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Copyright © 1996 Prelude Press, Inc. site credits
The important thing in acting is to be able to laugh and cry. If I have to cry, I think of my sex life. If I have to laugh, I think of my sex life.
GLENDA JACKSON
Love is the drug which makes sexuality palatable in popular mythology.
GERMAINE GREER
The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.
ERMA BOMBECK
Personally, I like sex and I don't care what a man thinks of me as long as I get what I want from him—which is usually sex.
VALERIE PERRINE
Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.
Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more, know what I mean?
ERIC IDLE MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS
Were kisses all the joys in bed, one woman would another wed.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Many mothers are wholly ignorant of the almost universal prevalence of secret vice, or self-abuse, among the young. Why hesitate to say firmly and without quibble that personal abuse lies at the root of much of the feebleness, paleness, nervousness, and good-for-nothingness of the entire community?
DR. J. H. KELLOGG the inventor of Kellogg's Corn Flakes in a warning against Grape Nuts
The next time you feel the desire [to masturbate] coming on, don't give way to it. If you have the chance, just wash your parts in cold water and cool them down.
ROBERT BADEN-POWELL to Boy Scouts
The only reason I feel guilty about masturbation is that I do it so badly.
DAVID STEINBERG
I would rather score a touchdown than make love to the prettiest girl in the United States.
PAUL HORNUNG
When a woman unhappily yoked talks about the soul with a man not her husband, it isn't the soul they are talking about.
DON MARQUIS
On stage I make love to 25,000 people; then I go home alone.
JANIS JOPLIN
I'm saving the bass player for Omaha.
JANIS JOPLIN
Your idea of fidelity is not having more than one man in bed at the same time.
FREDERIC RAPHAEL
Love is the self-delusion we manufacture to justify the trouble we take to have sex.
DAN GREENBURG
What is a promiscuous person? It's usually someone who is getting more sex than you are.
VICTOR LOWNES
Voyeurism is a healthy, non-participatory sexual activity—the world should look at the world.
DESMOND MORRIS
Sex is like having dinner: sometimes you joke about the dishes, sometimes you take the meal seriously.
She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
RAYMOND CHANDLER
I wrote the story myself. It's all about a girl who lost her reputation but never missed it.
MAE WEST
Once you know what women are like, men get kind of boring. I'm not trying to put them down, I mean I like them sometimes as people, but sexually they're dull.
RITA MAE BROWN
Self-abuse is the most certain road to the grave.
GEORGE M. CALHOUN, M.D., 1855
Hey, don't knock masturbation. It's sex with someone I love.
Masturbation! The amazing availability of it!
JAMES JOYCE
A woman occasionally is quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation. It takes an abundance of imagination, to be sure.
KARL KRAUS
I like making love myself and I can make love for about three minutes. Three minutes and I need eight hours sleep, and a bowl of Wheaties.
RICHARD PRYOR
DORIS DAY [to Rock Hudson]: Mr. Allen, this may come as a shock to you, but there are some men who don't end every sentence with a proposition.
PILLOW TALK
For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.
QUENTIN CRISP
Let's take coitus out of the closet and off the altar and put it in the continuum of human behaviour.
JOHN UPDIKE
If wisdom were offered me with the proviso that I should keep it shut up and refrain from declaring it, I should refuse. There's no delight in owning anything unshared.
SENECA
Not what we give, but what we share, for the gift without the giver is bare.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Even children followed with endearing wile, and plucked his gown, to share the good man's smile.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
Friends share all things.
PYTHAGORAS between theorems
I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR.
A man is known by the silence he keeps.
OLIVER HERFORD
Silence is wonderful to listen to.
THOMAS HARDY
Carlyle finally compressed his Gospel of Silence into thirty handsome octavos.
JOHN MORLEY
The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a tired feeling.
PAULA POUNDSTONE
To err is human—but it feels divine.
MAE WEST
If any of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.
JESUS OF NAZARETH John 8:7
Fifty-four-year-old Ellsworth Donald Griffith told a Des Moines, Iowa judge that he was too old to go to prison, and asked instead for a public stoning for his conviction for terrorizing his former employer. His one condition was that only those without sin be allowed to cast stones. The judge sentenced him to 5 years in prison.
WORLD ALMANAC & BOOK OF FACTS
We're all in this alone.
LILY TOMLIN
When you close your doors, and make darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone, for you are not alone; nay, God is within, and your genius is within. And what need have they of light to see what you are doing?
EPICTETUS
Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.
DAG HAMMARSKJÖLD
That I am totally devoid of sympathy for, or interest in, the world of groups is directly attributable to the fact that my two greatest needs and desires—smoking cigarettes and plotting revenge—are basically solitary pursuits.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
To me, the sea is like a person—like a child that I've known a long time. It sounds crazy, I know, but when I swim in the sea I talk to it. I never feel alone when I'm out there.
GERTRUDE EDERLE thirty years after becoming the first woman to swim the English Channel
I love tranquil solitude And such society as is quiet, wise, and good.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
The best way to study human nature is when nobody else is present.
TOM MASSON
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.
CHARLES DICKENS DAVID COPPERFIELD
When I had my operation, the doctor gave me a local anesthetic. I couldn't afford the imported kind.
LAUGH-IN
First he bought a '57 Biscayne and put it in a ditch; He drank up all the rest, that sonofabitch.
JONI MITCHELL
I am the maker of my own fortune. I think of the Great Spirit that rules this universe.
