“A” Quotations

(see also SHORTHAND)

• Abbreviations are the wheels of language, the wings of Mercury. And though we might be dragged along without them, it would be with much difficulty, very heavily and tediously. John Horne Tooke, in Epea Pteroenta, or The Diversions of Purley (1786)

QUOTE NOTE: The Greek title—taken directly from Homer—means “winged words.” Horne Tooke (1736–1812), an English cleric and philologist, used the term to refer to the power of abbreviations to speed communication.

(see also BODY and DIGESTION and EATING and HEALTH and HUNGER and STOMACH)

• The abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a god. Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

(includes CAPABILITY; see also ACHIEVEMENT and COMPETENCE and EXCELLENCE and GENIUS and INGENUITY and INTELLIGENCE and SKILL and TALENT)

• Would that my ability was equal to my inclination. Abigail Adams, in letter to John Quincy Adams (Feb. 16, 1786); quoted in John P. Kaminski, The Quotable Abigail Adams (2009)

• Ability without ambition is like kindling wood without the spark. Author Unknown

• Ability hits the mark where presumption overshoots and diffidence falls short. Author Unknown (but commonly attributed to Cardinal John Henry Newman)

• Native ability without education is like a tree which bears no fruit. Aristippus (5th c. B.C.), quoted in Edward Parsons Day, Day’s Collacon: An Encyclopaedia of Prose Quotations (1884)

QUOTATION CAUTION: The original source for this quotation has never been identified, but it has been popular since it first appeared in Edward Parson Day’s influential 1884 anthology. Aristippus, a student of Socrates, was described by Diogenes Laërtius in his Lives of Eminent Philosophers (3rd c. A.D.) as “the first of the followers of Socrates to charge fees and to send money to his master.” Diogenes presents many quotations from Aristippus, but nothing close to this observation about native ability.

• Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study. Francis Bacon, in Essays 1625)

• Ability, n. The natural equipment to accomplish some small part of the meaner ambitions distinguishing able men from dead ones. In the last analysis, ability is commonly found to consist mainly in a high degree of solemnity. Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

• Men who undertake considerable things, even in a regular way, ought to give us ground to presume ability. Edmund Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

• Abilities wither under criticism, they blossom under encouragement. Dale Carnegie, in How to Win Friends and Influence People (1998 edition)

• Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability. Marcus Tulles Cicero, in Pro Archia Poeta (1st. c. B.C.)

• The wicked are always surprised to find ability in the good. Luc de Clapiers (Marquis de Vauvenargues), in Reflections and Maxims (1746)

This observation has also been translated as: “The wicked are always surprised to discover ability in the just.”

• Duplicity is a mark of second-rate ability. Luc de Clapiers (Marquis de Vauvenargues), in Reflections and Maxims (1746)

• The superior man is distressed by his want of ability. Confucius, in Analects (6th c. B.C.)

• He who has acquired the ability may wait securely the occasion of making it felt and appreciated, and know that it will not loiter. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Worship,” in The Conduct of Life (1860)

• There is only one proof of ability—action. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, in Aphorisms (1880–93)

• When a workman knows the use of his tools, he can make a door as well as a window. George Eliot, in The Mill on the Floss (1860)

• The tragedy is that so many have ambition and so few have ability. William Feather, quoted in a 1984 issue of Forbes magazine (specific issue undetermined)

• Ability will never catch up with the demand for it. Malcolm Forbes, quoted in a 1990 issue of Forbes magazine (specific issue undetermined)

• The ultimate high: A man’s abilities equaling his opinion of ’em. Malcolm Forbes, quoted in The Forbes Book of Business Quotations (1997; Ted Goodman, ed.)

• As we advance in life, we learn the limits of our abilities. James Anthony Froude, “Education,” address at St. Andrew’s University (Fife, Scotland; March 19, 1869); reprinted in Short Studies on Great Subjects, Vol. 4 (1893)

• There are many rare abilities in the world which Fortune never brings to light. Thomas Fuller, M.D., in Gnomologia: Adages and Proverbs (1732)

• Ability and achievement are bona fides no one dares question, no matter how unconventional the man who presents them. J. Paul Getty, in How to Be Rich (1966)

QUOTE NOTE: The American Heritage Dictionary defines bona fides (pronounced BO-nuh FEE-daze) this way: “Information that serves to guarantee a person’s good faith, standing, and reputation; authentic credentials.”

• The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators. Edward Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. VI (1788)

• Great ability develops and reveals itself increasingly with every new assignment. Baltasar Gracián, in The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

• Ability is wont to grow old, and with it fame. Baltasar Gracián, in The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

• There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability. Elbert Hubbard, “The Crying Need,” in A Message to Garcia, and Thirteen Other Things (1901)

• Ability atrophies through lack of exercise. Glenda Jackson, in Ian Woodward, Glenda Jackson: A Study in Fire and Ice (1985)

QUOTE NOTE: Jackson was likely inspired by an Eleanor Roosevelt observation, to be found below.

