The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is a constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read.

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

Let sleeping dogs lie.

There seems no plan because it is all plan.

Several years ago, some smart businessmen had an idea: Why not build a big store where a do-it-yourselfer could get everything he needed at reasonable prices? Then they decided, nah, the hell with that, let's build a home center. And before long ho

I'm glad I was not born before tea.

Usually, when a lot of men get together, it's called a war.

Likewise, the national appetizer, brine-cured herring with raw onions, wins few friends, Germans excepted.

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.

But you shall not escape my iambics.

"I am not sure what this is, but an `F' would only dignify it."

Death is life's way of telling you you've been fired.

Men's skin is different from women's skin. It is usually bigger, and it has more snakes tattooed on it. Also, if you examine a woman's skin very closely, inch by inch, starting at her shapely ankles, then gently tracing the slender curve of her cal

Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

Producers seem to be so prejudiced against actors who've had no training. And there's no reason for it. So what if I didn't attend the Royal Academy for twelve years? I'm still a professional trying to be the best actress I can. Why doesn't anyone

If you wish to be happy for one hour, get drunk. If you wish to be happy for three days, get married. If you wish to be happy for a month, kill your pig and eat it. If you wish to be happy forever, learn to fish.

Well, the handwriting is on the floor.

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.

He thought of Musashi, the Sword Saint, standing in his garden more than three hundred years ago. "What is the 'Body of a rock'?" he was asked. In answer, Musashi summoned a pupil of his and bid him kill himself by slashing his abdomen with a knife.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

The idea there was that consumers would bring their broken electronic devices, such as television sets and VCR's, to the destruction centers, where trained personnel would whack them (the devices) with sledgehammers. With their devices thus permanent

In breeding cattle you need one bull for every twenty-five cows, unless the cows are known sluts.

Man proposes, God disposes.

I knew her before she was a virgin.

They're giving bank robbing a bad name.

It's very glamorous to raise millions of dollars, until it's time for the venture capitalist to suck your eyeballs out.

"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"

Fear is the greatest salesman.

There is always something new out of Africa.

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

If it were thought that anything I wrote was influenced by Robert Frost, I would take that particular work of mine, shred it, and flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes. A more sententious, holding- forth old bore who expected every

We were young and our happiness dazzled us with its strength. But there was also a terrible betrayal that lay within me like a Merle Haggard song at a French restaurant. [...] I could not tell the girl about the woman of the tollway, of her milk w

We all live in a state of ambitious poverty.

... 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

There is much Obi-Wan did not tell you.

Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for even the greatest fool may ask more the the wisest man can answer.

The notes blatted skyward as they rose over the Canada geese, feathered rumps mooning the day, webbed appendages frantically pedaling unseen bicycles in their search for sustenance, driven by cruel Nature's maxim, 'Ya wanna eat, ya gotta work,' and a

A rolling stone gathers no moss.

"I understand this is your first dead client," Sabian was saying. The absurdity of the statement made me want to laugh but they don't call me Deadpan Allie and lie.

Certainly the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you; if you don't bet, you can't win.

We Americans, we're a simple people... but piss us off, and we'll bomb your cities.

In Hollywood, if you don't have happiness, you send out for it.

No house should ever be on any hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it.

The only alliance I would make with the Women's Liberation Movement is in bed.

My father was a creole, his father a Negro, and his father a monkey; my family, it seems, begins where yours left off.

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

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

We should have a Vollyballocracy. We elect a six-pack of presidents. Each one serves until they screw up, at which point they rotate.

There is no doubt that my lawyer is honest. For example, when he filed his income tax return last year, he declared half of his salary as 'unearned income.'

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Conscience doth make cowards of us all.

The man who has never been flogged has never been taught.

(1) Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood. (2) If your stomach antagonizes you, pacify it with cool thoughts. (3) Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move. (4) Go very lightly on the vices, such as carrying on in society, as

We have lingered long enough on the shores of the Cosmic Ocean.

