Daily Inspirations:Thoughts For Every Day

Compressed Philosophy And Distilled Wisdom To Make You Think.

Collected by Vernon Coleman


Dedicated to Donna Antoinette, the Welsh Princess


Forward
When I was young I thought it was sacriligeous to mark the books I read. And then, a few decades ago, I made a faint pencil mark in a paperback by P.G.Wodehouse in order to help me re-find a passage I liked a lot.

It was a step on a slippery slope. Since then I haven't looked back. These days I never read a book (unless it's a rare first edition) without a pen or a pencil in my hand. Every time I come across something which makes me think I put a mark in the margin. Sometimes, if the book is borrowed, I scribble down the quotation on a slip of paper.

This is how I put this book together. Like most writers I have a fine collection of books of quotations. But this book is a taste from my personal collection of quotes - a collection which is derived first hand from some of my favourite authors and many of my favourite books.

Most of these quotes really made me think and many of them are funny. (That doesn't mean that some of the funny ones aren't also provocative though there are, I admit, one or two in here simply because they make me laugh.)

With a cavalier and comprehensive disregard for the conventions of false modesty I have included quotes from some of my own books in this collection.

Vernon Coleman, Devon 2000




`It is not enough to be busy. The question is: `What are you busy about?' - Henry David Thoreau


`What a different story men would have to tell if only they would adopt a definite purpose, and stand by that purpose until it had time to become an all-consuming obsession.' - Napoleon Hill


`Neutral, `objective', `fair' and `responsible' are qualities which we are taught to admire. But, in truth, these are the qualities of the weak-spirited and the passionless. Name me one great man who was ever `fair'. Name me a social, technical or artistic advance produced by a `bland' man.' - Vernon Coleman


`Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it! No matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and with your own common sense.' - Buddha


`It is from nature that the disease arises and from nature comes the cure, not from the physician.' - Paracelsus


`Never apologise for showing feeling, my friend. Remember that when you do, you apologise for truth.' - Benjamin Disraeli.


`In most peoples lives the good luck and the bad luck cancel one another out - and the trick is the try and take the greatest possible advantage of all the good luck so that you can ride all the bad luck.' - Vernon Coleman


`Truth is on the march and nothing will stop it.' - Emile Zola


`Of course we can splice genes. But can we NOT splice genes?' - Jean Paul Sartre


`If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me.' - Henry David Thoreau


`If you have two diseases, the chances are that the second was caused by the treatment for the first.' - Vernon Coleman


`There are more old drunkards than old doctors' - Benjamin Franklin


`We make walls, floor, roof, doors and windows for a room. But it is the empty space within that makes the room liveable. Thus, while the tangible have advantages it is the intangible that makes it useful.' - Tao Te Jing by Lao Tsu


`The verb `to doctor' means `to adulterate'.' - Dr Vernon Coleman

And then I was dying to finish college and start working.
And then I was dying to marry and have children.
And then I was dying for my children to grow old enough for school so I could return to work.
And then I was dying to retire.
And now, I am dying...and suddenly I realise I forgot to live.' - Anonymous

`Let food be your medicine.' - Hippocrates


`There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge.' - Napoleon Hill


`Try to forget and forgive. If you can't do both then try to do one.' - Vernon Coleman


`Your work is to discover your work, and then, with all your heart, to give yourself to it.' - Buddha


`Information is the currency of democracy.' - Thomas Jefferson.


`Dreams and memories are there to protect you from the dull and savage days.' - Vernon Coleman


`Tell the truth, and you are likely to be a pariah within your family, a semi-criminal to authorities and damned with faint praise by your peers. So why do we do it? Because saying what you think is the only freedom.' - Eica Jong


`I find my spirits and my health affect each other reciprocally - that is to say, every thing that discomposes my mind, produces a correspondent disorder in my body; and my bodily complaints are remarkably mitigated by those considerations that dissipate the clouds of mental chagrin.' - Tobias Smollett


`The money required to provide adequate food, water, education, health and housing for everyone in the world has been estimated at $17 billion a year. It is a huge sum of money...about as much as the world spends on arms every two weeks.' - Leo Rebello


`The best, simplest and least asked question in the world is `Why?'. Why do you want a better job? Why do you want to save money? Why do you want to move house? Why do you want to buy a holiday home? Only when you ask yourself `Why?' will you know what you really need and what you are prepared to do for it. Most people earn and spend without ever asking themselves `Why?' They blindly sell their time (which is the same as selling their lives) for money which they spend on things they neither want nor need. Ask yourself `Why?' more often and you will learn more about yourself and about what you are doing.' - Vernon Coleman


`When an archer misses the mark, he turns and looks for the fault within himself. Failure to hit the bull's eye is never the fault of the target. To improve yourself - improve your aim.' - Gilbert Arland


