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60 Selected Best Famous Quotes II

Luciano Passuello — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:28:24 +0000

It has been over a year since I published my collection of 60 very best quotes, and it still remains one of the most popular pages on this website. I thought it was time for a sequel, including great quotes that were left out of the first collection or have been recently discovered. Enjoy!

Wisdom and Inspirational Quotes

1. It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.

—Albert Einstein

2. Eighty percent of success is showing up.

—Woody Allen

3. I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.

—Wilson Mizner

4. The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.

—Daniel J. Boorstin

5. The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.

—William Arthur Ward

6. If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.

—Frank Wilczek

7. You can never get enough of what you don’t really need.

—Eric Hoffer

8. Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

—Albert Einstein

9. Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress.

—Alfred A. Montapert

10. I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

—Bill Cosby

11. Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week.

—Spanish Proverb

12. Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

—Oscar Wilde

13. There is a great difference between worry and concern. A worried person sees a problem, and a concerned person solves a problem.

—Harold Stephens

14. It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.

—Alfred Adler

15. I hear: I forget / I see: I remember / I do: I understand

—Chinese Proverb

16. Discipline is just choosing between what you want now and what you want most.

—Unknown Author

17. The very best thing you can do for the whole world is to make the most of yourself.

—Wallace Wattles

18. Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.

—Barry LePatner

19. When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.

—Abraham Lincoln

20. Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

—Winston Churchill

Humor Quotes

21. If it weren’t for my lawyer, I’d still be in prison. It went a lot faster with two people digging.

—Joe Martin

22. Acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.

—Ambrose Bierce

23. I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.

—Noel Coward

24. The difference between death and taxes is death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.

—Will Rogers

25. You know you’re getting old when you stop to tie your shoelaces and wonder what else you could do while you’re down there.

—George Burns

26. Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

—Groucho Marx

27. Those are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others.

—Groucho Marx

28. Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.

—Sam Levenson

29. Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur. (Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.)

—Unknown Author

30. The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.

—Calvin Trillin

31. The tooth fairy teaches children that they can sell body parts for money.

—David Richerby

32. My friends tell me I have an intimacy problem. But they don’t really know me.

—Garry Shandling

33. I don’t deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don’t deserve that either.

—Jack Benny

34. I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific.

—Lily Tomlin

35. If God wanted us to fly, He would have given us tickets.

—Mel Brooks

36. If I only had a little humility, I’d be perfect.

—Ted Turner

37. When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.

—Henny Youngman

38. The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

—Groucho Marx

39. Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

—Douglas Hofstadter

40. Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.

—Franklin P. Jones

Otherwise Interesting Quotes

41. Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

—Albert Einstein

42. Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

—Susan Erz

43. Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

—Pablo Picasso

44. A genius! For 37 years I’ve practised fourteen hours a day, and now they call me a genius!

—Pablo Sarasate

45. There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have.

—Don Herold

46. The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.

—Michael Althsuler

47. The little I know I owe to my ignorance.

—Orville Mars

48. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

—George Bernard Shaw

49. In God we trust; all others bring data.

—Dr. W. Edwards Deming

50. The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

—Mark Twain

51. Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.

—Mark Twain

52. My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

—Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

53. Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.

—Dee Hock

54. Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

—Albert Einstein

55. In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower

56. The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

—Niels Bohr

57. Before you go and criticize the younger generation, just remember who raised them.

—Unknown Author

58. Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

59. It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.

—Harry Truman

60. A conclusion is the place where you got tired thinking.

—Martin H. Fischer

If you enjoyed this collection, check the original selection of 60 very best quotes or browse the full collection (which has just been updated with over 500 quotes).

What are you favorite ones out of the collection above? Do you have a favorite quote of yours that isn’t in this list? I’d love to hear in the comments!

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60 Selected Best Famous Quotes

Luciano Passuello — Mon, 19 May 2008 12:01:05 +0000

In this posting you will find my selection of the very best 60 quotes, from nearly a decade of collecting them. They range from the profound to the intriguing to the just plain funny.

One way or the other, you’ll surely find many of them to be thought-provoking and entertaining.

This selection is, of course, based solely on my personal taste (and even that varies largely from day to day according to my mood). You are welcome to browse the entire collection and look for your own favorite ones or contribute new quotes from your own personal collection.

Wisdom Quotes

1. You can do anything, but not everything.

—David Allen

2. Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

3. The richest man is not he who has the most, but he who needs the least.

—Unknown Author

4. You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.

—Wayne Gretzky

5. Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.

—Ambrose Redmoon

6. You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

—Gandhi

7. When hungry, eat your rice; when tired, close your eyes. Fools may laugh at me, but wise men will know what I mean.

—Lin-Chi

8. The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

—A. A. Milne

9. To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.

—Abraham Maslow

10. We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

—Aristotle

11. A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.

—Baltasar Gracian

12. Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.