• A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life. Carl Jung, in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)

• The art of using moderate abilities to advantage wins praise, and often acquires more reputation than actual brilliancy. François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, in Maximes (1665)

• It is a great ability to be able to conceal one’s ability. François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, in Maximes (1665)

• Ability wins us the esteem of the true men; luck that of the people. François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, in Maximes (1665)

• The desire of appearing persons of ability often prevents our being so. François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, in Maximes (1665)

• Is there any delight as great as the child’s discovering ability? Doris Lessing, in Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 (1994)

• Ours is a very practical age, and no matter how skillfully a man play the game of life, there is but one test of his ability—did he win? Charles Lever, the voice of the narrator, in The Martins of Cro’ Martin (1856)

• We rate ability in men by what they finish, not by what they attempt. Norman Macdonald, in Maxims and Moral Reflections (1827)

• Thousands of men of great native ability have been lost to the world because they have not had to wrestle with obstacles, and to struggle under difficulties sufficient to stimulate into activity their dormant powers. Orison Swett Marden, in Architects of Fate (1895)

A few pages later, Marden went on to write: “How often we see a young man develop astounding ability and energy after the death of a parent, or the loss of a fortune, or after some other calamity has knocked the props and crutches from under him.”

• All great events hang by a hair. The man of ability takes advantage of everything and neglects nothing that can give him a chance of success. Napoleon I Napoleon Bonaparte), in letter to his Minister of Foreign Affairs (Sep. 26, 1797)

• He is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight. John Randolph, on Edward Livingston, quoted in W. Cabell Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke (1923)

ERROR ALERT: Many books and web sites mistakenly report that Henry Clay was the target of this legendary metaphorical insult. John F. Kennedy even got it wrong in Profiles in Courage (1957), where he described the line as “the most memorable and malignant sentence in the history of personal abuse.” But Randolph, a Virginia congressman hailed by William Safire as a “master of American political invective,” said it about Edward Livingston, a former New York City mayor who had been elected to Congress. In 1998, Bill Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts, titled his first novel, Mackerel by Moonlight. Appropriately, it was a tale of political corruption.

• If you have great talents, industry will improve them: if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency. Joshua Reynolds, in Reynolds’ Discourses (1887; Helen Zimmern, ed.)

• Ability is not something to be saved, like money, in the hope that you can draw interest on it. The interest comes from the spending. Unused ability, like unused muscles, will atrophy. Eleanor Roosevelt, in Tomorrow is Now (1963)

Mrs. Roosevelt continued: “It is tragic to realize that the majority of human beings, even the so-called educated, call upon only the smallest fraction of their potential capacity. They leave many talents dormant. They fail to develop their mental qualities. They are almost unaware of the degree of energy upon which they might call to build a full and rewarding life.”

• Every man loves what he is good at. Thomas Shadwell, the character Lady Cheat speaking, in The True Widow: A Comedy (1679)

• Out of my lean and low ability/I’ll lend you something. William Shakespeare, the character Viola, speaking to Antonio, in Twelfth-Night (1601-02)

• I believe that happiness consists in having a destiny in keeping with our abilities. Our desires are things of the moment, often harmful even to ourselves; but our abilities are permanent, and their demands never cease. Germaine de Staël, in Reflections on Suicide (1813)

• A man must not deny his manifest abilities, for that is to evade his obligations. Robert Louis Stevenson, the Doctor speaking, in the short story “The Treasure of Franchard,” first pub. in an 1883 issue of Longman’s magazine; reprinted in The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887)

The doctor continued: “I must be up and doing; I must be no skulker in life’s battle.”

• The abilities of man must fall short on one side or other, like too scanty a blanket when you are a-bed. Sir William Temple, in Miscellanea (1705)

Temple added: “If you pull it upon your shoulders, you leave your feet bare; if you thrust it down upon your feet, your shoulders are uncovered.”

• He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles. Henry David Thoreau, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)

• They are able because they think they are able. Virgil, in Aeneid (1st c. B.C.)

• Ability is active power, or power to perform; as opposed to capacity, or power to receive. Noah Webster, in An American Dictionary of the English Language (1845 ed.)

• Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended. Alfred North Whitehead, remark in conversation (Dec. 15, 1939), in Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954; Lucien Price, ed.)

• We all have ability. The difference is how we use it. Stevie Wonder, quoted in James Haskins, The Story of Stevie Wonder (1976)

• Ability is a poor man’s wealth. Matthew Wren, quoted in Day’s Collacon (1884)

QUOTATION CAUTION: An original source for this quotation has never been provided and, as with the Aristippus quotation earlier, its first appearance appears to have been in Day’s Collacon. Wren (1585–1667), an Anglican cleric and scholar, was the uncle of Sir Christopher Wren.