Mate, this parrot wouldn't VOOM if you put four million volts through it!

How do you explain school to a higher intelligence?

I was in this prematurely air conditioned supermarket and there were all these aisles and there were these bathing caps you could buy that had these kind of Fourth of July plumes on them that were red and yellow and blue and I wasn't tempted to buy

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that balances are correct.

Rome was not built in one day.

They can't stop us... we're on a mission from God!

An honest tale speeds best being plainly told.

The whole world is a scab. The point is to pick it constructively.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

... but as records of courts and justice are admissible, it can easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women were convicted of witch

I heard a definition of an intellectual, that I thought was very interesting: a man who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows.

She is not refined. She is not unrefined. She keeps a parrot.

[He] took me into his library and showed me his books, of which he had a complete set.

A morgue is a morgue is a morgue. They can paint the walls with aggressively cheerful primary colors and splashy bold graphics, but it's still a holding place for the dead until they can be parted out to organ banks. Not that I would have cared nor

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

If God lived on Earth, people would knock out all His windows.

You get what you pay for.

Look, we trade every day out there with hustlers, deal-makers, shysters, con-men. That's the way businesses get started. That's the way this country was built.

The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.

It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.

Patience is the best remedy for every trouble.

One hundred women are not worth a single testicle.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.

Imagine what we can imagine!

I just need enough to tide me over until I need more.

Rembrandt is not to be compared in the painting of character with our extraordinarily gifted English artist, Mr. Rippingille.

If a man has a strong faith he can indulge in the luxury of skepticism.

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

Work Hard. Rock Hard. Eat Hard. Sleep Hard. Grow Big. Wear Glasses If You Need 'Em.

There must be more to life than having everything.

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

Wisdom is knowing what to do with what you know.

All hope abandon, ye who enter here!

When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.

The first requisite for immortality is death.

Gauls! We have nothing to fear; except perhaps that the sky may fall on our heads tomorrow. But as we all know, tomorrow never comes!!

Competitive fury is not always anger. It is the true missionary's courage and zeal in facing the possibility that one's best may not be enough.

I am not afraid of tomorrow, for I have seen yesterday and I love today.

The future is a race between education and catastrophe.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments.

When eating an elephant take one bite at a time.

"You little (such a one who, while wearing a copper nose ring, stands in a footbath atop Mount Raruaruaha during a heavy thunderstorm and shouts that Alohura, Goddess of Lightning, has the facial features of a diseased uloruaha root)!"

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.

Since everything in life is but an experience perfect in being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may well burst out in laughter.

We may not be able to persuade Hindus that Jesus and not Vishnu should govern their spiritual horizon, nor Moslems that Lord Buddha is at the center of their spiritual universe, nor Hebrews that Mohammed is a major prohpet, nor Christians that Shinto

If you hype something and it succeeds, you're a genius

When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

"I only touch base with reality on an as-needed basis!"

You can never do just one thing.

The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that it is scraping the top of the barrel.

Goals... Plans... they're fantasies, they're part of a dream world...

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

To know Edina is to reject it.

A fake fortuneteller can be tolerated. But an authentic soothsayer should be shot on sight. Cassandra did not get half the kicking around she deserved.

There's such a thing as too much point on a pencil.

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

Why are you doing this to me? Because knowledge is torture, and there must be awareness before there is change.

According to the Rand McNally Places-Rated Almanac, the best place to live in America is the city of Pittsburgh. The city of New York came in twenty-fifth. Here in New York we really don't care too much. Because we know that we could beat up their

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall.

"I'd like to start a new religion. One that doesn't use a dead young man as its logo."

There are many of us in this old world of ours who hold that things break about even for all of us. I have observed, for example, that we all get about the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summer and the poor get it in the winter.

Fast ship? You mean you've never heard of the Millennium Falcon?

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.

Never have so many understood so little about so much.

During almost fifteen centuries the legal establishment of Christianity has been upon trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity,; in both, superstition, bigo

Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.