`He who knows he has enough is rich.' - Tao Te Jing by Lao Tsu


`With the exception of death the bottom line is hardly ever as bad as you think its going to be.' - Vernon Coleman


`The purpose of life is to know oneself. We cannot do it unless we identify ourselves with all that lives.' - Gandhi


`You must live as you think. If not, sooner or later you end up by thinking as you have lived.' - Paul Valery


`A great healer heals with only a minimum of medicines. The superior healer knows how to heal the mind first. Even without any medicine.' - Tao Te Jing by Lao Tsu


`If you really want something then you must believe in your ability to get it. If you think you're going to fail then you'll almost certainly fail. if you think you can succeed then you'll stand a chance of succeeding.' - Vernon Coleman


`It is part of the cure to wish to be cured.' - Seneca


`The invalid who takes a strenuous and indestructible interest in everything and everybody but himself, and to whom a dull moment is an unknown thing and an impossibility, is a formidable adversary for disease and a hard invalid to vanquish.' - Mark Twain


`Look after the minutes as carefully as you look after the pennies and the hours, like the pounds, will look after themselves.' - Vernon Coleman


`We have to learn to become better ancestors.' - Jonas Salk


`The natural force within each of us is that greatest healer of all.' - Hippocrates


`All men are anarchists at heart, or, if they're not, they should be ashamed of themselves. To one and all of us, at some time or other, amid technocratic pressures and totalitarian intimations, must come the urge to kick over the orthodox traces, to say insultingly what we think, to reduce authority to the shambles it deserves.' - Michael Foot


`I have a new philosophy. I'm only going to dread one day at a time.' -
Charles M. Schulz


`If thou really desirest and would bravely find knowledge, open thine ears willingly to all men's views; have ability to study and comprehend their scope, and the will, courage and honesty to follow truth at all times, and however at first distasteful and unpopular.' - Confucius


`You have to be a friend to have friends. And true friendships take time to mature. Like seeds growing in the garden you can't hurry friendships; you have to let them take root, you have to be patient and attentive. Real wealth is measured in friendships - not material possessions.' - Vernon Coleman


`Le germe n'est rien, c'est le terrain qui est tout.' (`The microbe is nothing, the soil is everything.') - Louis Pasteur


`Time is the only little fragment of eternity that belongs to man; and, like life, it can never be recalled.' - Samuel Smiles


`Smile! People will wonder why.' - Harry D Schultz


`Cherish your youthful fantasies and enjoy them to the full. In a few years time all your waking hours will be spent worrying about mortgage rates, blocked drains and german measles.' - Vernon Coleman


`There are only two truly infinite things: the universe and stupidity. And I am unsure about the universe.' - Albert Einstein


`I couldn't take all those nut cases any more. You'd think once in a while somebody would notice that I have problems too.' - Psychiatrist who shot a woman patient who kept ranting about her sex life


`I have in my car a long list of hospitals to which I would not want myself or a member of my family to be admitted.' - a surgeon talking on British television


`I am still waiting for something really wonderful to happen.' - Woman celebrating her 100th birthday


`More people are made miserable trying to get rich - and failing - than are made happy by trying to get rich - and succeeding.' - Vernon Coleman


`Apologising for your mistakes is a sign of maturity and strength. Learning from your mistakes is a sign of true wisdom.' - Vernon Coleman


`Hate usually does more damage to the person doing the hating than to the object of their hatred.' - Vernon Coleman


`If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.' - Katharine Hepburn


`You must come again when you have less time.' - Walter Sickert


`A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain.' - Oscar Wilde


`The first half of our life is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.' - Clarence Darrow


`I am convinced digestion is the great secret of life.' - Sydney Smith


`Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.' - Alexander Pope


`History is not what happened, it is what you can remember.' - W.C.Sellar and R.J.Yateman


`In youth we tend to look forward; in old age we tend to look back; in middle age we tend to look worried.' - Anon


`However good your life is it will be better if you smile and say `thank you' more often.' - Vernon Coleman


`Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.' - Mark Twain


`Politics - the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.' - Oscar Ameringer


`When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him, he calls it ferocity.' - George Bernard Shaw


`Confront your fears and face the worst; it is the unknown which creates the monsters which will engulf you.' - Vernon Coleman


`Too bad all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.' - George Burns


`If it weren't for the optimist, the pessimist would never know how happy he isn't.' - Anon


`Perception is more important than reality.' - Vernon Coleman


`An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.' - George Bernard Shaw


`Old age is always 15 years older than I am.' - Bernard Baruch


`What is life but a series of sharp corners, round each of which fate lies in wait for us with a stuffed eelskin?' - P.G.Wodehouse