(see also AVERAGE and CONFORMITY and DEVIANT and ECCENTRIC and DIFFERENT and HEALTHY and INDIVIDUALITY & INDIVIDUALISM and NORMAL)

• Abnormal, adj. Not conforming to standard. In matters of thought and conduct, to be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested. Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

(see also ADVENTURE and AIRPLANES & AIR TRAVEL and CRUISES & CRUISING and DISCOVERY and EXPLORATION and HOTELS & MOTELS and JOURNEYS and PILGRIMAGE & PILGRIMS and SIGHTSEEING and TOURISM & TOURISTS and TRIPS and VACATIONS & HOLIDAYS and VOYAGES and WANDERING & WANDERERS and WANDERLUST)

• There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction. One has to go abroad in order to find the home one has lost. Franz Kafka, quoted in Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka (1951; 2nd expanded ed., 1971)

QUOTATION CAUTION: Some Kafka scholars have questioned the authenticity of this quotation. See explanation in the Kafka ACHIEVEMENT entry.

• The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there? Rose Macaulay, the opening line of the essay “Abroad,” in Personal Pleasures (1936)

• Being abroad for the first time brings one’s unexamined assumptions into sharp focus. Deryn P. Verity, quoted in Christina Henry de Tessan, Expat: Women’s True Tales of Life Abroad (2002)

(see also PARTING and SEPARATION)

• Absence is what the poets call death in love. Joseph Addison, in a 1711 issue of The Spectator

• Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives. Author Unknown

QUOTE NOTE: This observation first appeared in H. L. Mencken’s A New Dictionary of Quotations (1942). Many believe it was actually authored by Mencken, who decided to include it in his collection as an anonymous quip.

• The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. Elizabeth Bowen, the voice of the narrator, in The Death of the Heart (1938)

• Absence, that common cure of love. Miguel de Cervantes, in Don Quixote (1605)

• Absence from whom we love is worse than death,/And frustrates hope severer than despair. William Cowper, in “Hope” (1782)

• Can flowers but droop in absence of the sun,/Which waked their sweets? John Dryden, in Aureng-zebe (1675)

• When you part from your friend, you grieve not;/For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain. Kahlil Gibran, in The Prophet (1923)

• He was a man whose absence was usually preferable to his presence. P. D. James, protagonist Adam Dalgliesh’s assessment of Sir Alred, in Death in Holy Orders (2001)

• Friendship, like love, is destroyed by long absence, though it may be increased by short intermissions. Samuel Johnson, in The Idler (Sep. 23, 1758)

• Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated. Alphonse de Lamartine, in Méditations Poétiques (1820)

• Absence lessens the minor passions and increases the great ones, as the wind douses a candle and kindles a fire. François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, in Maximes (1665)

QUOTE NOTE: La Rochefoucauld, the most famous of all French aphorists, usually gets credit for this sentiment, but he may have been inspired by a similar analogy in Histoire amoureuse des Gaules (1665) by Roger de Bussy-Rabutin. In a section on “Maxims of Love,” he wrote: “Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great.”

• When you’re gone, all the colors fade/When you’re gone, no New Year’s Parade/You’re gone, colors seem to fade. Amos Lee, lyric from the song “Colors” (written under his birth name, Ryan Anthony Massaro), on the album Amos Lee (2005)

This is a beautiful lyric from a beautiful song, written by a gifted singer-songwriter. See Lee perform the song live in concert at: “Colors”

• Your absence has gone through me/Like thread through a needle./Everything I do is stitched with its color. W. S. Merwin, “Separation,” in The Moving Target (1963)

• The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity. Ouida (pen name of Maria Louise Ramé), in Wisdom, Wit and Pathos (1884)

• It is only love that has already fallen sick that is killed by absence. Diane de Poitiers, quoted in W. Gordon, A Book of Days (1910)

• Absence and a friendly neighbor washes away love. Proverb (English)

• The absent are like children, helpless to defend themselves. Charles Reade, the character Helen speaking, in Foul Play (1869)

• Judicious absence is a weapon. Charles Reade, the character Mr. Coventry speaking, in Put Yourself in His Place (1870)

• Absence becomes the greatest Presence. May Sarton, “Difficult Scene,” in The Lion and the Rose (1948)

• How like a Winter hath my absence been/From thee. William Shakespeare, the opening words of Sonnet 97, in Sonnets (1609)

QUOTE NOTE: Shakespeare went on to write: “What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!/What old December’s bareness everywhere.” The words are from one who is clearly smitten, and it comes as a bit of a surprise to learn that they were addressed to a man! In fact, the first 126 (out of the total of 154) sonnets are addressed to a beautiful and charming young nobleman—never formally identified—who Shakespeare clearly loved. Norrie Epstein says in The Friendly Shakespeare (1993): “No other straight poet has ever written such ardent poems to a man.” Was Shakespeare gay? Or bisexual (since he was, after all, married and a father)? The question has intrigued Shakespeare fans for centuries. Nowadays, most scholars would probably agree with Epstein, who concluded: “We’ll probably never know Shakespeare’s sexual preferences, though it’s likely he was bisexual.”

