... before I could come to any conclusion it occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility. What did it matter what anyone knew or ignored? What did it matter who was manager? One gets sometimes s

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when the're reading to themselves.

If you are of the opinion that the contemplation of suicide is sufficient evidence of a poetic nature, do not forget that actions speak louder than words.

If a jury in a criminal trial stays out for more than twenty-four hours, it is certain to vote acquittal, save in those instances where it votes guilty.

The sooner you make your first 5000 mistakes, the sooner you will be able to correct them.

The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.

If you aren't rich you should always look useful.

It's not a sin not to be Irish, but it is a great shame.

The first requisite for immortality is death.

"Well, it's garish, ugly, and derelicts have used it for a toilet. The rides are dilapidated to the point of being lethal, and could easily maim or kill innocent little children." "Oh, so you don't like it?" "Don't like it? I'm CRAZY for it."

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne we

If you sell diamonds, you cannot expect to have many customers. But a diamond is a diamond even if there are no customers.

Events are not affected, they develop.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

What makes you think graduate school is supposed to be satisfying?

Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

Conscience doth make cowards of us all.

Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth.

It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

The chief enemy of creativity is "good" sense

The tree in which the sap is stagnant remains fruitless.

Yet creeds mean very little, Coth answered the dark god, still speaking almost gently. The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Patch griefs with proverbs.

Go away, I'm all right.

The optimum committee has no members.

If I were a grave-digger or even a hangman, there are some people I could work for with a great deal of enjoyment.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm in my right mind. Then it passes off and I'm as intelligent as ever.

Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote.

It is ridiculous to call this an industry. This is not. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I'll kill 'em, and I'm going to kill 'em before they kill me. You're talking about the American way of survival of the fittest.

"A Mormon is a man that has the bad taste and the religion to do what a good many other people are restrained from doing by conscientious scruples and the police."

One learns to itch where one can scratch.

Facts are the enemy of truth.

However, on religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or wha

We are what we pretend to be.

Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.

For myself, I can only say that I am astonished and somewhat terrified at the results of this evening's experiments. Astonished at the wonderful power you have developed, and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on

Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.

You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.

Whatever it is, I fear Greeks even when they bring gifts.

There is no ox so dumb as the orthodox.

All of us should treasure his Oriental wisdom and his preaching of a Zen-like detachment, as exemplified by his constant reminder to clerks, tellers, or others who grew excited by his presence in their banks: "Just lie down on the floor and keep calm

"Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company."

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so fo

The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve.

Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice. In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it "Christmas" and went to

If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem.

Even the best of friends cannot attend each other's funeral.

If reporters don't know that truth is plural, they ought to be lawyers.

"I don't mind going nowhere as long as it's an interesting path."

Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.

My daddy's brains was so scrambled he thought he was Jesus. They put him in a nut house for 5 years and when he got out, he didn't think he was Jesus, he thought he was *God*! ... Which made me Jesus.

Immature artists imitate, mature artists steal.

It is either through the influence of narcotic potions, of which all primitive peoples and races speak in hymns, or through the powerful approach of spring, penetrating with joy all of nature, that those Dionysian stirrings arise, which in their int

I think we are in Rats' Alley where the dead men lost their bones.

"You've got to have a gimmick if your band sucks."

If there really was a Jewish conspiracy to run the world, my rabbi would have let me in on it by now. I contribute enough to the shule.

Delay not, Caesar. Read it instantly.

Even the clearest and most perfect circumstantial evidence is likely to be at fault, after all, and therefore ought to be received with great caution. Take the case of any pencil, sharpened by any woman; if you have witnesses, you will find she did

Life is the living you do, Death is the living you don't do.

The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience, while the error of age is to believe experience is a substitute for intelligence.

It is better to live rich than to die rich.

Something's rotten in the state of Denmark.

Eeny, Meeny, Jelly Beanie, the spirits are about to speak!

The trouble is, there is an endless supply of White Men, but there has always been a limited number of Human Beings.

In Marseilles they make half the toilet soap we consume in America, but the Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they have obtained from books of travel.

Smartness runs in my family. When I went to school I was so smart my teacher was in my class for five years.

Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know that he is.

The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.

Why am I so soft in the middle when the rest of my life is so hard?

The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul is: WHAT DOES A WOMAN WANT?

Darth Vader! Only you would be so bold!

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around with royal-blue chickens.

You cannot see the wood for the trees.

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths good theatre.

Authors (and perhaps columnists) eventually rise to the top of whatever depths they were once able to plumb.

Man is the measure of all things.

No is no negative in a woman's mouth.

One man's brain plus one other will produce one half as many ideas as one man would have produced alone. These two plus two more will produce half again as many ideas. These four plus four more begin to represent a creative meeting, and the ratio c

I can't understand why a person will take a year or two to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

Campus sidewalks never exist as the straightest line between two points.

Dianetics is a milestone for man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his invention of the wheel and the arch.

And tomorrow will be like today, only more so.

A is for Apple.

Anyone who has had a bull by the tail knows five or six more things than someone who hasn't.

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.

It's always darkest just before the lights go out.

Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.

Drop the vase and it will become a Ming of the past.

The two most beautiful words in the English language are "Cheque Enclosed."

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.

The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

Turn the other cheek.

A rolling stone gathers no moss.

God helps them that help themselves.

No problem is so formidable that you can't just walk away from it.

I played lead guitar in a band called The Federal Duck, which is the kind of name that was popular in the '60s as a result of controlled substances being in widespread use. Back then, there were no restrictions, in terms of talent, on who could make

Littering is dumb.

If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars.

A sinking ship gathers no moss.

If you want divine justice, die.

Having nothing, nothing can he lose.

Progress might have been all right once, but it's gone on too long.

No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

The seven deadly sins ... Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven milestones from man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the milestones are lifted.

The last vestiges of the old Republic have been swept away.

You first have to decide whether to use the short or the long form. The short form is what the Internal Revenue Service calls "simplified", which means it is designed for people who need the help of a Sears tax-preparation expert to distinguish betwe

The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo! now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished.

A continuing flow of paper is sufficient to continue the flow of paper.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

One, with God, is always a majority, but many a martyr has been burned at the stake while the votes were being counted.

There is always something new out of Africa.

Recently deceased blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan "comes to" after his death. He sees Jimi Hendrix sitting next to him, tuning his guitar. "Holy cow," he thinks to himself, "this guy is my idol." Over at the microphone, about to sing, are Jim Mo

Zounds! I was never so bethumped with words since I first called my brother's father dad.

She cried, and the judge wiped her tears with my checkbook.

[Americans] are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.

Lord, what fools these mortals be!

In India, "cold weather" is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

The best case: Get salary from America, build a house in England, live with a Japanese wife, and eat Chinese food. Pretty good case: Get salary from England, build a house in America, live with a Chinese wife, and eat Japanese food. The wo

It is a wise father that knows his own child.

Everything is possible. Pass the word.

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so.

No small art is it to sleep: it is necessary for that purpose to keep awake all day.

The Least Successful Collector Betsy Baker played a central role in the history of collecting. She was employed as a servant in the house of John Warburton (1682-1759) who had amassed a fine collection of 58 first edition plays, including most of t

"Consequences, Schmonsequences, as long as I'm rich."

A casual stroll through a lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

Of all men's miseries, the bitterest is this: to know so much and have control over nothing.