Sunday 1 January 2006

Previous Thoughts

Into the face of the young man ... there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.
P. G. Wodehouse

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.
A. A. Milne

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

Guess, if you can, and choose, if you dare.
Pierre Corneille

By putting forward the hands of the clock you shall not advance the hour.
Victor Hugo

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom
Marcel Proust

Australia is properly speaking an island, but it is so much larger than every other island on the face of the globe, that it is classed as a continent in order to convey to the mind a just idea of its magnitude.

Charles Sturt

Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while.
Kin Hubbard

The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?

J. B. Priestley

In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it
Emile Zola

Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.

Nicolas de Chamfort

What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming.
Edgar Degas

Autumn is a season followed immediately by looking forward to spring.
Doug Larson

He who lives without folly isn't so wise as he thinks.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.
Winnie the Pooh, A. A. Milne

To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.
Abraham Maslow

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
Albert Einstein

Don't spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.
Coco Chanel

Carry on any enterprise as if all future success depended on it.
Cardinal Richelieu

I hate women because they always know where things are.

Voltaire

The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.
Voltaire

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.

Marcel Proust

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.
Anatole France

It is better to understand little than to misunderstand a lot.
Anatole France

Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.

Blaise Pascal

A witty saying proves nothing.
Voltaire

Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.
Edgar Degas

As one grows older, one becomes wiser and more foolish.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
Gustave Flaubert

All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.
Alexandre Dumas

As long as you know men are like children, you know everything!
Coco Chanel

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
Douglas Adams

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
Jean-Paul Sartre

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

Albert Camus

All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.
Blaise Pascal

To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.
Voltaire

If you wait for the perfect moment when all is safe and assured, it may never arrive. Mountains will not be climbed, races won, or lasting happiness achieved.
Maurice Chevalier

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Douglas Adams

No clock is more regular than the belly.
Francois Rabelais

There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.
Marie Antoinette

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
Diane Ackerman

Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has
Rene Descartes

Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.
Bertolt Brecht

Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember it didn't work for the rabbit.
R. E. Shay

We don't stop playing because we grow old; We grow old because we stop playing
George Bernard Shaw

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
Aldous Huxley

Anything invented before your fifteenth birthday is the order of nature. That's how it should be. Anything invented between your 15th and 35th birthday is new and exciting, and you might get a career there. Anything invented after that day, however, is against nature and should be prohibited.
Douglas Adams

If you wish to make an apple pie truly from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
Carl Sagan

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.
Lewis Carroll

If it squirms, it's biology; if it stinks, it's chemistry; if it doesn't work, it's physics and if you can't understand it, it's mathematics.
Magnus Pyke

The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime, makes the ridiculous; and one step above the ridiculous, makes the sublime again.
Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.
Leonard Bernstein

Un tas de pierres cesse d'être un tas de pierres dès qu'un seul homme le contemple avec en lui l'image d'une cathédrale.

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.
Helen Keller

Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?
Winnie the Pooh

Life has taught me that there are occasions when you should, and occasions that you shouldn't. Life has not yet taught me to distinguish between the two types of occasion.
Douglas Adams