• Fond as we are of our loved ones, there comes at times during their absence an unexplained peace. Anne Shaw, in But Such is Life (1931)

• Absence is death, or worse, to them that love. Philip Sidney, in The Arcadia (c. 1581)

• Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the day-time, and falling into at night. Edna St. Vincent Millay, in a 1920 letter to Whitter “Hal” Bynner and Arthur Davidson Ficke; reprinted in Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1952; A. R. Macdougall, ed.)

• Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to do it rightly is an art like any other. Freya Stark, in The Freya Stark Story (1953)

(includes ABSTAINING; see also ASCETICISM and CHASTITY and LUST and MODERATION and PASSION and PLEASURE and SELF-CONTROL and SELF-DENIAL and STOICISM & STOICS and TEMPTATION)

• The way to avoid evil is not by maiming our passions, but by compelling them to yield their vigor to our moral nature. Henry Ward Beecher, in Life Thoughts (1858)

Beecher continued: “Thus they become, as in the ancient fable, the harnessed steeds which bear the chariot of the sun.”

• Abstainer, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

• Better shun the bait than struggle in the snare. John Dryden, in “To My Honoured Kinsman, John Driden” (1699), in Fables (1700)

QUOTE NOTE: John Driden was John Dryden’s first cousin (Dryden the poet often spelled his own name with an “i” as well). While this line from the poem is casually understood to be about resisting temptation, Dryden was in fact complimenting his cousin’s decision to stay single and remain unmarried! Dryden continued: “Thus have you shunned and shun the married state,/Trusting as little as you can to Fate.” Reading the poem, one clearly senses Dryden’s dim view of marriage. A bit earlier in the poem, he describes his cousin as “Lord of yourself, uncumbered [sic] with a wife.” And just prior to the shun the bait phrase, he offers this memorable metaphor about the married state: “Two wrestlers help to pull each other down.”

• Abstaining is favorable both to the head and the pocket. Horace Greeley, quoted in Maturin Murray Ballou, Edge-Tools of Speech (1886)

• Against diseases here the strongest fence/Is the defensive virtue, abstinence. Robert Herrick, in Hesperides (1648)

• Refrain tonight,/And that shall lend a kind of easiness/To the next abstinence; the next more easy. William Shakespeare, the title character speaking to Gertrude, in Hamlet (1601)

• The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires is like cutting off our feet when we want [i.e., lack] shoes. Jonathan Swift, in Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1696–1706 (1711)

(see also EXISTENCE and LUDICROUSNESS and MEANING and [Lack of] MEANING and RIDICULOUSNESS & THE RIDICULOUS)

• Fashion: the search for a new absurdity. Natalie Clifford Barney, “Scatterings” (1910), in A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney (1992; Anna Livia, ed.)

• Absurdity, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one’s own opinion. Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

• The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world. Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

• Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful. Albert Camus, “Three Interviews,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays (1970)

• Life is absurd and cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it. Albert Camus, in a review of Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre; quoted in Avi Sagi, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd (2002)

• Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified. G. K. Chesterton, “Spiritualism,” in All Things Considered (1908)

• There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it. Marcus Tullius Cicero, in De Divinations (5th c. B.C.)

• Absurdity is the one thing love can’t stand; it can overlook anything else— coldness, or weakness, or viciousness—but just be ridiculous and that’s the end of it! Margaret Deland, the voice of the narrator, in Philip and His Wife (1894)

• The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject but man only. Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651)

• Humor helps us get through life with a modicum of grace. It offers one of the few benign ways of coping with the absurdity of it all. Diane Keaton, in Then Again (2011)

• We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. Norman Mailer, “Introducing Our Argument,” in Cannibals and Christians (1966)

• A prophet or an achiever must never mind an occasional absurdity; it is an occupational risk. Oswald Moseley, in My Life (1968)

• We poets are (upon a poet’s word)/Of all mankind the creatures most absurd. Alexander Pope, in Imitations of Horace (1733-38)

• People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization. Agnes Repplier, in In Pursuit of Laughter (1936)

• The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible. Bertrand Russell, in Marriage and Morals (1929)

• I very much like your love of pleasure, and your humour and malice: it is so delightful to live in a world that is full of pictures, and incident divertissements, and amiable absurdities. Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together. George Santayana, in letter to Logan Pearsall Smith (May 24, 1918)

