Quotes to inspire and reflect

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

Reason should direct and appetite obey.

When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are, infinite.

I hope that one or two immortal lyrics will come out of all this tumbling around.

I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries

Religions change; beer and wine remain.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike.

Amusement is the happiness of those who cannot think.

I do not say a proverb is amiss when aptly and reasonably applied, but to be forever discharging them, right or wrong, hit or miss, renders conversation insipid and vulgar.

I hate quotations.

Reviewing has one advantage over suicide: in suicide you take it out on yourself; in reviewing you take it out on other people.

Nobody ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have while trying to write one.

Man is what he believes.

Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

Marriage is a triumph of habit over hate.

If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse - as a man shoots himself

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you

Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?

He without benefit of scruples His fun and money soon quadruples.

In order to preserve your self-respect, it is sometimes necessary to lie and cheat.

A man must marry only a very pretty woman in case he should ever want some other man to take her off his hands.

Nothing is more intolerable than a wealthy woman.

California, the department store state.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist

God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

Man is certainly stark mad. He cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.

A pious man is one who would be an athiest if the king were.

The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.

We were married by a reformed rabbi in Long Island. A very reformed rabbi. A Nazi.

He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office

Be modest! It is the kind of pride least likely to offend.

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

As if there were safety in stupidity alone.

What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

The cynics are right nine times out of ten

I hate mankind, for I think of myself as one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

A dramatic critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.

Lawers, I suppose, were children once.

Do thou restrain the haughty spirit in thy breast, for better far is gentle courtesy.

The days just prior to marriage are like a snappy introduction to a tedious book.

A man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life.

When a book and a head collide and there is a hollow sound, is it always from the book?

My father and he had one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.

America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.

Americans are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.