CHIEF TECUMSEH
Do not put your faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say.
WILLIAM W. WATT
I could prove God statistically.
GEORGE GALLUP
If my hands are fully occupied in holding on to something, I can neither give nor receive.
DOROTHEE SÖLLE
There is an ordinary proverb for this: "Stinginess does not enrich; charity does not impoverish."
GLÜCKEL OF HAMELN
It is with narrow-souled people as with narrow-necked bottles: the less they have in them the more noise they make in pouring it out.
ALEXANDER POPE
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
This . . . reminds me of the way they used to weigh hogs in Texas. They would get a long plank, put it over a cross-bar, and somehow tie the hog on one end of the plank. They'd search all around till they found a stone that would balance the weight of the hog and they'd put that on the other end of the plank. Then they'd guess the weight of the stone.
JOHN DEWEY
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, the ant. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.
PABLO PICASSO
Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
GORE VIDAL
You can convert your style into riches.
QUENTIN CRISP
It's no good running a pig farm badly for thirty years while saying, "Really I was meant to be a ballet dancer." By that time, pigs will be your style.
QUENTIN CRISP
The Argentinians believed in Mrs. Perón. So much so, that when she died, they petitioned the pope to make her a saint. His Holiness declined. But if he'd consented, what a triumph for style that would have been. A double fox stole, ankle-strapped shoes, and eternal life. Nobody's ever had that.
QUENTIN CRISP
If Quentin Crisp had never existed it is unlikely that anyone would have had the nerve to invent him.
ANONYMOUS REVIEWER
Men are born to succeed, not to fail.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Success is simply a matter of luck. Ask any failure.
EARL WILSON
Eighty percent of success is showing up.
It matters not whether you win or lose; what matters is whether I win or lose.
DARIN WEINBERG
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK
When you get there, there is no there there. But there will be a pool.
DAVID ZUCKER
Procrastination is the fear of success. People procrastinate because they are afraid of the success that they know will result if they move ahead now. Because success is heavy, carries a responsibility with it, it is much easier to procrastinate and live on the "someday I'll" philosophy.
DENIS WAITLEY
What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.
BOB DYLAN
JANE HATHAWAY: Chief, haven't you heard of the saying "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game"? MR. DRYSDALE: Yes, I've heard it. And I consider it one of the most ridiculous statements ever made.
THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES
The method of the enterprising is to plan with audacity, and execute with vigor; to sketch out a map of possibilities; and then to treat them as probabilities.
BOVEE
Always bear in mind that your own resolution to success is more important than any other one thing.
Losers visualize the penalties of failure. Winners visualize the rewards of success.
DR. ROB GILBERT
There's nothing to winning, really. That is, if you happen to be blessed with a keen eye, an agile mind, and no scruples whatsoever.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.
REGGIE LEACH
The real secret of success is enthusiasm.
WALTER CHRYSLER
There is only one success— to be able to spend your life in your own way.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.
SENECA
Act as if it were impossible to fail.
DOROTHEA BRANDE
The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility.
CHARLES F. KETTERING
Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
MARK TWAIN
The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self complacent is erroneous— on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind. Failure makes people bitter and cruel.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
The secret of success is constancy to purpose.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
When you get right down to the root of the meaning of the word "succeed," you find it simply means to follow through.
F. W. NICHOL
No man is a failure who is enjoying life.
WILLIAM FEATHER
Can success change the human mechanism so completely between one dawn and another? Can it make one feel taller, more alive, handsomer, uncommonly gifted and indomitably secure with the certainty that this is the way life will always be? It can and it does!
MOSS HART
The man who lives for himself is a failure. Even if he gains much wealth, position or power he still is a failure. The man who lives for others has achieved true success. A rich man who consecrates his wealth and his position to the good of humanity is a success. A poor man who gives of his service and his sympathy to others has achieved true success even though material prosperity or outward honors never come to him.
NORMAN VINCENT PEALE
The moral flabbiness born of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease.
You can't win any game unless you are ready to win.
CONNIE MACK
There's no secret about success. Did you ever know a successful man that didn't tell you all about it?
KIN HUBBARD
It is easy to get everything you want, provided you first learn to do without the things you can not get.
ELBERT HUBBARD
Success didn't spoil me; I've always been insufferable.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
There's always room at the top— after the investigation.
OLIVER HERFORD
The successful people are the ones who can think up things for the rest of the world to keep busy at.
DON MARQUIS
I started out with nothing. I still have most of it.
MICHAEL DAVIS
We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat.
QUEEN VICTORIA
WILBUR POST: I'm counting on you to win tomorrow, but if you don't, be a good sport—lose with a smile. MR. ED: I'd rather win with a sneer!
MR. ED
If at first you don't succeed, you're running about average.
M. H. ALDERSON
Suffering is not a prerequisite for happiness.
JUDY TATELBAUM
The man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
MARCEL PROUST
I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning.
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
M. KATHLEEN CASEY
Nothing can be attained without suffering but at the same time one must begin by sacrificing suffering.
GURUDJIEFF
Many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable.
TACITUS
I know a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex, and rich food. He was healthy right up to the time he killed himself.
JOHNNY CARSON
I don't think suicide is so terrible. Some rainy winter Sunday when there's a little boredom, you should always carry a gun. Not to shoot yourself, but to know exactly that you're always making a choice.
LINA WERTMULLER
Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune or "broken heart" is excuse for cutting off one's life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
Copyright © 1996 Prelude Press, Inc. site credits