only good for wallowing in.

KATHERINE MANSFIELD

The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.

JOAN BAEZ

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.

W. H. AUDEN

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

RICK: I mean, what AM I supposed to call you? My "Girl Friend"? My "Companion"? My "Roommate"? Nothing sounds quite right! JOANIE: How about your "Reason for Living"? RICK: No, no, I need something I can use around the office.

GARRY TRUDEAU DOONESBURY

It's relaxing to go out with my ex-wife because she already knows I'm an idiot.

WARREN THOMAS

The perfect lover is one who turns into a pizza at 4:00 a.m.

CHARLES PIERCE

It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn't give enough.

QUENTIN CRISP

I recommend having no relationships except those easily borne and disposed of; I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.

QUENTIN CRISP

It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.

ANDRÉ GIDE

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

I was told that the Chinese said they would bury me by the Western Lake and build a shrine to my memory. I have some slight regret that this did not happen, as I might have become a god, which would have been very chic for an atheist.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Men talk of "finding God," but no wonder it is difficult; He is hidden in that darkest hiding-place, your heart. You yourself are a part of him.

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

You must believe in God, in spite of what the clergy say.

BENJAMIN JOWETT

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

G. K. CHESTERTON

The world embarrasses me, and I cannot dream That this watch exists and has no watchmaker.

VOLTAIRE

You dare to dicker with your pontiff?

REX HARRISON TO CHARLTON HESTON, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

Belief is a wise wager. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He exists.

BLAISE PASCAL

To believe in God is impossible—not to believe in him is absurd.

VOLTAIRE

I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God.

CARL JUNG

There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed.

ALBERT SCHWEITZER

Giving away a fortune is taking Christianity too far.

CHARLOTTE BINGHAM

I'm going to take the moment to contemplate most of the Western religions. I'm looking for something soft on morality, generous with holidays, and with a very short initiation period.

DAVID ADDISON MOONLIGHTING

I do benefits for all religions—I'd hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.

BOB HOPE

Looking for loopholes.

W. C. FIELDS an atheist his entire life, asked on his deathbed why he was reading the Bible

After ecstasy, the laundry.

ZEN STATEMENT

My philosophy is that not only are you responsible for your life, but doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.

OPRAH WINFREY

Well, if you've got work to do, Wallace, I don't want to interfere. I was reading an article in the paper the other day where a certain amount of responsibility around the home was good character training. Good-bye, Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver.

EDDIE HASKELL LEAVE IT TO BEAVER

The price of greatness is responsibility.

WINSTON CHURCHILL

Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

JOAN DIDION

When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.

EDITH HAMILTON

Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I'm the only person standing between Richard Nixon and the White House.

JOHN F. KENNEDY

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.

LILY TOMLIN'S ERNESTINE

Sometimes I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits.

SATCHEL PAIGE

How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then rest afterward.

SPANISH PROVERB

Most of the evils in life arise from man's being unable to sit still in a room.

BLAISE PASCAL

True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.

WILLIAM PENN

Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.

JULES RENARD

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.

JEROME KLAPKA JEROME

When lovely woman stoops to folly, And finds too late that men betray, What charm can soothe her melancholy? What art can wash her guilt away? The only art her guilt to cover, To hide her shame from every eye, To give repentance to her lover, And wring his bosom, is—to die.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH

Revenge is often like biting a dog because the dog bit you

AUSTIN O'MALLEY.

If you want a place in the sun, you must leave the shade of the family tree.

OSAGE SAYING

One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

ANDRÉ GIDE

One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.

Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one. It's a drug. It distorts reality, and that's the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw.

FRAN LEBOWITZ

In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love you want the other person.

MARGARET ANDERSON

The message that "love" will solve all of our problems is repeated incessantly in contemporary culture—like a philosophical tom tom. It would be closer to the truth to say that love is a contagious and virulent disease which leaves a victim in a state of near imbecility, paralysis, profound melancholia, and sometimes culminates in death.

