Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A person who learns to juggle six balls will be more skilled than the person who never tries to juggle more than three.
Be able to sneeze without sounding ridiculous. That means neither stifling yourself or spraying your immediate vicinity.
I?d rather be rejected than used because they both amount to the same thing in the end, but being used takes a lot longer.
The length of your education is less important than its breadth, and the length of your life is less important than its depth.
At first, I only laughed at myself. Then I noticed that life itself is amusing. I've been in a generally good mood ever since.
What is the essence of America? Finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom 'to' and freedom 'from.'
Skill is successfully walking a tightrope between the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Intelligence is not trying.
A 45-year old looks a lot like a 25-year old who's been out all night. And feels just as good about having survived the experience.
Be able to meet any deadline, even if your work is done less well than it would be if you had all the time you would have preferred.
Teens think listening to music helps them concentrate. It doesn't. It relieves them of the boredom that concentration on homework induces.
[Adulthood:] It's when you stop doing the stuff you have to make excuses for and when you stop making excuses for the stuff you have to do.
Although spoken English doesn't obey the rules of written language, a person who doesn't know the rules thoroughly is at a great disadvantage.
I believe that love--not imitation--is the sincerest form of flattery. Your imitator thinks that you can be duplicated; your lover knows you can't.
Know the difference between principles based on right or wrong vs. principles based on personal gain, and consider the basis of your own principles.
Be in the habit of experimenting with your clothing so that you don't get stuck for life with a self-image developed over the course of high school.
I suspect that some apparently homosexual people are really heterosexuals who deeply phobic about the opposite sex or have other emotional problems.
Just because you're unemployed doesn't mean you're not doing anything useful. You are, for example, at least keeping your mother-in-law's wit sharp.
No one would choose to be jerked randomly off task again and again until you have half a dozen things you're trying to get done, all at the same time.
Many people feel they must multi-task because everybody else is multitasking, but this is partly because they are all interrupting each other so much.
The chess player who develops the ability to play two dozen boards at a time will benefit from learning to compress his or her analysis into less time.
What is the essence of America? The essence of America is finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom "to" and freedom "from."
The lower our self-esteem, the more we're attracted to our opposite, and the higher our self-esteem, the more we are attracted to another like ourselves.
...there are days when I feel I can do anything and days when I feel I can do nothing. But fortunately for those around me, neither sort occurs very often.
One cannot inherit a talent for the violin - there are no violins in nature. Instead, one must be motivated, able to benefit from practice, and persevering.
[When asked if the voice is an instrument:] Yes, of course. Some are violins, some are fountain pens and some are stethoscopes. And others are just washboards.
If your head tells you one thing, and your heart tells you another, before you do anything, you should first decide whether you have a better head or a better heart.
Everybody loves an accent. It you've been unlucky in love, consider pulling up stakes and moving to another country. Then you'll be the one with a neat foreign accent.
You're who you think you are, even if you never admit it to yourself or to anyone else. You may be in the worst position to judge, but you're in the best position to know.
I think change is possible, but only for individuals who were never truly gay in the first place and who have a strong personal motivation to recover their heterosexuality.
When you're in a good mood, bring up the past. When you're in a bad mood, stick to the present. And when you're not feeling emotional at all, it's time to talk about the future.
The difference between talking on your cell phone while driving and speaking with a passenger is huge. The person on the other end of the cell phone is chattering away, oblivious.
Working in an office with an array of electronic devices is like trying to get something done at home with half a dozen small children around. The calls for attention are constant.
Email, instant messaging, and cell phones give us fabulous communication ability, but because we live and work in our own little worlds, that communication is totally disorganized.
I believe a 'talented' person is one who has learned how to effectively cultivate and polish any of the many desirable capabilities with which most of us are born but few of us nurture.
Common sense comes from experience, and kids need to fail as well as succeed in order to learn it. It's difficult to develop common sense when you spend a lot of time in your room where nothing much happens.
How can we live in freedom and maintain that we are entitled to *anything* that we can't get without the labor of others? Remember, if we are entitled to the labor of others, that makes slaves of those others.
I love having ten times as much stuff to do as I can possibly find time to do. That way, I can pick the one-tenth that I want to do most. But if I only have enough to just occupy all my time, I'm stuck doing all of whatever stuff it happens to be.
It is a lot easier to prove that you don't love someone than it is to prove that you do, but one of the best 'proofs' I know is the desire to devote time to the person with no expectation of any sort of compensation, including gratitude, in return.
Stop asking for directions so much. Assuming that you're in a safe environment, pay attention and figure things out for yourself. Have the nerve to take a wrong turn now and then. You'll develop better working instincts and have more self-esteem too.
Loving behavior contributes to the group at the expense of the individual. Competition contributes to the survival of the individual at the expense of the group. In the garden of life, some people are more like flowers, and other people are more like weeds.
Geometry is beautifully logical, and it teaches you how to think and prove that things are so, step by step by step. Proofs are excellent lessons in reasoning. Without logic and reasoning, you are dependent on jumping to conclusions or - worse - having empty opinions.
The magnitude of an action may change not only the strength of its impact, but the direction. If you became a dentist, for example, you would certainly be an asset to our society. But what if everyone became a dentist? Who would bake the bread? Who would build the houses?
Almost all of the finer things in life are free or nearly free. You don't have to pay for the sky at night or snow in the morning or a kiss on the nose when you're sick. Forgetting that may put you at the mercy of those who seek to profit by convincing you to want whatever it is they have to sell.
I believe that one becomes stronger emotionally by taking life less personally. If your employer criticizes your report, don't take it personally. Instead, find out what's needed and fix it. If your girlfriend laughs at your tie, don't take it personally. Find another tie or find another girlfriend.
I believe Picasso's success is just one small part of the broader modern phenomenon of artists themselves rejecting serious art- perhaps partly because serious art takes so much time and energy and talent to produce-in favor of what I call `impulse art': art work that is quick and easy, at least by comparison.
The difference between America and England is that the English think 100 miles is a long distance and the Americans think 100 years is a long time. The difference between an autobiography and an unauthorized biography is like the difference between an account of your life written by your mother and one written by your mother-in-law.
Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, the others, goats. You pick a door, say #1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say #3, which has a goat. He says to you: 'Do you want to pick door #2?' Is it to your advantage to switch your choice of doors?
Yes. The original argument is defective. Substitute the word 'male' for 'gay,' and you'll see the flaw: 'Male people cannot be normal. If everyone were male starting tomorrow, the human race would die out, so being male cannot be nature's intended way.' Or you could substitute the word 'female.' In either case, the argument makes no sense: Being male or female is perfectly normal.
I think one of the problems [with raising intelligent children] is compulsory schooling...and that children are sitting there and they are taught and told what to believe. They are passive from the very beginning, and one must be very, very aggressive intellectually to have a high IQ [...] the child is taught. Right from the beginning, it's a passive process. He or she sits there, and they simply try to believe everything they're told.