Jason's Quotes Page

This page contains a list of quotes that I have been collecting over the years because they've caught my attention. There are even a couple of my own witticisms here.


My mother loved children -- she would have given anything if I had been one.
    --Groucho Marx

Best thing you can teach your children
Next to never drawing breath
Is choking on it.
    --Archibald Macleish

The mirror sees the man as beautiful, the mirror loves the man; another mirror sees the man as frightful and hates him; and it is always the same being who produces the impressions.
    --Marquis D. A. F. de Sade

Fear... can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you're afraid you don't commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back.
    --Philip K. Dick

We have nothing to fear and nothing to celebrate.
    --Professor James Johnson

It takes a long time to understand nothing.
    --Edward Dahlberg

As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.
    --Socrates

Nothing can come out of the artist that is not in the man.
    --H. L. Mencken

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

Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.
    --Arthur Balfour

A book's a book although there's nothing in't.
    --Lord Byron

One truly understands only what one can create.
    --Giambattista Vico

Never regret anything you have done with a sincere affection; nothing is lost that is born of the heart.
    --Basil Rathbone

Try to understand everything, but believe nothing.
    --Unknown

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
    --Beckett

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.
    --Baba Ram Dass

Beware of anything that wraps itself in a flag.
    --Dana Blankenhorn

It seems like the less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag.
    --Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard

Il y a une superficielle joliesse de la femme que le goût provincial considère à tort comme la beauté. Et puis, il y a la vraie beauté érotique de la femme. ...en effet, le charme érotique se manifeste plutôt par l'originalité que par la régularité; plutôt par l'expressivité que par la mesure; plutôt par l'anormalité que par la banale joliesse.
    --Milan Kundera

Ceci du moins est sûr : tout être de qualité exceptionnelle est toujours un anormal, tant par son quotient d'intelligence que par son quotient de sensibilité.
    --Jeannine Etiemble

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
    --Raoul Duke

Welcome to the Nineties: Welcome to Jail
    --Hunter S. Thompson

You can't teach people to be lazy - either they have it, or they don't.
    --Dagwood Bumstead

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
     --Milan Kundera

Enjoy every sandwich.
    --Warren Zevon

I prefer the most unjust peace to the most righteous war.
    --Cicero

Even peace may be purchased at too high a price.
    --Poor Richard

Come and die; it will be great fun.
    --Rupert Brooke

Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.
    --Milan Kundera

Self-sacrifice is for the desperate and the dumb.
    --Steve Gilliard

What was tomorrow is today and will be yesterday.
    --Jason J.A. Stephenson

"Curiouser and curiouser," said Alice.
    --Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a.k.a Lewis Carroll)

Everyone is from somewhere, even if you've never been there.
    --Ian Anderson

Intellectual growth is contingent upon mastering the social means of thought, that is, language.
    --Lev Vygotsky

Kites rise highest against the wind -- not with it.
    --Winston Churchill

Only dead fish swim with the current.
    --Unknown

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
    --Albert Einstein

You cannot build a reputation on what you intend to do.
    --Liz Smith

He could fit more words inside the smallest idea as any man I've ever seen.
    --Abraham Lincoln

A person gets from a symbol the meaning he puts into it.
    --The United States Supreme Court

Mais, quelle est la rencontre qui ne se fonde pas sur l'erreur? ...le premier regard de chacun s'adresse à sa propre imagination et à sa propre mémoire, plutôt qu'à la réalité de l'autre.
    --Alicia Dujovne-Ortiz

Reality is that which can be narrated only in the form of a story.
    --Karl Jaspers

Reality, in sum, is human; it is always that which we make signify, never a mere given.
    --Lionel Gossman on Roland Barthes

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
    --Philip K. Dick

Reality is for those who lack imagination.
    --Jason J.A. Stephenson

There are no guarantees in life, the Tao, or programming.
    --Bruce Eckel

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.
    --Elbert Hubbard

There's no way to make life perfectly safe; you can't get out of it alive.
    --Mary Shafer (NASA Dryden Flight Research Center)

Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world.
    --Mary Shafer (NASA Dryden Flight Research Center)