QUENTIN CRISP

My silks and fine array, My smiles and languished air, By love are driv'n away; And mournful lean Despair Brings me yew to deck my grave: Such end true lovers have.

WILLIAM BLAKE

Doris, I think I'm in love with you. I mean, it's crazy. Really crazy! I mean I don't even know if you've read The Catcher in the Rye.

BERNARD SLADE

In 1862, as token of love and remorse, Dante Gabriel Rossetti buried a sheaf of original manuscript poems with his dear departed wife, Elizabeth Siddal. In 1869, having reconsidered his romantic gesture, Dante Gabriel Rossetti exhumed his wife, retrieved and subsequently published the buried poems.

JON WINOKUR

If the man and woman walk off into the sunset hand-in-hand in the last reel, it adds $10 million to the box office.

GEORGE LUCAS advice to Steven Spielberg

Even though the labels stripper and congressman are completely incongruous, there was never anything but harmony in our hearts.

FANNE FOX about her relationship with Congressman Wilbur Mills

Love: that's self-love á deux.

MADAME DE STAËL

What a recreation it is to be in love! It sets the heart aching so delicately, there's no taking a wink of sleep for the pleasure of the pain.

GEORGE COLMAN THE YOUNGER

It's curious how, when you're in love, you yearn to go about doing acts of kindness to everybody. I am bursting with a sort of yeasty benevolence these days, like one of those chaps in Dickens.

P. G. WODEHOUSE

It's an extra dividend when you like the girl you're in love with.

CLARK GABLE

One exists with one's husband—one lives with one's lover.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

To say that you can love one person all your life is just like saying that one candle will continue burning as long as you live.

LEO TOLSTOY

Older woman, younger man! Popular wisdom claims that this particular class of love affair is the most poignant, tender, poetic, exquisite one there is, altogether the choicest on the menu.

DORIS LESSING

I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon. I cannot understand the love affair.

GORE VIDAL

Love is the same as like except you feel sexier. And more romantic. And also more annoyed when he talks with his mouth full. And you also resent it more when he interrupts you. And you also respect him less when he shows any weakness. And furthermore, when you ask him to pick you up at the airport and he tells you he can't do it because he's busy, it's only when you love him that you hate him.

JUDITH VIORST

Out upon it, I have loved Three whole days together; And am like to love three more, If it prove fair weather.

JOHN SUCKLING

When you're in love it's the most glorious two-and-a-half days of your life.

RICHARD LEWIS

Ecstasy cannot last, but it can carve a channel for something lasting.

E. M. FORSTER

HOW TO BEHAVE IN AN ELEVATOR 1. Face forward. 2. Fold hands in front. 3. Do not make eye contact. 4. Watch the numbers. 5. Don't talk to anyone you don't know. 6. Stop talking with anyone you do know when anyone you don't know enters the elevator. 7. Avoid brushing bodies.

LAYNE LONGFELLOW

A cardinal rule of politics—never get caught in bed with a live man or a dead woman.

J. R. EWING

RULE A: Don't. RULE A1: Rule A does not exist. RULE A2: Do not discuss the existence or non-existence of Rules A, A1 or A2.

R. D. LAING

Rule #1: Don't sweat the small stuff. Rule #2: It's all small stuff.

DR. MICHAEL MANTELL

Is forbidden to steal towels, please. If you are not person to do such is please not to read notice.

SIGN IN TOKYO HOTEL

Exit according to rule, first leg and then head. Remove high heels and synthetic stockings before evacuation: Open the door, take out the recovery line and throw it away.

RUMANIAN NATIONAL AIRLINES EMERGENCY INSTRUCTIONS

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules, whose would you use?

DALE CARNEGIE

You are a member of the British royal family. We are never tired, and we all love hospitals.

QUEEN MARY

Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.

JEAN COCTEAU

To change one's life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. No exceptions.