`Everyone knows that you can buy money with your time. But only the wisest realise that you can also buy time with your money. Time is the most important, most fundamental currency in the world; the only currency that really matters.' - Vernon Coleman


`An after dinner speech should be just like a lady's dress; long enough to cover the subject and short enough to be interesting.' - Anon


`Saying `I don't know' is a sign of strength not weakness.' - Vernon Coleman


`He squandered health in search of wealth, To gold became a slave; Then spent his wealth in search of health, But only found a grave.' - Message on a gravestone


`When I was 18, when I looked my most perfect, I was absolutely, deeply insecure. Now that I've gotten older and can see the age in my face, I feel comfortable in a way that I never was when I was younger.' - Cybil Shepherd (when aged 45)


`Life is simply one damned thing after another.' - Elbert Hubbard


`Much of the world's work is done by men who do not feel quite well.' - J K Galbraith


`The ultimate indignity is to be given a bedpan by a stranger who calls you by your first name.' - Maggie Kuhn


`Live your life honestly and with good intentions and you will enjoy the comfort of a clear conscience; now probably the only quality asset in a harsh, cruel world.' - Vernon Coleman


`Your body knows best. Learn to listen to it.' - Vernon Coleman


`Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation the other eight are unimportant.' - Henry Miller


`I long ago came to the conclusion that it was horribly evil to experiment on other living being and then attempt to justify the practice by calling it medical research.' - Sir John Gielgud


`I'm not for suppressing pornography. I'm for suppressing guns. Some pornography insults women, but none of it is as dangerous as the guns that kill women and men.' - American feminist Betty Friedan


`It doesn't matter what you do for a living. What matters is how proud you are of what you do.' - Vernon Coleman


`When you have difficulty saying `no' think of how much more difficult things are likely to become if you say `yes.' - Vernon Coleman


`If Michaelangelo had been straight, the Sistine Chapel would have been wallpapered.' - Robin Tyler


`Only when you know why you do things will you know whether they are worth doing.' - Vernon Coleman


`Listening and talking are still the two most potent ways to communicate with other people.' - Vernon Coleman


`All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.' - Edmund Burke


`Be good to the people you know. Take care of them and they'll take care of you.' - Asa Baber


`I'm just trying to get my life back together.' - Benjamin Petrosius, six-year-old actor


`Chastity is the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.' - Anon


`You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.' - Ralph Waldo Emerson


`Obscene is not the picture of a naked woman exposed but that of a fully-clad general who exposes his medals won in a war of aggression.' - Herbert Marcuse


`I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have a wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.' - W B Yeats


`The more you know about yourself - and the more purpose your life has - the stronger you will become.' - Vernon Coleman


`Well, this is a fine state of affairs, you damned desperado! You meet my son just as he comes out of the gymnasium, all fresh from the bath, and you don't kiss him, you don't hug him, you don't feel his balls! And you're supposed to be a friend of ours!' - Aristophanes


`Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets.' - Somerset Maugham


`Long-term change requires looking honestly at our lives and realising that it is nice to be needed, but not at the expense of our health, our happiness and our sanity.' - Ellen Sue Stern


`Roughly speaking there is about 10 times more chance of being admitted to a mental hospital in any First World country than of being admitted to a university.' - R D Laing


`If you don't take chances you'll never know what would have happened. And you will always wonder. And always regret. Getting old and never knowing what might have been is almost certainly worse than getting old and having regrets. When you are old your regrets will tell you more about yourself than your accomplishments.' - Vernon Coleman


`Only when you have found something you are prepared to die for will you know what life is all about.' - Vernon Coleman


`The man who is pulling his own weight never has time to throw it around.' - Peggy J Rudd


`The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. - Henry David Thoreau


`We don't hold much with talking to patients in this ward.' - A nurse


`One single book can significantly change the reader's attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the effect of any other single medium.' - Central Intelligence Agency (USA)


`When you are getting kicked from the rear it means you are in front.' - Fulton J Sheen


`Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.' - Somerset Maugham on his death bed


`Looks are so deceptive that people should be done up like food packages, with the ingredients clearly labelled.' - Helen Hudson


`When official spokesmen speak, you should only ever believe their denials. When official spokesmen deny something you can be confident that it is the truth.' - Vernon Coleman


`The graveyards are full of indispensable men.' - Charles de Gaulle


`There are very few people who don't become more interesting when they stop talking.' - Mary Lowry


`Everything great in the world comes from neurotics.' - Marcel Proust


`In almost every society, pornography is reckoned as an offence, except when it is part of a religious ceremony.' - Bertrand Russell


`Your only duty on this earth is to find yourself and live accordingly.' - Carl Jung


`Success is truly the result of good judgement. Good judgement is the result of experience and experience is often the result of bad judgement.' - Anthony Robbins


