quotes and jokes

The departure of our boys to foreign parts with the ever-present possibility that they might never return, taught the real value of photography to every father and mother. To many a mother the photograph of her boy in his country's uniform was the one never-failing consolation. ~Louis Fabian Bachrach



Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance. ~George Bernard Shaw



They say that age is all in your mind. The trick is keeping it from creeping down into your body. ~Author Unknown



Surrounded by people who love life, you love it too; surrounded by people who don't, you don't. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966



Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we. ~Michel de Montaigne, translated



A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism. ~Carl Sagan



They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price. ~Kahlil Gibran



Thrift means that you should always have the best you can possibly afford, when the thing has any reference to your physical and mental health, to your growth in efficiency and power. ~Orison Swett Marden



We did not change as we grew older; we just became more clearly ourselves. ~Lynn Hall



Envy is a littleness of soul, which cannot see beyond a certain point, and if it does not occupy the whole space feels itself excluded. ~William Hazlitt, Characteristics, 1823



Next to the wound, what women make best is the bandage. ~Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly



But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine. ~Thomas Jefferson



A lie is an excuse guarded. ~Jonathan Swift



All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable. ~Walt Disney



Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic. ~Norman Cousins



History: the category of human phenomena which tends to catastrophe. ~Jules Romains, Men of Good Will



Without this ridiculous vanity that takes the form of self-display, and is part of everything and everyone, we would see nothing, and nothing would exist. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin



No man is a failure who is enjoying life. ~William Feather



Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before - it takes something from him. ~Louis L'Armour



I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. ~George Bernard Shaw