100 fantastic quotes and aphorisms | The World of English

100 fantastic quotes and aphorisms by great and famous authors and writers edited for the World of English blog by Carl William Brown, a sincere literary avenger. (Find out more about him on Amazon).

We are all born mad. Some have the fortune to remain so.
Carl William Brown Via Ionesco

The primary quality of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new boundaries.
Arthur Koestler

The meaning is a stone in the mouth of the signifier.
Jacques Lacan

My aphorisms are certainly a richer form of literature than the Bible itself, but you’ll see how long it will take before they’re translated into 1,400 languages.
Carl William Brown

The only intelligent tactical response to life’s horror is to laugh defiantly at it.
Søren Kierkegaard

The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture on the verge of descending into barbarism.
Hannah Arendt

The oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed.
Simone de Beauvoir

The origin of philosophy is due to the intellectual wonder and emotional disgust one feels when one pauses to observe the horrible imbecility of humanity.
Carl William Brown

The valor that struggles is better than the weakness that endures.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge but the refusal to acquire it.
Karl R. Popper

Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
Margaret Atwood

It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple.
Rabindranath Tagore

Aristotle said that choice, not chance, determines your destiny; if it weren’t that most of the times choices are directed mainly by chance.
Carl William Brown

And it is the thought of death that ultimately helps us to go on living.
Umberto Saba

Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk.
Seneca

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.
Rabindranath Tagore

Per gli amanti dei ponti. Il più grande ponte che esiste in Italia è quello tra la stupidità degli elettori e l’imbecillità degli eletti.
Carl William Brown

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.
Bertrand Russell

Few men think; yet all have opinions.
George Berkeley

What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.
Isaac Newton

If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.
Anton Chekhov

My brain tries to cheat time and itself through memory, which moves between the spaces of places from my past.
Carl William Brown

When the market deviates from your analysis, you have to cut losses without fuss or emotions.
Alexander Elder

A writer is always unwelcome at the family table. Because we notice things. And then we use them.
Elizabeth Hardwick

Most of us are mediocre. Even the most talented are mediocre because their talent is partial, limited, narrow. A gift doesn’t lift you out of mediocrity.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washed it away: Again I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
Edmund Spenser

Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Robert Heinlein

To old people, all young people are idiots except their own grandchildren. They are geniuses.
Carl William Brown

Genius requires solitude; that is the secret of inventiveness.
Nikola Tesla

None proclaim their innocence so loudly as the guilty.
Samuel Johnson

Before Man goes to the stars he should learn how to live on Earth.
Clifford D. Simak

We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side one which we preach but do not practise, and another which we practise but seldom preach.
Bertrand Russell

A wise man among the ignorant is as a beautiful girl in the company of blind men.
Saadi

A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
Ezra Pound

The real philosopher and artist must necessarily be stateless, citizen of the world, considering history as a bunch of shitty facts and power as the emblem of human imbecility.
Carl William Brown

The best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful.
Fyodor Dostoevsky

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
Edgar Allan Poe

The more distinctly a man knows, the more intelligent he is, the more pain he has; the man who is gifted with genius suffers most of all.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.
Georg Friedrich Hegel

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.
Oscar Wilde

The ruling class fears education because it makes obedience impossible.
Karl Marx

All morons hate it when you call them a moron.
Jerome D Salinger

Every child is in a way a genius; and every genius is in a way a child.
Arthur Schopenhauer

A good aphorism should not only highlight obvious things, even if expressed in an original way, but also evoke solutions, though unpleasant for human stupidity.
Carl William Brown

Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot.
Richard P. Feynman

The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer somebody else up.
Mark Twain

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people.
Carl Jung

See, people with power understand exactly one thing – violence.
Noam Chomsky

I was educated once – it took me years to get over it.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by his pen name Mark Twain

First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.
Epictetus

It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.
Franz Kafka

Patience is not the ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting.
Joyce Meyer

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke

The rich rob the poor and the poor rob one another.
Sojourner Truth

It is dangerous to be right in matters about which the established authorities are wrong.
Voltaire

The truth has no defense against a fool determined to believe a lie.
Mark Twain

The more distinctly a man knows, the more intelligent he is, the more pain he has; the man who is gifted with genius suffers most of all.
Arthur Schopenhauer

The real philosopher and artist must necessarily be stateless, citizen of the world, considering history as a bunch of shitty facts and power as the emblem of human imbecility.
Carl William Brown

He who thinks does not believe, he who believes does not think.
Arthur Schopenhauer

A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool because he has to say something.
Plato

De gustibus non disputandum est utque omnia res in principia parva sunt.

The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention.
John Burroughs

I’m only responsible for what I say, not for what you understand.
John Wayne

A fool is known by his speech, and a wise man by his silence.
Pythagoras

To be alone is the fate of all great minds.
Arthur Shopenhauer

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.
Voltaire

The world is so full of simpletons and madmen, that one need not seek them in a madhouse.
Johann W Goethe

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.
Socrates

To live without philosophizing is in truth the same as keeping the eyes closed without attempting to open them.
Rene Descartes

The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.
Ray Bradbury

Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel.
Jack London

A saint is a person who behaves decently in a shockingly indecent society.
Kurt Vonnegut

Some physicists say that time doesn’t exist, and I can agree with that; but then remove it from your banal formulas, which in any case won’t save you from the universal stupid entropy.
Carl William Brown

I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.
Johannes Kepler

Suffering comes from our view of things, not from the things themselves.
Marcus Aurelius

I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.
Johannes Kepler

When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it cannot be cured.
Anton Chekhov

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.
Franz Kafka

Life is a catastrophe of consciousness.
Emil Cioran

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
Marshall McLuhan

La violenza è l’ultimo rifugio degli incapaci.
Isaac Asimov

The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order, for meaning.
Arthur Miller

A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein

If you are going through hell, keep going.
Winston Churchill

The aim of war is not to kill the enemy, but to destroy his will to fight.
General Sir Frank Kitson

A true warrior fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
G.K. Chesterton

The essence of the Navy, its very soul, is that it is always ready for war.
Admiral Sir John Fisher

The enemy is not beaten until he thinks he is.
Field Marshal Sir Claude John Eyre Auchinleck

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished, unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
Voltaire

People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
Aldous Huxley

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
Ernest Hemingway

The greater the outward show, the greater the inward poverty.
J. Krishnamurti

Nothing can be more hopeless than a nation of disillusioned bigots, who have lost the capacity to be rational, and have no longer any outlet but despair for their irrationality.
Bertrand Russell

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.
Mark Twain

There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don’t come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity.
Isaac Asimov

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
Aldous Huxley

I don’t hate people. I just feel better when they aren’t around.
Charles Bukowski

There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Virginia Woolf

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
Edgar Allan Poe

Behind every sentence lies a storm trying to make sense of itself. Writing isn’t just words on paper, it’s chaos learning to breathe.

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.
Arthur Schopenhauer

We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
Immanuel Kant

I know nothing more stupid and indeed vulgar than wanting to be right.
Paul Valéry

You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.
Richard Branson

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