`The sad lesson we learn from history is that hardly anyone ever learns anything from history.' - Robert Beckman


`A wise man ought to realise that health is his most valuable possession.' - Hippocrates


'Year by year we are becoming better equipped to accomplish the things we are striving for. But what are we striving for?' - Dr Lawrence Peter


'When I was young, I kissed my first woman and smoked my first cigarette on the same day. Believe me, never since have I wasted so much time on tobacco.' - Italian orchestral conductor Arturo Toscanini


'Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.' - Dramatist Oscar Wilde


'Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you're a good person is like expecting a bull not to charge you because you're vegetarian.' - Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan


'Do not forget those who fought the battles for you, and bought your freedom with their genius and their blood.' - Emile Zola


`You must laugh and be cheerful 10 times a day or your stomach, that father of affliction, will disturb you in the night.' - Frederich Nietzsche


`To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.' - Tao Te Jing by Lao Tsu


`Time is worth much more than money, so don't waste it - your own or anyone else's.' - Asa Baber


`To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.' - Bertrand Russell


`I only took with me two valets and a cook.' - The Marechal de Biron, reporting his imprisonment in the Bastille in 1631


`It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.' - US President Abraham Lincoln


`It is one of life's laws that as soon as one door closes another opens. But the tragedy is we look at the closed door and disregard the open one.' - Andre Gide


`I attribute my whole success in life to a rigid observance of a fundamental rule: never have yourself tattooed with any woman's name, not even her initials.' - P G Wodehouse


`Some of my elderly patients still enjoy good sex - although they can't always remember the names of their partners.' - Sex expert


`Guests are like fish - they go off after three days.' - Alan Plater


`Ignorance is expensive.' - Harry D Schultz


`What does not kill me makes me stronger.' - Frederich Nietzsche


`Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.' - John Lennon


`If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood, I'd type a little faster.' - Isaac Asimov


`It's probably true that hard work never killed anyone, but I figure why take the chance.' - Former US President Ronald Reagan


`There are some ideas worth fighting for, and if you become a completely frightened and servile employee, a safe player at all times, you will become bored with yourself.' - Asa Baber


`Prostitution gives her an opportunity to meet people. It provides fresh air and wholesome exercise, and it keeps her out of trouble.' - Joseph Heller


`If you must slander someone, dont speak it, but write it. Write it in the sand, near the water's edge.' - Napoleon Hill


`Acting and streetwalking are the oldest professions in the world and both are ruined by amateurs.' - Alexander Woollcott


`If you limit your actions in life to the things that nobody can possibly find fault with, you will not do much'. - Lewis Carroll


`If you are poor, and married to the woman you love everything becomes and adventure. A new hat for her is an achievement. The dreams, the plans, the obstacles that must be surmounted - the rich don't have any of that. There can be no castles in the air for people who live in castles.' - P G Wodehouse


`Before the Cherry Orchard was sold everybody was worried and upset, but as soon as it was all settled finally and once and for all, everybody calmed down, and felt quite cheerful.' - Playwright Anton Chekhov


`We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.' - Politician Aneurin Bevan


`Love does not consist of looking at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.' - Antoine de Saint-Exupery


`Self pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.' - John W Gardner


`Half the useful work in the world consists of combating the harmful work.' - Bertrand Russell


`If you were to believe all the bad things that were said about you, you might as well close up shop and go out of business.' - Former US President Abraham Lincoln


`One soul inhabiting two bodies.' - Aristotle, on the meaning of friendship


`The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.' - Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge


`Be kind to animals. Don't eat them.' - Playwright George Bernard Shaw


`Most people will believe anything that tells against someone they dislike or flatters their self-esteem.' - Hesketh Pearson


`I am their leader; I must follow them.' - Bertolt Brecht


`When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.' - Jonathan Swift


`I have from an early age abjured the use of meat and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.' - Leonardo Da Vinci


`Governments change. The lies stay the same.' - Anon


`Bureaucracies are the most evil of man's institutions they enshrine the worst of us and bring low the best of us.' - John Le Carre


`When a fool does evil work he forgets that he is lighting a fire wherein he must burn one day.' - Buddha


`The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.' - Horace Walpole


`And she had suffered many things of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse.' - The Bible


`The best man for the job is often a woman.' - Anonymous


`You can't control the length of your life but you can control its width and depth.' - Tom Anderson


`One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.' - Jane Austin


`When I was a young man I observed that nine out of 10 things I did were failures. I didn't want to be a failure so I did 10 times more work.' - George Bernard Shaw


`Bravery is a synonym for having absolutely no imagination.' - Vernon Coleman


`To animals belongs innocence.' - Frederich Nietzsche


`You have to know what you want to get it.' - Gertrude Stein


`An honest man is always in trouble.' - Vernon Coleman


`The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.' - George Bernard Shaw