—Basho

13. Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

—Lao-Tze

14. Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

15. What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.

—John Ruskin

16. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.

—Marcel Proust

17. Work like you don’t need money, love like you’ve never been hurt, and dance like no one’s watching

—Unknown Author

18. Try a thing you haven’t done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time, to figure out whether you like it or not.

—Virgil Garnett Thomson

19. Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.

—Will Rogers

20. People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.

—Zig Ziglar

Funny Quotes

21. Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories.

—John Wilmot

22. What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.

—Oscar Levant

23. Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

—Oscar Wilde

24. I’ve gone into hundreds of [fortune-teller's parlors], and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her.

—New York City detective

25. When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty.

—Norm Crosby

26. Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.

—Kurt Vonnegut

27. Just the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

—Carl Sagan

28. My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists.

—Jean Rostand

29. Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.

—Lily Tomlin

30. I quit therapy because my analyst was trying to help me behind my back.

—Richard Lewis

31. We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.

—Robert Wilensky

32. If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?

—Scott Adams

33. If the lessons of history teach us anything it is that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.

—Anon

34. When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I’m beginning to believe it.

—Clarence Darrow

35. Laughing at our mistakes can lengthen our own life. Laughing at someone else’s can shorten it.

—Cullen Hightower

36. There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say.

—Cyril Connolly

37. There’s so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?

—Dick Cavett

38. All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

—H. L. Mencken

39. I don’t mind what Congress does, as long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses.

—Victor Hugo

40. I took a speed reading course and read ‘War and Peace’ in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

—Woody Allen

Otherwise Intelligent Quotes

41. The person who reads too much and uses his brain too little will fall into lazy habits of thinking.

—Albert Einstein

42. Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.

—André Gide

43. It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

—Aristotle

44. I’d rather live with a good question than a bad answer.

—Aryeh Frimer

45. We learn something every day, and lots of times it’s that what we learned the day before was wrong.

—Bill Vaughan

46. I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.

—Blaise Pascal

47. Don’t ever wrestle with a pig. You’ll both get dirty, but the pig will enjoy it.

—Cale Yarborough

48. An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn’t take his education too seriously.

—Charles F. Kettering

49. Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

—Christopher Hampton

50. Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

—Cyril Connolly

51. Never be afraid to laugh at yourself, after all, you could be missing out on the joke of the century.

—Dame Edna Everage

52. I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.

—Edith Sitwell

53. Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.

—Ellen Goodman

54. The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

—Ellen Parr

55. Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.

—Erica Jong

56. Some people like my advice so much that they frame it upon the wall instead of using it.

—Gordon R. Dickson

57. The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.

—Lily Tomlin

58. Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.

—Napoleon (Hanlon’s Razor)

59. Imagination was given to 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

60. When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.

—Thomas Szasz

Help! How to Better Manage my Unwieldy Collection of Quotes?

After I first published my favorite quotes collection (along with its companion article 5 Reasons to Collect Favorite Quotes), it grew faster than ever from 400 to over 500 quotes.

Nowadays, I’m much more demanding about which quotes to add to my collection. However — judging from the number of quotes I find on the web on a daily basis — I can only expect it to grow even faster than before.

Years ago, I faced the same situation with my browser bookmarks. Even being extremely conservative about adding them, after years they inevitably started adding up to the point of being unmanageable. Cleaning and categorizing those bookmarks was both time-consuming and inefficient.

The problem was eventually solved not by tidying them up regularly, but by the smart use of tagging and searching technology. Now my bookmarks are online at del.icio.us, tagged and fully searchable — and I still have ways to own the data. (Call me paranoid, but I don’t feel comfortable relying entirely on a third party to hold years of data, no matter how much I like their service.)

Now I feel I need a similar solution for my quotes — having a long flat list isn’t working very well anymore. At first, Quotiki seemed like a perfect fit. Unfortunately, however, there’s currently no way to export my quotes or otherwise retain ownership of the data.

So, here’s the question to my smart readers: How do you think I should go with my quotes collection? Do you have any suggestions of online services I can use and still retain my collection while making it more useful to myself and to others?

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5 Reasons to Collect Favorite Quotes

Luciano Passuello — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 12:44:18 +0000

Quotes are great because they can distill ideas very efficiently.

Even though famous quotes are very popular, few people manage to create their own personal quote catalog. Being a quote collector myself for nearly a decade, I find several benefits in maintaining a personal collection of favorite quotes, famous or otherwise.

1. Instantly Transform your Mood

Quotes have the power to change our mental state very quickly. Just like books or movies, quotes can generate strong emotions, inspire, motivate or make us laugh – with the notable difference that we don’t need to invest hours of our time to experience the desired effect.