(see also BULLIES & BULLYING and AGGRESSION and CRUELTY and INSENSITIVITY and KINDNESS and MALICE and PAIN and UNKINDNESS and RECOVERY)

• He who has provoked the lash of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it. James Boswell, a 1769 observation, in Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)

• The human race…tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What’s left of kisses? Wounds however leave scars. Bertolt Brecht, in Short Stories, 1921-1946 (1983)

• Abuse is the weapon of the vulgar. Samuel Goodrich, quoted in Maturin Murray Ballou, Edge-Tools of Speech (1886)

• Abuse is an indirect species of homage. William Hazlitt, “Common Places,” in The Literary Examiner (Sep.–Dec., 1823)

QUOTE NOTE: See a similar remark about criticism, made a century and a half later by John Maddox.

• The difference between coarse and refined abuse is as the difference between being bruised by a club, and wounded by a poisoned arrow. Samuel Johnson, quoted in Boswell’s Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1791)

• Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend’s forehead. Proverb (Chinese)

• A wound from a tongue is worse than a wound from a sword: for the latter affects only the body, the former the spirit. Pythagoras, in Thomas Stanley, Pythagoras: His Life and Teachings (1970, James Wasserman’s updated version of Stanley’s 1678 classic The History of Philosophy)

• When political ammunition runs low, inevitably the rusty artillery of abuse is wheeled into action. Wallace Stevens, in a speech in New York City (Sep. 22, 1952)

British prime minister Margaret Thatcher might have had this observation in mind when she said about the political abuse heaped on her: “I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because…it means that they have not a single political argument left” (quoted in London’s Daily Telegraph, March 21, 1986)

• Whipping and abuse are like laudanum: you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline. Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

(see also ABUSE and CHILDREN and CRUELTY and PAIN and UNKINDNESS and PUNISHMENT and RECOVERY and TRAUMA and VICTIMS & VICTIMHOOD)

• A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Table-Talk,” in Driftwood (1857)

• The hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. Carson McCullers, in The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951)

The words come from the narrator, who adds: “The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.“

• Child abuse casts a shadow the length of a lifetime. Herbert A. Ward (from 1970-2000, Father Ward was director of St. Jude’s Ranch for Children in Boulder City, Nevada)

(see also DANGER and DARKNESS and DARKNESS & LIGHT and LIGHT and OBLIVION)

• It is by going down into the abyss/that we recover the treasures of life./Where you stumble,/there lies your treasure. Joseph Campbell, in A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (1991; Robert Walter, ed., from material by Diane K. Osbon)

QUOTE NOTE: Campbell continued: “The very cave you are afraid to enter/turns out to be the source of/what you are looking for. The damned thing in the cave/that was so dreaded/has become the center.”

• Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil (1886). Note that the concluding line is a famous example of chiasmus.

QUOTE NOTE: The observation is also commonly presented this way: “Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become one himself. And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you.”

• We can’t be creative if we refuse to be confused. Change always starts with confusion; cherished interpretations must dissolve to make way for what’s new. Margaret J. Wheatley, “Willing to Be Disturbed,” in Turning to One Another (2002)

Wheatley continued: “Of course it’s scary to give up what we know, but the abyss is where newness lives. Great ideas and inventions miraculously appear in the space of not knowing. If we can move through the fear and enter the abyss, we are rewarded greatly.”

(see also COLLEGE and ERUDITION and INTELLECT and INTELLECTUALS and KNOWLEDGE and LEARNING and PEDANTS & PEDANTRY and PROFESSORS and SCHOLARS & SCHOLARSHIP and STUDY and UNIVERSITY)

• If poetry is like an orgasm, an academic can be likened to someone who studies the passion-stains on the bedsheets. Irving Layton, “Obs II,” in The Whole Bloody Bird (1969)

• Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

(see also COMMUNICATION and IMMIGRANTS and LANGUAGE and [Foreign] LANGUAGE and SPEECH & SPEAKING and TALK & TALKING)

• The accent of a man’s native country remains in his mind and his heart, as it does in his speech. François de la Rochefoucauld, in Maximes (1678)

• Accent is the soul of language; it gives to it both feeling and truth. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in Emile: Or, On Education (1762)

(see also ATTACHMENT & NONATTACHMENT and CRITICISM and EVALUATION and INEVITABILITY and JUDGMENTALISM & NONJUDGMENTALISM)

• A wise man weaves a philosophy out of each acceptance life forces upon him. Elizabeth Bibesco, in Haven: Short Stories, Pems, and Aphorisms (1951)

• It is better to learn early of the inevitable depths, for then sorrow and death take their proper place in life, and one is not afraid. Pearl S. Buck, in My Several Worlds (1954)
• At thirty, a man should have himself well in hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures—be what he is. And above all accept these things. Albert Camus, notebook entry (July 30, 1945), in Carnets: 1942–1951 (1963)