`Don't go around saying the world owes you a living: the world owes you nothing: it was here first.' - Mark Twain


`Never give in. Never. Never. Never. Never.' - Winston Churchill


`Happiness? A good cigar, a good meal, and a good woman - or a bad woman. It depends on how much happiness you can handle.' - George Burns


`A loving wife will do anything for her husband except stop criticising and trying to improve him.' - J B Priestly


`Children suck the mother when they are young and the father when they are grown.' - John Ray


`The best armour is to keep out of range.' - Anonymous


`Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.' - Margaret Mitchell


`Nothing weighs less than a promise.' - Anonymous


`The state does nothing except to assist the strong to despoil the weak.' - Clarence S Darrow


`Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.' - Mother Teresa


`Old age isn't so bad compared to the alternative.' - George Burns


`Love is being stupid together.' - Paul Valery


`The best way to avoid criticism is to keep quiet and do nothing. But what sort of life is that?' - Vernon Coleman


`Victories are always temporary; so are defeats.' - Mafia boss


`No-one can make you feel inferior without your consent.' - Eleanor Roosevelt


`Hunger is the best sauce in the world.' - Miguel Cervantes


`All things tremble before danger, all rear death. When a man considers this, he does not kill or cause to kill.' - Buddha


`It's better that your enemies think you are crazy than reasonable and rational.' - A Mafia boss


`If you have men who exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.' - Jesus Christ


`Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule.' - Frederich Nietzsche


`No man can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.' - Nathaniel Hawthorne


`Writing is an act of love. If not, it is merely paperwork.' - Jean Cocteau


`Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.' - Oscar Wilde


`During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.' - George Orwell


`We should all do what in the long run gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.' - E B White


`I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.' - Oscar Wilde


`A bargain is something you have to find a use for once you have bought it.' - Benjamin Franklin


`We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like.' - Film-maker Jean Cocteau


`Money is a good thing to have. It frees you from doing things you dislike. I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy.' - Groucho Marx


`A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; more's the pity.' - Herman Melville.


`If a man owns land, the land owns him.' - Ralph Waldo Emerson


`We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sister; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers.' - Red Indian leader Chief Sealth


`Nothing can harm a good man, either in life or after death.' - Socrates


`God created woman. And boredom did indeed cease from that moment.' - Frederich Nietzsche


`Of course, truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.' - Mark Twain


`An Englishman in a state of adultery is miserable; even at the supreme moment his conscience torments him.' - Hippolyte Taine


`The treatment with poison medicines, comes from the West.' - Huang Ti, Chinese Emperor 2697 - 2597BC


`Study sickness while you are well.' - Thomas Fuller


`Men do not desire to be rich, only to be richer than other men.' - John Stuart Mill


`We know for certain only when we know little. With knowledge, doubt increases.' - Goethe


`Do not let a man practise to those beneath him that which he dislikes in those above him.' - Confucius


`Never before have we had so little time in which to do so much.' - Franklin D Roosevelt


`I don't know what London's coming to - the higher the building the lower the morals.' - Noel Coward


`I don't want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth, even if it costs them their jobs.' - Samuel Goldwyn


`I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savour) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.' E B White


`Nothing is terrible except fear itself.' - Francis Bacon


`The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.' - Albert Einstein


`My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between, I occupy myself as best I can.' - Cary Grant


`No grand idea was ever born in a conference.' - F Scott Fitzgerald


`A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.' - C G Jung


`Man remains what he has always been; the cruellest of all the animals, and the most elaborately and fiendishly sensual.' - George Bernard Shaw


`It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.' - Oscar Wilde


`The great end of life is not knowledge but action.' - Thomas Huxley


`The main trouble with the world is that someone put the grown-ups in charge.' - Vernon Coleman


`I've had a wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.' - Groucho Marx


`Knaves nowadays look so honest that honest folk are forced to look like knaves so as to be different.' - Oscar Wilde


`Remember, friends, as you pass by, as you are now so once was I. As I am now, so you must be. Prepare yourself to follow me.' - 18th Century epitaph


`I don't want to achieve immortality through my work - I want to achieve it through not dying.' - Woody Allen


`Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character; and it may be confidently asserted he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.' - Arthur Schopenhauer


`The good thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.' - Abraham Lincoln


`Whatever you do to the least of my brethren you do to me.' - God


`The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.' - William Blake


`Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.' - Oscar Wilde


`Man is quite insane. He wouldn't know how to create a maggot, and he creates Gods by the dozen.' - Michel de Montaigne


`Education: that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.' - Ambrose Bierce


`Whenever I'm caught between two evils, I take the one I've never tried.' - Mae West


