Quotes to inspire and reflect

DON’T TELL ME THE MOON IS SHINING; SHOW ME THE GLINT OF LIGHT ON BROKEN GLASS.

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

A SEQUEL IS AN ADMISSION THAT YOU’VE BEEN REDUCED TO IMITATING YOURSELF.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems; it’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

A GOOD NOVEL TELLS US THE TRUTH ABOUT ITS HERO; BUT A BAD NOVEL TELLS US THE TRUTH ABOUT ITS AUTHOR.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle.

Happiness is seeing the muscular lifeguard all the girls were admiring leave the beach hand in hand with another muscular lifeguard.

What's the use of happiness? It can't buy you money.

Happiness is finding two olives in your martini when you're hungry.

Happiness: an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing-glove.

A pessimist is one who has been intimately acquainted with an optimist.

Duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself.

He was the sort of man who would have tried to cheer Napoleon up by talking about the Winter Sports at Moscow.

Optimist: a proponent of the doctrine that black is white.

Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.

Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.

I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like 'What I'm Going to be if I Grow up'.

There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper.

No woman marries for money: they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.

The quickest way to make a million? Marry it.

Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much.

The general was essentially a man of peace, except in his domestic life.

Generals detest generals on their own side far more than they dislike the enemy.

We are here on earth to do good for others; what the others are here for I have no idea.

I'm sorry, my good fellow, but all my money is tied up in currency.

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. Other dangerous months are July, january, September, April, November, May, March, june, December, August and February.

Now that he was rich he was not thought ignorant any more, but simply eccentric.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

I was once so poor I didn't know where my next husband was coming from.

I worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.

I wouldn't trust a bank that would lend money to such a poor risk as me.

The hardest thing in the world to understand is income tax.

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

When they fire a rocket at Cape Canaveral, I feel as if I own it.

(a) How much did you make last year? (b) How much have you got left? (c) Send (b).

I've got all the money I'll ever need if I die by four o'clock.

Saving is a fine thing - especially when your parents have done it for you.

I handed one of my creditors an IOU and thought thank heavens that's settled.

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.