Software is but the metaphor our age offers for a struggle found throughout the human epochs, that of the spirit to be freed from the tyranny of the immediate and the necessary.
    --Andy Oram

Writing software is more fun than working.
    --Unknown

I'm not a computer programmer, but I play one at work.
    --Found on Slashdot

I have often felt that programming is an art form, whose real value can only be appreciated by another versed in the same arcane art; there are lovely gems and brilliant coups hidden from human view and admiration, sometimes forever, by the very nature of the process. You can learn a lot about an individual just by reading through his code, even in hexadecimal.
    --Ed Nather

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
    --Mitch Ratcliffe

Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable. Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable.
    --Gilb

Anyone who says that the solution is to educate the users hasn't ever met an actual user.
    --Bruce Schneier

Does a good farmer neglect a crop he has planted?
Does a good teacher overlook even the most humble student?
Does a good father allow a single child to starve?
Does a good programmer refuse to maintain his code?
    --Geoffrey James

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.
    --John Lennon

There are absolute things in the world but you must look deeply for them. The things that first present themselves to your notice are for the most part relative.
    --Albert Einstein

We say that error is appearance. This is false. On the contrary, appearance is always true if we confine ourselves to it. Appearance is being.
     --Jean-Paul Sartre

To think contrary to one's era is heroism. But to speak against it is madness.
     --Eugene Ionesco

Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do.
     --Bertrand Russell

One must put a high price on his conjectures to burn a man alive.
    --Michel de Montaigne

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
     --Seneca

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?
     --Epicurus

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
     --Richard Dawkins

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
     --Stephen F. Roberts

In Nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.
     --R.G. Ingersoll

Morality is the herd instinct of the individual.
    --Friedrich Nietzche

The feeble is devoured by his own.
    --T.S. Eliot

Man is a useless passion condemned to exercise a worthless freedom.
    --Jean-Paul Sartre

Only the fool, fixed in his folly, may think he can turn the wheel on which he turns.
    --T.S. Eliot

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
    --Henry Kissinger

History is nothing but a collection of fables and useless trifles, cluttered up with a mass of unnecessary figures and proper names.
    --Leo Tolstoy

Nations are cold monsters.
    --Charles de Gaulle

L'amour, tel qu'il existe dans la société, n'est que l'échange de deux fantaisies et le contact de deux épidermes.
    --Chamfort

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
    --Goethe

Women, deceived by men, want to marry them; it is a kind of revenge as good as any other.
    --Philippe De Remi

<screevo> I'm stranded at the gas station of love, and I have to use the self service pump...
    --Found on bash.org, an IRC quotes page.

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
    --Carl Gustav Jung

The universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact, which, for the sake of a quiet life, most people tend to ignore. Most would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings, in fact, do.
    --Douglas Adams

Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.
    --Christopher Morley

I respect faith, but doubt is what gives you an education.
    --Wilson Mizner

It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
    --W. K. Clifford

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
    --G. B. Shaw

Our appreciation is least in our own backyard.
    --Joel Brown

I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind.
    --Khalil Gibran

Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.
    --Norman Douglas.

Plutôt crever de faim que de ne pas devenir écrivain.
    --Henry Miller

Ecrire c'est un travail d'organisation autant que d'inspiration, ce à quoi vous n'avez pas assez réfléchi.
    --exemple dans un livre de grammaire

All of us learn to write in second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.
    --Bobby Knight

La vraie vie est absente.
    --Arthur Rimbaud

Cogito ergo sum.
    --René Descartes

Je chie, donc je suis.
    --Jason J.A. Stephenson

Be a philosopher; but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.
    --David Hume

Thank Heaven for little girls.
    --Maurice Chevalier

And some of the other sizes, too.
    --Sam and Dave

Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.
    --Alan McKay

Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret.
    --Benjamin D'Israeli

Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.
    --Anita Brookner

The old forget. The young don't know.
    --Japanese proverb

The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.
    --Saki

My youth may wear and waste, but it shall never rust.
    --William Congreve

Young fellows will be young fellows.
    --Isaac Bickerstaff

Joy is founded on something too profound to be understood and communicated. To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts.
    --Henry Miller

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
    --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself
(I am large, I contain multitudes).
    --Walt Whitman