`The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.' - Linus Pauling


`I sometimes think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.' - Oscar Wilde


`Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.' - Anon


`The Queen is most anxious to enlist every one who can speak or write to join in checking this mad wicked folly of Women's Rights.' - Queen Victoria


`When a wise scholar hears the Tao
He practises it diligently.
When a mediocre scholar hears the Tao
He waves between belief and disbelief.
When a worthless scholar hears the Tao
He laughs boisterously (and foolishly) at its wisdom.'
- Tao Te Jing by Lao Tsu


`To constitute the millionth part of a legislature, by voting for one or two men once in three or five years, however conscientiously this duty may be performed, can exercise but little active influence upon any man's life and character.' - Samuel Smiles


`The mass of men serve the state not as men but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army and the jailers and the constables. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.' - Henry David Thoreau


`We have not abolished slavery, we have nationalised it.' - Herbert Spencer


`The whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory with equality of work and equality of pay.' - V.I. Lenin


`Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.' - d'Alexis de Tocqueville


`We put too much faith in systems and look too little to men.' - Benjamin Disraeli


`The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.' - John Stuart Mill


`Innumerable are these small and pitiable men; but raindrops and weeds have already brought about the destruction of many a proud building.' - Frederich Nietzsche


`The effect of Socialist doctrine on Capitalist society is to produce a third thing, different from either of its two begetters - to wit, the Servile State.' - Hilaire Belloc


`Anything acquired without effort and without cost is generally unappreciated.' - Napoleon Hill


`The socialists believe in two things which are absolutely different and perhaps even contradictory: freedom and organisation.' - Elie Halevy


`Failure in any good cause is ...honourable, whilst success in any bad cause is merely infamous.' - Samuel Smiles


`When a woman behaves like a man, why doesn't she behave like a nice man?' - Dame Edith Evans


`He would be a man must be a non conformist.' - Ralph Waldo Emerson


`Of all writings I love only that which is written with blood. Write with blood: and you will discover that blood is spirit.' - Frederich Nietzsche


`Just look at these superfluous people. They vomit their bile and call it a newspaper.' - Frederich Nietzsche


`We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms of civilisation, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become.' - Benito Mussolini


`When trouble is sensed well in advance it can easily be remedied; if you wait for it to show itself any medicine will be too late because the disease will have become incurable. As the doctors say of a wasting disease, to start with it is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; after a time, unless it has been diagnosed and treated at the outset, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure.' - Niccolo Machiavelli


`It is every day becoming more clearly understood that the function of Government is negative and restrictive, rather than positive and active.' - Samuel Smiles


`Literary coteries have no vital contact with the life of the community, and such contact is necessary if men's feelings are to have the seriousness and depth within which both tragedy and true happiness proceed.' - Bertrand Russell


`The value of legislation as an agent in human advancement has usually been much over-estimated.' - Samuel Smiles


`Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterwards. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have the right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right. Law never made men a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.' - Henry David Thoreau


`No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident or the drunken sober.' - Samuel Smiles


`The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion for equality made vain the hope for freedom.' - Lord Acton


`All the complaints which are made of the world are unjust; I never knew a man of merit neglected; it was generally by his own fault that he failed of success.' - Dr Samuel Johnson


`Life is a checkerboard and the player opposite you is time...you are playing against a partner who will not tolerate indecision.' - Napoleon Hill


`In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.' - Leon Trotsky


`Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.' - Benjamin Franklin


`What people fear when they engage in the struggle is not that they will fail to get their breakfast next morning, but that they will fail to outshine their neighbours.' - Bertrand Russell


`Talk about modest merit being neglected, is too often a cant by which indolent and irresolute men seek to lay their want of success at the door of the public.' - Washington Irving


`The best part of every man's education, is that which he gives to himself.' - Sir Walter Scott


`One needs only to know the letters of the alphabet in order to learn everything that one wishes.' - Edmund Stone


`I learned grammar when I was a private soldier on the pay of sixpence a day. The edge of my berth, or that of my guard bed was my seat to study in; my knapsack was my bookcase; a bit of board lying on my lap was my writing table; and the task did not demand anything like a year of my life. I had no money to purchase candle or oil; in winter time it was rarely that I could get any evening light but that of the fire, and only my turn even of that. And if I, under such circumstances, and without parent or friend to advise or encourage me, accomplished this undertaking, what excuse can there be for any youth, however poor, however pressed with business, or however circumstanced as to room or other conveniences? ' - William Cobbett


`Not only is love a source of delight, but its absence is a source of pain. Love is to be valued because it enhances all the best pleasures, such as music, and sunrise in mountains, and the sea under the full moon. A man who has never enjoyed beautiful things in the company of a woman whom he loved has not experienced to the full the magic power of which such things are capable.' - Bertrand Russell