• Until we can tolerate our own company, we cannot expect other people to be overjoyed by our presence. Dorothy Carnegie, in Don’t Grow Old—Grow Up! (1956)

• During much of my life, I was anxious to be what someone else wanted me to be. Now I have given up that struggle. I am what I am. Elizabeth Coatsworth, in Personal Geography: Almost an Autobiography (1976)

• I’m Not OK, You’re Not OK—and That’s OK. William Sloane Coffin, title of book he said he would like to write, offered in a Riverside Church sermon (July 12, 1987)

• Accept the place the divine providence has found for you. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Essays: First Series (1841)

• There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be. John Fowles, the character Maurice Conchis speaking, in The Magus (1965)

QUOTE NOTE: Conchis is speaking to Nichoas Urfe, the narrator and protagonist, and, at age twenty-five, many decades younger. Conchis added: “You are too young to know this. You are still becoming. Not being.”

• My happiness goes in direct proportion to my acceptance and in inverse proportion to my expectations. Michael J. Fox, quoted in Brian Hiatt, “Michael J. Fox: The Toughest Man on TV,” Rolling Stone magazine (Sep. 26, 2013)

QUOTE NOTE: This has become one of Fox’s most frequently quoted observations, but it is unclear from Hiatt’s article whether the observation is original to Fox or a maxim he learned during his many years in recovery from alcoholism. At the time of the article, Fox had been sober for 21 years (about which, he quipped, “My sobriety is old enough to drink”).

• He who seeks for applause only from without, has all his happiness in another’s keeping. Oliver Goldsmith, the character Sir William speaking, in The Good-Natur’d Man (1768)

• Some people confuse acceptance with apathy, but there’s all the difference in the world. Apathy fails to distinguish between what can and what cannot be helped; acceptance makes that distinction. Apathy paralyzes the will-to-action; acceptance frees it by relieving it of impossible burdens. Arthur Gordon, in A Touch of Wonder: A Book to Help Stay in Love with Life (1974)

• Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. Audre Lorde, “Eye to Eye,” in Sister Outsider (1984)

Lorde continued: “I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself.”

• Self-acceptance begets acceptance from others, which begets even deeper, more genuine self-acceptance. It can be done. But no one is going to bestow it on you. It is a gift only you can give yourself. Camryn Manheim, in Wake Up, I’m Fat! (1999)

• I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself. I want to be rich my myself, not by borrowing. Michel de Montaigne, “On Glory,” in Essays (1580-88)

• Until you make peace with who you are, you’ll never be content with what you have. Doris Mortman, in Circles (1984)

• The best-adjusted people are the “psychologically patriotic,” who are glad to be what they are. Isabel Briggs Myers, in Gifts Differing (1980; with Peter B. Myers)

• Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better. Flannery O’Connor, in letter to “A” (Dec. 9, 1961); reprinted in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor (1979; Sally Fitzgerald. ed.)

• Perhaps the most important thing we can undertake toward the reduction of fear is to make it easier for people to accept themselves, to like themselves. Bonaro Overstreet, in The World Book Complete Word Power Library, Vol. 1 (1981)

• Unless I accept my faults I will most certainly doubt my virtues. Hugh Prather, in Notes to Myself (1983)

• It seems to take a lifetime for us to learn that wisdom consists largely in a graceful acceptance of things that do not immediately concern us. Myrtle Reed, in Old Rose and Silver (1909)

• The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change. Carl Rogers, in On Becoming a Person (1961)

A moment later, Rogers went on to add: “We cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed.”

• Friendship with oneself is all-important because without it, one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world. Eleanor Roosevelt, the concluding words of the essay “How to Take Criticism,” in Ladies' Home Journal (Nov., 1944)

• The mistake ninety-nine percent of humanity made, as far as Fats could see, was being ashamed of what they were; lying about it, trying to be somebody else. J. K. Rowling, the narrator describing a belief of the character Stuart “Fats” Wall, in The Casual Vacancy (2012)

The narrator continued: “Honesty was Fats’ currency, his weapon and defense. It frightened people when you were honest; it shocked them. Other people Fats had discovered, were mired in embarrassment and pretense, terrified that their truths might leak out.”

• We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be. May Sarton, a reflection of the protagonist Hilary Stevens, in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965)

• It is not easy to be sure that being yourself is worth the trouble, but we do know it is our sacred duty. Florida Scott Maxwell, in The Measure of My Days (1968)
• Acceptance is an art that must be mastered if we want to keep our friends for the span of life that remains to us, and presently step off the stage with our self-respect intact. Ethel Smyth, in As Time Went On… (1936)

• Every acceptance of suffering is an acceptance of that which exists. The denial of every form of suffering can result in a flight from reality in which contact with reality becomes ever thinner, ever more fragmentary. Dorothee Sölle, in Suffering (1973)

Sölle continued: “It is impossible to remove oneself totally from suffering, unless one removes oneself from life itself, no longer enters into relationships, makes oneself invulnerable.”

