Oliver Wendell Holmes

"It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Rita Mae Brown

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you." - Rita Mae Brown (American Writer)

G. K. Chesterton

"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered." - G. K. Chesterton

Ben Hecht

"Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock." - Ben Hecht

P. J. O'Rourke

"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." - P. J. O'Rourke

George Orwell

"Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it." - George Orwell

Scott Adams

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." - Scott Adams

Elie Wiesel

"There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them." - Elie Wiesel

Robert H. Schuller

"Tough times never last, but tough people do." - Robert H. Schuller

Thomas Wolfe

"All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken." - Thomas Wolfe (American)

Albert Einstein

"Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience." - Albert Einstein

John Muir

"Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally." - John Muir

Fernando Pessoa

"To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost." - Fernando Pessoa (Portuguese Poet)

Paul Beatty

"If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door." - Paul Beatty

Alan Key

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay

Victor Hugo

"I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses." - Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

John le Carre

"Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen." - John le Carre, "The Chancellor Who Agreed To Play Spy", The New York Times, May 8, 1974

Ernest Hemingway

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut." - Ernest Hemingway (American Writer)

Bill Hicks

"It's just a ride and we can change it any time we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money, a choice, right now, between fear and love." - Bill Hicks, Revelations (1993)

Expanded and in video form, after the Jump.

Horace Walpole

"Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel." - Horace Walpole

Albert Einstein

"The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life." - Albert Einstein

TS Eliot, poetry & theatre

Excerpt of TS Eliot's poem "Choruses" from The Rock, a pageant play:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

- TS Eliot (American Poet), "Choruses"

Complete poem, after the Jump:

Max Beerbohm

"You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men." - Max Beerbohm

Norman Mailer

"There is no greater importance in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you." - Norman Mailer

Albert Einstein

"The physicists say that I am a mathematician, and the mathematicians say that I am a physicist. I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know me." - Albert Einstein