`The longest journey starts with the first step.' - Confucius


`Between him who in battle has conquered thousands upon thousands of men, and him who has conquered himself, it is the latter who is the greater conqueror.' - Buddha


`Opportunity has hair in front, behind she is bald; if you seize her by the forelock you may hold her, but, if suffered to escape, not Jupiter himself can catch her again.' - Latin proverb


`Certain things are indispensable to the happiness of most men, but these are simple things: food and shelter, health, love, successful work and the respect of one's own herd.' - Bertrand Russell


`Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life.' - Bertolt Brecht


`In the dissipation of worldly treasure the frugality of the future may balance the extravagance of the past; but who can say: `I will take minutes from tomorrow to compensate for those I have lost today.' - Jackson of Exeter


`Every moment lost gives an opportunity for misfortune.' - Napoleon Bonaparte


`Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone for ever.' - Samuel Smiles


`Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself.' - Edward Gibbon


`Any fool can make a rule - and every fool will mind it.' - Henry David Thoreau


`I put my sole trust in my own strength of body and soul.' - old Norse saying


`However men choose to regard me, they cannot change my essential being, and for all their power and all their secret plots I shall continue, whatever they do, to be what I am in spite of them.' - Jean-Jacques Rousseau


`My rule is, deliberately to consider, before I commence, whether the thing be practicable. If it be not practicable, I do not attempt it. If it be practicable, I can accomplish it if I give sufficient pains to it; and having begun, I never stop till the thing is done. To this rule I owe all my success.' - John Hunter


`One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.' - Bertrand Russell


`Have we not all eternity to rest in.' - Arnauld


`The longer I live the more I am certain that the great difference between men, between the feeble and the powerful, the great and the insignificant, is energy - invincible determination - a purpose once fixed, and then death or victory. That quality will do anything that can be done in this world; and no talents, no circumstances, no opportunities will make a two legged creature a Man without it.' - Fowell Buxton


`Purpose is the touchstone of any accomplishment, large or small. A strong man can be defeated by a child who has a purpose.' - Napoleon Hill


`The truest wisdom is a resolute determination.' - Napoleon Bonaparte


`Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.' - Bertrand Russell


`I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self contained,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
- Walt Whitman


`Is there one whom difficulties dishearten - who bends to the storm? He will do little. Is there one who will conquer? That kind of man never fails.' - John Hunter


`Bureaucracy is a great machine operated by pigmies.' - Honore de Balzac


`I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don't deserve that, either. So I'll take it.' - Jack Benny


`When I started writing seriously, I made the major discovery of my life - that I am right and everybody else is wrong if they disagree with me. What a great thing to learn. Don't listen to anyone else, and always go your own way.' - Ray Bradbury


`It doesn't matter where you live - where you live is really in your head.' - Henry David Thoreau


`The subconscious mind will translate into its physical equivalent a thought impulse of a negative or destructive nature just as readily as it will act upon thought impulses of a positive or constructive nature. This accounts for the strange phenomenon which so many millions of people experience, referred to as `misfortune' or `bad luck'.' - Napoleon Hill


`There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.' - William Shakespeare


`It is because millions only ever concern themselves with the trivia - the best way to make a padded pelmet and three wys to eradicate moss from your lawn - that our world has become the obscenely barbaric place it is.' - Vernon Coleman


`I believe in the power of desire backed by faith because I have seen this power lift men from lowly beginnings to places of power and wealth; I have seen it rob the grave of its victims; I have seen it serve as the medium by which men staged a comeback after having been defeated in a hundred different ways...' - Napoleon Hill


`I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly.' - Henry David Thoreau


`This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet.' - Henry David Thoreau


`There is no greater calamity than to under estimate the strength of your enemy. For to under estimate the strength of your enemy is to lose the war. Therefore, when opposing troops meet in battle, victory belongs to the strategic planner.' - Tao Te Jing by Lao Tsu


`He who knows when he has got enough is rich.' - Tao Te Jing by Lao Tsu


`It is necessary to plan and to organise in order to get rich. Staying poor is very easy; poverty needs no plan.' - Napoleon Hill


`The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.' - Hilaire Belloc


`Poverty takes away so many means of doing good, and produces so much inability to resist evil, both natural and moral, that it is by all virtuous means to be avoided...Let it be your first care, then, not to be in any man's debt. Resolve not to be poor, whatever you have spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable and others extremely difficult.' - Dr Samuel Johnson


`Not for to hide it in a hedge,
Nor for a train attendant,
But for the glorious privilege
Of being independent.'
- Robert Burns