It’s very easy to incorporate the reading of quotes in your life if you have your own collection handy. If it is organized in categories, you can have an instant dose of humor or inspiration whenever you like. If you know quotes that have a particularly powerful effect on you, you can also put them in a highly visible place to have your quick fix many times a day.

"I pick my favorite quotations and store them in my mind as ready armor, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence." –Robert Burns.

2. Get to Know New Authors

You may already be a quote junkie, but let’s face it: quotes don’t replace good books. ‘Quotes is reading for lazy people’, I once heard. But being exposed to quotes from different or unknown authors can spark your curiosity and make you go read their works. For example, I used to think Einstein was only a genius of physics. It was only after knowing some of his quotes that I had the interest to read his great essays on subjects such as religion, the meaning of life and many others.

"At any rate, I am convinced that He does not play dice." –Albert Einstein.

3. Distill Insights and Communicate Them Effectively

Quotes have the highest wisdom density you can get in a single sentence. Although quotes may seem, in hindsight, obvious observations about reality, the truth is that it requires a lot of insight to be able to to grab those reality bites in such accessible format.

It is very rewarding to find a simple and concise quote that expresses one idea that you already had, but didn’t know how to express it quite well. Moreover, you can use the quote as a shortcut for explaining your own established views to others. Having that easily communicable expression of an idea can be a springboard to start new discussions that wouldn’t happen otherwise.

"The point of quotations is that one can use another’s words to be insulting." –Amanda Cross.

4. Be Known and Know Other People Better

People say you can know someone by the books one reads, or by the friends one has. I would say that a quicker way to know people is by taking a look at the quotes they collect.

Just as it happens with someone’s personal music library, if you read just a few quotes from someone’s quote collection, you can already tell a lot about that person. I bet that if you check some quotes from my own collection in this blog’s sidebar, you can quickly infer what kind of person I am, without having to spend much time having a conversation with me (lucky you!).

There are social websites built around quote collections, where you can, based on your own favorite quotes, get to know like-minded people and get recommendations of new quotes. A good example is the Quotiki website.

"We are the people our parents warned us about." -Jimmy Buffett.

5. Get a Different Perspective

Even more interesting that stumbling upon a quote that expresses something you already know, is to find one that expresses something totally unexpected or contrary to what you know.

An essay, for example, usually builds a point of view step-by-step. If the ideas in that article go against your own point of view, the natural response is to resist them. And since reading an article is a somewhat long activity, your brain has plenty of time to build its internal mental wall. But with a single quote, it’s completely different: you take your brain off-guard. That is great, because it allows your mind to generate brand new thoughts you wouldn’t have otherwise.

“If there’s only one answer, then this must not be a very interesting topic.” -Ron Jeffries.

Start your Quote Collection Now

With the proliferation of websites in recent years, collecting quotes became extremely easy. You just need to be careful not to overwhelm yourself with information. The best strategy is to transform it in a habit – instead of browsing the huge catalogs available online.

I also recommend that you be very selective in adding a quote to your collection: when in doubt, don’t. You may also want to consider doing regular clean sweeps in your database; you only want to see the quotes you consider to be the absolute best there.

Regarding format, try to keep it simple. A simple text file or spreadsheet will do it.

If you don’t mind having it hosted by a third-party, you can use a website (see below). You get the benefits of universal access, tagging and social interaction – all very nice. I am totally in favor of using online services – the only reason I don’t currently maintain my own catalog in such services is that I couldn’t yet find any with export functionality. When I do, I will certainly take my database online. Call me old-fashioned, but I still need to own my data to feel comfortable – especially a database that takes decades to build.

Where to Get Quotes

You can find good quotes everywhere – all you need is to go look for them. If you’re serious about growing your collection, I highly recommend quotations websites. I suggest you pay them a visit and see what you like most. I particularly recommend you use the ones that provide RSS feeds. Feeds are a great way to get quotes since you don’t actively spend time browsing thousands and thousands of pages (if you are not into RSS feeds, most websites provide some sort of daily e-mail functionality, too).

Most of the quotes I get nowadays are from:

The Quotations Page: Very comprehensive collection. I subscribe to the session Quotes of the Day [feed].
BrainyQuote: Also provides good feeds by category and keep my collection a bit more diverse than if I got it all from the same source. I subscribe to Quote of the Day [feed] and Funny Quote of the Day [feed].

These give me some good ones often enough. Other quote sites that are definitely worth a visit are:

Wikiquote – It’s the Wikipedia branch for quotes. That speaks for itself, doesn’t it?
Quotiki – It’s sort of a social site built around quotes. You can get to know other people based on preferences and find out similar quotes to the ones you have.
ThinkExist – Yet another quote site with nice features such as a great search engine, daily e-mail and quote ratings.

In case you’re interested, I created a page sharing my entire personal collection – it currently has more than 400 of the best quotes I’ve come across so far.

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