Aphorisms and Quotations in English
Loading, please wait...| Author |  |  | Subject | | | Text | | | 822 aphorisms |
| N° | Author | Text | Subject | Subject |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4424 | Mark Twain | Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. | Ambition | Ambition |
| 3614 | David Brent | If at first you don't succeed, remove all evidence you ever tried. | Success | Success |
| 4179 | Emile Cioran | "Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place." This old proverb makes all judgment impossible, for we judge someone only because, in fact, we cannot put ourselves in his place. | Judging | Judging |
| 2338 | Louise Beal | Love thy neighbor as thyself, but choose your neighborhood. | Society | Society |
| 4522 | Naguib Mahfouz | You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. | Wisdom | Wisdom |
| 3266 | Oswald Avery | Whenever you fall, pick something up. | Failure | Failure |
| 3986 | William Faulkner | The past isn't dead. It isn't even past. | Past | Past |
| 3161 | Mark Twain | Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. | Deception | Deception |
| 2367 | Galileo Galilei | In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. | Science | Science |
| 2559 | Samuel Butler | Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them. | Man & Animals | Man & Animals |
| 4399 | Johann W. von Goethe | You don't have to travel around the world to understand that the sky is blue everywhere. | Knowledge | Knowledge |
| 4530 | Bertrand Russell | La cosa seccante di questo mondo è che gli imbecilli sono sicuri di sé, mentre le persone intelligenti sono piene di dubbi. | Stupidity | Stupidity |
| 2259 | Henry Ford | Don't find fault, find a remedy. | Fault | Fault |
| 3735 | Jane Austen | One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other. | Pleasure | Pleasure |
| 3280 | Anonymous | A liberal is someone too poor to be a capitalist, and too rich to be a communist. | Politics | Politics |
| 4083 | Plato | The worst of all deceptions is self-deception. | Deception | Deception |
| 3904 | Aldous Huxley | Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs. | Mankind | Mankind |
| 3197 | Confucius | Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall. | Glory | Glory |
| 4212 | Antonio Porchia | When your suffering is a little greater than my suffering I feel that I am a little cruel. | Justice | Justice |
| 3232 | Arthur Conan Doyle | Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius. | Mediocrity | Mediocrity |
| 3351 | Molière | It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable. | Responsibility | Responsibility |
| 3901 | Socrates | The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. | Children | Children |
| 4614 | Anonymous | Lord save me from your followers | God | God |
| 2796 | Anonymous | Half of the people in the world are below average. | Statistics | Statistics |
| 2874 | Dante Alighieri | The secret of getting things done is to act! | Work | Work |
| 3402 | C. Garbett | Any fool can criticize - and many of them do. | Criticism | Criticism |
| 2474 | Bertrand Russell | The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. | Religion | Religion |
| 2951 | George Santayana | Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. | History | History |
| 4542 | Ella Fitzgerald | It isn't where you came from; it's where you're going that counts. | Miscellaneous | Miscellaneous |
| 3601 | Benjamin Franklin | Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. | Drinking | Drinking |
| 4501 | Zsa Zsa Gabor | A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished. | Marriage | Marriage |
| 4431 | Henry David Thoreau | For every ten people who are clipping at the branches of evil, you're lucky to find one who's hacking at the roots. | Evil | Evil |
| 4338 | Gabriel Laub | Der Aphorismus hat vor jeder anderen Literaturgattung den Vorteil, dass man ihn nicht weglegt, bevor man ihn zu Ende gelesen hat. | Aphorisms | Aphorisms |
| 2584 | Henry David Thoreau | It is not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about? | Work | Work |
| 3026 | William Shakespeare | We know what we are, but know not what we may be. | Future | Future |
| 2241 | Erich Fromm | Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age? | Education | Education |
| 3859 | Laurence J. Peter | An employee within an organization will advance to his or her level of incompetence and remain there. | Hierarchy | Hierarchy |
| 4496 | Robert Kennedy | Non troveremo mai un fine per la nazione né una nostra personale soddisfazione nel mero perseguimento del benessere economico, nell’ammassare senza fine beni terreni. Non possiamo misurare lo spirito nazionale sulla base dell’indice Dow-Jones, né i successi del paese sulla base del prodotto nazionale lordo (PIL). Il PIL comprende anche l’inquinamento dell’aria e la pubblicità delle sigarette, e le ambulanze per sgombrare le nostre autostrade dalle carneficine dei fine-settimana. Il PIL mette nel conto le serrature speciali per le nostre porte di casa, e le prigioni per coloro che cercano di forzarle. Comprende programmi televisivi che valorizzano la violenza per vendere prodotti violenti ai nostri bambini. Cresce con la produzione di napalm, missili e testate nucleari, comprende anche la ricerca per migliorare la disseminazione della peste bubbonica, si accresce con gli equipaggiamenti che la polizia usa per sedare le rivolte, e non fa che aumentare quando sulle loro cen | Money | Money |
| 2699 | Gaius Plinius | An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit. | Possession | Possession |
| 4255 | Giacomo Leopardi | As a man's desires grow cooler, he becomes better equipped to deal with other men or to succeed in society. Nature, with her usual benevolence, has ordained that men shall not learn to live until they lose the motives for living. | Ageing | Ageing |
| 2900 | Alan Kay | The best way to predict the future is to invent it. | Future | Future |
| 4281 | Anonymous | Good example is half a sermon. | Talking | Talking |
| 4206 | Antonio Porchia | A child shows his toy, a man hides his. | Playing | Playing |
| 4325 | Peter Drucker | Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility. | Responsibility | Responsibility |
| 2707 | Ambrose Bierce | War is God's way of teaching Americans geography. | War | War |
| 4105 | Oscar Wilde | People say sometimes that Beauty is only superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. | Beauty | Beauty |
| 4608 | Aristotele | The secret to humor is surprise. | Humour | Humour |
| 3982 | Victor Borge | Laughter is the shortest distance between two people. | Laughing | Laughing |
| 4217 | Olivia Dresher | All my writing is a reflection of my core, bits of my core. All those bits...and as they fall onto the page, the puzzle automatically gets put together -- the way a plant gets put together just by being itself and growing day-by-day. Journals are the organic side of my essence, unfolding... | Writing | Writing |
| 2603 | Winston Churchill | The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. | Democracy | Democracy |