`The battle of life is, in most cases, fought up hill...if there were no difficulties there would be no success; if there were nothing to struggle for, there would be nothing to be achieved...All experience of life, indeed, serves to prove that the impediments thrown in the way of human advancement may for the most part be overcome by steady good conduct, honest zeal, activity, perseverance, and above all by a determined resolution to surmount difficulties, and stand up manfully against misfortune.' - Samuel Smiles


`Power may be defined as organised and intelligently directed knowledge.' - Napoleon Hill


`No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and un-patched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.' - Henry David Thoreau


`If I had to live my life again, I'd make all the same mistakes - only sooner.' - Tallulah Bankhead


`Fill your house with gold and jade,
And it can no longer be fully guarded.
If you set store by your riches and honour,
You will only reap a crop of calamities.'
- Tao Te Jing by Lao Tsu


`Work is my chief pleasure.' - Mozart


`The barriers are not erected which can say to aspiring talents and industry: `Thus far and no farther'. - Ludwig van Beethoven `The family of emotions `gratitude, friendship, respect etc' on which a stable society is based lose their meaning when it comes to the nomads, whose social conditions have created a different spirit. It is absurd to expect gratitude from the Moors, as it would be absurd to condemn them for being ungrateful. The sentiment of gratitude in its European sense follows from a set of social conditions in which contacts and needs are permanent; a given nomadic tribe will have a very different need tomorrow from the one it has today.'
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery


`I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.' - William Henley


`Half the failures in life arise from pulling in one's horse while he is leaping.' - Samuel Smiles


`Either I will find a way or make one.' - Family crest with a pickaxe on it


`Have few friends but those thou hast, grapple them to thy heart with hoops of steel.' - William Shakespeare


`A non observant man goes through the forest and sees no firewood.' - Russian proverb


`The world is disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.' - Ronald Firbank


`The ruler must not display his weapons if he is to survive long.' - Tao Te Jing by Lao Tsu


`Patience is the finest and worthiest part of fortitude, and the rarest too...Patience lies at the root of all pleasures, as well as of all power. Hope herself ceases to be happiness when Impatience companions her.' - John Ruskin


`Nothing in the world is softer and weaker than water. But, for attacking the hard and strong, there is nothing like water.' - Tao Te Jing by Lao Tsu


`If you want a friend, you must also be willing to wage war for him: and to wage war, you must be capable of being an enemy.' - Frederich Nietzsche


`A difficulty is a thing to be overcome.' - Lord Lyndhurst


`Misfortune is next door to stupidity.' - Russian proverb


`He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.' - Nietzsche


`The truth is that our race survived ignorance; it is our scientific genius that will do us in.' - Stephen Vizinczey


`Elderly relatives who enjoy poor health are like nymphomaniacs in short, tight skirts. Both are difficult to satisfy and impossible to get into and out of motor cars. - Vernon Coleman


`The average man is more interested in a woman who is interested in him than he is in a woman with beautiful legs.' - Marlene Dietrich


`The primary sex organ in both men and women is the brain.' - Sydney Biddle Barrows


`I find more and more that it is well to be on the side of the minority, since it is always the more intelligent.' - Goethe


`Follow the course opposite to custom and you will almost always do well.' - Jean-Jacques Rousseau


`You don't have to realise your dreams to benefit from them. But you do have to keep them alive.' - Vernon Coleman


`Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.' - George Bernard Shaw


`To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.' - Oliver Wendell Holmes


`Whoever said money can't buy happiness didn't know where to shop.' - Gittel Hudnick


`Impossible is a word only to be found in the dictionary of fools.' - Napoleon Bonaparte


Selection copyright Vernon Coleman 2003



The Things They Say - Banned

The following quotes were removed from my column in The People newspaper for April, May and June 2003


`Live today as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn today as if you were to live forever.' - Gandhi


`In summoning even the wisest of physicians to our aid, it is probably that he is relying upon a scientific `truth', the error of which will become obvious in just a few years' time.' - Marcel Proust, writer


`Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.' - Goethe


`A man's got to do his own growing no matter how tall his father is.' - From the film `Gun Fury'


`There have never been so many wars as in the kingdom of Christ.' - Montesquieu


`Governments change; the lies stay the same.' - James Bond (secret agent)


`The relationship of a journalist to a politician should be the same as that of a dog to a lamp-post.' - H.L.Mencken, writer


`Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.' - Henry David Thoreau, writer and philosopher


`An eye for an eye will eventually make us all blind.' - Gandhi


`People should not attempt to change history. It is the job of history to change people.' - John Le Carre


`Money is a good thing to have. It frees from you doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy.' - Groucho Marx


`If I contracted cancer, I would never go to a conventional cancer treatment centre. Cancer victims who live far from such centres have a chance.' - French cancer specialist


`We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.' - T.S.Eliot


Selection copyright Vernon Coleman 2003


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