What are your favorite quotes?

I borrowed this one from another author:

"Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an
amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it
becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled
to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public!"

- Winston Churchill

From my mom...a wonderful, funny and dear person:

"Enjoy your life. Do what you wish. I have yet to see a hearse pullin' a U-haul."

I thought I responded to your post that your mom sounds terrific. Guess favorite quotes didn't interest anyone else. Thanks for responding.

DK,
I don't I have a favorite, and therefore didn't respond. There are many quotes attributed to famous people that are meaningful. Sometimes a quote fits a circumstance. They can provide insight and often comfort. I think the idea of thread is good. I like the one you posted by Churchill.

everybody's business is nobody's business,
Dikens,

I tried google to find my real favourite which is written in middle English but failed. It’s the prologue to ‘the cloud of unknowing’ when the (anonymous) author states in strident terms who the book is not for.

So here’s another: (from memory fingers crossed it is correct)

“Georgina was engrossed with a book she was tossing it in the air and catching it”.

GB Shaw from the unsocial socialist

You just wanted me to find it for you, didn't you? Here it is:

"Fleshly janglers, open praisers and blamers of themselves or of any
other, tellers of trifles, ronners and tattlers of tales, and all manner
of pinchers, cared I never that they saw this book. For mine intent was
never to write such thing unto them, and therefore I would that they
meddle not therewith; neither they, nor any of these curious, lettered,
or unlearned men."
The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. by
Evelyn Underhill, [1922], at sacred-texts.com

George Bernard Shaw quote, could it be this one?

"... he saw Agatha coming towards him, occupied with a book which she was
tossing up to the ceiling and catching."

The Free Library > Literature >George Bernard Shaw > An Unsocial Socialist> CHAPTER VII

The cloud of unknowing quote is as good as i remember? We have a few tellers of trifles and tattlers of tales in this manor.

I think my recollection of the Shaw quote is better that the original but I must try to work out who Georgina is! Memory plays funny tricks.

Thanks again for the research.

Mike, that opening to The Cloud of Unknowing reminds me of another beginning:



PERSONS attempting to find a
motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to
find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a
plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR,
Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance.
from the front matter for Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

I think the prologue to the cloud is more akin to the verbal beating of critics that Lenin specialised in. One of the putdowns he coined is petite bourgeois dilettante (I like that one). Stalin was like Twain but he did not stop with threats to shot his critics he really did shot them and starve them and worse

"Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve."
Napolen Hill

2/26/2010


" Hollywood is a place where they'll
pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss
and fifty cents for your soul."

MM 1950's


Cheers..Joe

Thank you; thank you; thank you. The quotes are truly unique and fascinating! I like each for its unique perspective.

Here one more immortal quote: " I will have no a man in my boat who is not afraid of a whale"
This must every US citizen know.

Good ones Don. The message is clear.