Here is a list of quotes I like. I add one every so often. New quotes appear at the top of the page. Last quote added 10/8/2021.

Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

You’re going to change your mind a thousand times. That’s a good thing. Only imbeciles never change their minds.

— Anna Rascouët-Paz

We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.

— Frank Tibolt

To express the inexpressible — this is the challenge of art. But to express the expressible is a considerable challenge, too.

— Joyce Carol Oates

All phone calls are obscene.

— Karen Elizabeth Gordon

This is very exasperating.

— Donald Duck

Life is what happens when electromagnetic impulses move through protein.

— Ethan Greer

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

— Sam Levenson

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.

— Ernest Benn

Of the Seven Dwarfs, the only one who shaved was Dopey. That should tell us something about the wisdom of shaving.

— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.

— Dave Barry

She had the Midas touch. Everything she touched turned into a muffler.

— Lisa Smerling

Certainly the pleasures of youth are great, but they are nothing to the pleasures of adultery.

— from Herrings Go About the Sea in Shawls, a collection of student errors

It is not true that life is one damn thing after another — it is one damn thing over and over.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

If you’re already in a hole, it’s no use to continue digging.

— Roy W. Walters

Death is nature’s way of saying, “Howdy.”

— Unknown

There’s nothing wrong with teenagers that reasoning with them won’t aggravate.

— Unknown

All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.

— H. P. Lovecraft, “The Silver Key”

I was unavoidably detained by my lack of punctuality.

— Ethan Greer

You don’t have to change much to change everything.

— Mark Rosewater

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

— Groucho Marx

Don’t be humble. You’re not that great.

— Golda Meir

When God gives you lemons, find a new god.

— Picnicface

The Good Lord never gives you more than you can handle. Unless you die of something.

— Guindon cartoon caption

People who like to dive through plate-glass windows shouldn’t live in stone houses.

— Allen Hetzer

Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?

— Francois de La Rochefoucauld

You can look at practically any part of anything man-made around you and think, “Some engineer was frustrated while designing this.” It’s a little human connection.

— Randall Munroe

We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

— Robert Wilensky

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant.

— Fra Giovanni Giocondo

Lazy writing will always stand on the shoulders of clichéd giants.

— Josh Wilson

There is no food so good that it cannot be improved by forming it into a loaf.

— Ethan Greer

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

— George Bernard Shaw

Profanity is the inevitable linguistic crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker.

— Bruce Sherrod

To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.

— Marquis De Sade

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

— Denis Diderot

If you meet a clown in the forest it means you’re gonna die.

— Unknown

Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.

— Frank Zappa

The only thing more annoying than a proselytizing Christian is a proselytizing atheist.

— Ethan Greer

My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.

— Erica Jong

More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

— Woody Allen

I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.

— John Cage

This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.

— Horace Walpole

People say life’s too short to be unhappy. But if you’re unhappy, everything seems to last a really, really long time.

— Ethan Greer

Instant gratification takes too long.

— Carrie Fisher

Hell is other people.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.

— Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night

“College is the best thing that can ever happen to you,” my father used to say, and he was right, for it was there that I discovered drugs, drinking, and smoking.

— David Sedaris

Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.

— George Jean Nathan

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

— Oscar Wilde

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?

— Stephen Wright

I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.

— Vita Sackville-West

Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.

— Ambrose Bierce

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

— Oscar Wilde

No sane man will dance.

— Cicero

The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards.

— Alexander Jablokov

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.

— William Carlos Williams

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.

— Woody Allen

Self-denial is indulgence of a propensity to forego.

— Ambrose Bierce

It is well, when judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality.

— Arnold Bennett

Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.

— James Ernest

Indeed, one of the ultimate advantages of education is simply coming to an end of it.

— B.F. Skinner

It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

— Voltaire

Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.

— John Galsworthy

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

— Albert Camus

The most common of all antagonisms arises from a man’s taking a seat beside you on the train, a seat to which he is completely entitled.

— Robert Benchley

The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle, complimentarty way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

There is no such thing as “social gambling.” Either you’re there to cut the other bloke’s heart out and eat it — or you’re a sucker. If you don’t like this choice — don’t gamble.

— Robert Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founder’s than any other agency in the world.

— Richard le Gallienne

Nobody ought to wear a Greek fisherman’s cap who doesn’t meet two qualifications:
1. He is Greek.
2. He is a fisherman.

— Roy Blount, Jr.

Never turn your back on reality. It surrounds you.

— Stanislaw J. Lec

I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.

— George Bernard Shaw

Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever.

— Horace Mann

If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.

— Philip Sheridan

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delerium.

— Cyril Connolly

Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

— Ambrose Bierce

Golf is a good walk spoiled.

— Mark Twain

I am free of all prejudices. I hate everyone equally.

— W.C. Fields

Desire unacted is corruption.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?

— Jean Kerr

Brevity is the soul of lingerie.

— Dorothy Parker

If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrement.

— Florynce Kennedy

The young always have the same problem — how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

— Quentin Crisp

Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man.
Minor Premise: One man can dig a post hole in sixty seconds.
Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a post hole in one second.

— Ambrose Bierce

The bitterness of poor quality far outlasts the sweetness of a bargain.

— Unknown

If tomato paste is made out of tomatoes, what is toothpaste made out of?

— Ethan Greer

Reality is not subject to the limits of human knowledge.

— Troy Gustavel

Meskimen’s Law: There’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it over.

— Unknown