• The turning point is that moment of naked acceptance of the truth. Ellen Sue Stern, in The Indispensable Woman (1988)

• What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Henry David Thoreau, in Walden (1854)

• It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always. Henry David Thoreau, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)

• A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval. Mark Twain, the Old Man speaking, in title essay, in What is Man? And Other Essays (1917)

(see also ACCOMPLICE and ENABLERS & ENABLEMENT)

• There is at least one thing more brutal than the truth, and that is the consequence of saying less than the truth. One becomes an accessory to any facts one attempts—however much—to conceal. Ti-Grace Atkinson, “The Older Woman,” in Amazon Odyssey (1974)

• We may be accessory to another’s sin by counsel, by command, by consent, by concealment, by provoking, by praise, by partaking, by silence, by defense. John McCaffrey, in A Catechism of Christian Doctrine for General Use (1866)

(see also DRESS and FASHION)

• It is tempting to think of your husband-to-be as just another bridal accessory. It may be easier for him to play along with this too. After all, you don’t expect your shoes or your beaded bag to help you make decisions. Mimi Pond, A Groom of One’s Own and Other Bridal Accessories (1993)

(see also CHANCE and MISFORTUNE)

• Accident, n. And inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws.

Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

• Men’s accidents are God's purposes. Sophia A. Hawthorne, quoted in a June 1, 1842 entry The American Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1932; C. M. Simpson, ed.)

• Accident is the name one gives to the coincidence of events, of which one does not know the causation. Franz Kafka, quoted in Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka (1953

According to Janouch, Kafka went on to add: “Accidents only exist in our heads, in our limited perceptions.”

(see also ACCESSORY and ENABLERS & ENABLEMENT)

• Accomplice, n. One associated with another in a crime, having guilty knowledge and complicity, as an attorney who defends a criminal, knowing him guilty. Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

• Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art. Remy de Gourmont, in Le Chemin de Velours (1902); reprinted in in Decadence: And Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas (1921; tr. by W. A. Bradley)

Gourmont introduced the thought by writing: “Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.”

• The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference. Bess Myerson, quoted in Claire Safran, “Impeachment?” Redbook magazine (April 1974)

• Changes are not only possible and predictable, but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one's own unnecessary vegetation. Gail Sheehy, in Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1976)

• The writer’s first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth…and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Susan Sontag, “The Conscience of Words,” in At the Same Time (2007)

Sontag continued: “Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers.”

(see also AIMS & AIMING and ACHIEVEMENT and AMBITION and ASPIRATION and GOALS and TARGET)

• We will more easily accomplish what is proper if, like archers, we have a target in sight. Aristotle, in Nicomachean Ethics (4th c. B.C.)

QUOTE NOTE: Another translation of the Aristotle thought has it phrased this way: “It concerns us to know the purposes we seek in life, for then, like archers aiming at a definite mark, we shall be more likely to attain what we want.”

• The desire accomplished is sweet to the soul. The Bible: Proverbs 13:19

• Sweat is the cologne of accomplishment. Heywood Hale Broun, in CBS television interview (July 21, 1973)

• Accomplishments are the ornaments of life. Willa Cather, the character Mrs. Ramsay speaking, in Lucy Gayheart (1935)

QUOTATION CAUTION: This is how the quotation is commonly presented, but it was originally part of a larger message that Mrs. Ramsay was sending to Lucy: “Nothing really matters but living. Get all you can out of it. I’m an old woman, and I know. Accomplishments are the ornaments of life, they come second.”

• None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Greatness,” in Letters and Social Aims (1876)

QUOTE NOTE: Emerson believed that all people had a special leaning, or bias, they needed to identify, and then follow, in order to achieve greatness. He went on to explain: “Every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and…it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path…. He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it.”

• Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it. Once realized, it becomes commonplace. Robert H. Goddard, quoted in Milton Lehman, This High Man: The Live of Robert H. Goddard (1963)

• We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821)

• Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything. Thomas Merton, in New Seeds of Contemplation (1962)

(see also BLAME and CHARACTER and CONSEQUENCES and DUTY and RESPONSIBILITY)

• Accountability is a key factor in management because it is the cornerstone of empowerment and personal growth. If no one is accountable for a project, no one gets to grow through the experience of it. Accountability has nothing to do with blame. It has everything to do with individual and corporate growth. Laurie Beth Jones, in Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership (1995)

A moment later, Jones added: “Holding people accountable allows them the opportunity to sign their name on a portrait of success, no matter how small that portrait might be. It gives them their next growth challenge in a defined and measurable form.”

