Skip to main content

Archives - May 2006

May 1, 2006

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

– Franz Kafka

May 2, 2006

The only means of strengthening one's intelligence is to make up one's mind about nothing --- to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.

– John Keats

May 3, 2006

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

– Isak Dinesen, "Babette's Feast"

May 4, 2006

I always read the last page of a book first so that if I die before I finish, I'll know how it turned out.

– Nora Ephron, in When Harry Met Sally

May 5, 2006

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

– Duke Ellington

May 6, 2006

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

– H. L. Mencken

May 7, 2006

There are two kinds of light --- the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.

– James Thurber

May 8, 2006

Oh! do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.

– Jane Austen, MANSFIELD PARK

May 9, 2006

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.

– Virginia Woolf

May 10, 2006

You can cage the singer but not the song.

– Harry Belafonte

May 11, 2006

Life doesn't make any sense, and we all pretend it does. Comedy's job is to point out that it doesn't make sense, and that it doesn't make much difference anyway.

– Eric Idle

May 12, 2006

Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent.

– Jean Kerr

May 13, 2006

Isn't elegance forgetting what one is wearing?

– Yves Saint Laurent

May 14, 2006

Women know the way to rear up children (to be just). They know a simple, merry, tender knack of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes, and stringing pretty words that make no sense. And kissing full sense into empty words.

– Elizabeth Barrett Browning

May 15, 2006

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is the progressive discovery of our ignorance.

– Will Durant

May 16, 2006

Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands --- and then eat just one of the pieces.

– Judith Viorst

May 17, 2006

At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they hope it can be done, then they see it can be done --- then it is done and the whole world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.

– Frances Hodgson Burnett, THE SECRET GARDEN

May 18, 2006

If you can't make a mistake, you can't make anything.

– Marva Collins

May 19, 2006

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same kind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.

– George Elliot

May 20, 2006

Traveling in the company of those we love is home in motion.

– Leigh Hunt

May 21, 2006

When I say beautiful things, I'm not necessarily living them; when I live them, the beautiful thing is that words aren't necessary.

– Brock Tully

May 22, 2006

The only way most people recognize their limits is by trespassing on them.

– Tom Morris

May 23, 2006

In creating, the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.

– James Russell Lowell

May 24, 2006

Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.

– E. B. White, SOME REMARKS ON HUMOR, introduction

May 25, 2006

Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.

– George Santayana, THE LIFE OF REASON: REASON IN ART

May 26, 2006

Without heroes, we are all plain people, and don't know how far we can go.

– Bernard Malamud

May 27, 2006

What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald, LOVE OF THE LAST TYCOON

May 28, 2006

Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly.

– Arnold Edinborough

May 29, 2006

Although no sculptured marble should rise to their memory, nor engraved stone bear record of their deeds, yet will their remembrance be as lasting as the land they honored.

– Daniel Webster

May 30, 2006

It is remarkable how similar the pattern of love is to the pattern of insanity.

– Andy and Larry Wachowsk, in The Matrix Revolutions

May 31, 2006

Life is tough, and if you have the ability to laugh at it you have the ability to enjoy it.

– Salma Hayek