• Part of having a strong sense of self is to be accountable for one’s actions. No matter how much we explore motives or lack of motives, we are what we do. Janet Geringer Woititz, in Adult Children of Alcoholics (1983)

(see also LIES & LYING and TRUTH and VERACITY)

• There is an accuracy that defeats itself by the over-emphasis of details. Benjamin N. Cardozo, in Law and Literature (1930)

Cardozo continued: “I often say that one must permit oneself . . . a certain margin of misstatement. Of course, one must take heed that the margin is not exceeded, just as the physician must be cautious in administering the poisonous ingredient which magnified will kill, but in tiny quantities will cure.”

ERROR ALERT: The Cardozo observation is often mistakenly presented as if it ended on details.

• An inaccurate use of words produces such a strange confusion in all reasoning that in the heat of debate, the combatants, unable to distinguish their friends from their foes, fall promiscuously on both. Maria Edgeworth, in letter from Caroline to Julia, in Letters of Julia and Caroline (1795)

Caroline continued: “A skillful disputant knows well how to take advantage of this confusion, and sometimes endeavors to create it.”

• Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth. Anna Jameson, in A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies (1854)

Jameson continued: “If we looked into the matter we should probably find that all the varieties and modifications of conscious and unconscious lying—as exaggeration, equivocation, evasion, misrepresentation—might be traced to the early misuse of words.”

• In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness. Samuel Johnson, “The Bravery of the English Common Soldier,” in The British Magazine (Jan., 1760)

• Accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a woman. Joseph Pulitzer, quoted in Alleyne Ireland, “Joseph Pulitzer: Reminiscences of a Secretary,” in Metropolitan magazine (Dec., 1913)

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the quotation is typically presented, but it was originally the concluding portion of remarks Pulitzer made to Mr. Ireland, his personal secretary. “It is not enough to refrain from printing fake news,” he said, adding that it was also insufficient to be simply on guard for mistakes and carelessness in reporting. Rather, he concluded: “You have got to do much more than that; you have got to make every one connected to the paper—your editors, your reporters, your correspondents, your re-write men, your proof-readers—believe that accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a woman.” Pulitzer’s observation, which went on to become one of his best-known quotations, was also tweaked in a memorable way by Adlai Stevenson: “Accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a lady, but a newspaper can always print a retraction.”

• A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation. Saki (pen name of H. H. Munro), the character Lady Caroline speaking, “Clovis on the Alleged Romance of Business,” in The Square Egg (1924)

• Accuracy is twin brother to honesty, and inaccuracy to dishonesty. Charles Simmons, in Laconic Manual and Brief Remarker (1852).

ERROR ALERT: a similar observation is commonly misattributed to Nathaniel Hawthorne

(see also BLAME & BLAMING and CENSURE and CRITICISM and JUDGING OTHERS and LIBEL and SCAPEGOAT and SLANDER)

• Even doubtful accusations leave a stain behind them. Thomas Fuller, M.D., in Gnomologia (1732)

• Guilt hath very quick ears to an accusation. Henry Fielding, the character William Booth speaking, in Amelia (1751)

(see also AIMS & AIMING and ACCOMPLISHMENT and AMBITION and ASPIRATION)

• All that a man achieves and all that he fails to achieve is the direct result of his own thoughts. James Allen, in As a Man Thinketh (1903)

• The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg, and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities. James Allen, in As a Man Thinketh (1903)

• Every great achievement is the victory of a flaming heart. Author Unknown

ERROR ALERT: This observation is commonly attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, but nothing like it has been found in his works. It might be a paraphrase of something Emerson did say in his “Man the Reformer” lecture (Boston; Jan. 25, 1841): “Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm.”

• Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance. Bruce Barton, in The Man and the Book Nobody Knows (rev. ed.; 1956)

• Achievement, n. The death of endeavor and the birth of disgust. Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

• An achievement is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher achievement. Albert Camus, in Notebooks: 1942-1951 (1965)

• Life requires thorough preparation. Veneer isn’t worth anything; we must disabuse our people of the idea that there is a short cut to achievement. George Washington Carver, quoted in Raleigh H. Merritt, From Captivity to Fame: Or The Life of George Washington Carver (1929)

• Achievement brings with it its own anticlimax. Agatha Christie, the voice of the narrator, in They Came to Baghdad (1951)

• It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog.
 Joseph Conrad, voice of the narrator, in Victory: An Island Tale (1915)

• The virtue of all achievement is victory over oneself. Those who know this can never know defeat. A. J. Cronin, quoted in Lillian Eichler Watson, Light From Many Lamps (1951)

• Death comes to all,/But great achievements build a monument/Which shall endure until the sun grows cold. Georg Fabricius, in In Praise of Georgius Agricola (c. 1550)

• Achievement is talent plus preparation. Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers: The Story of Success (2008)

• There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction. One has to go abroad in order to find the home one has lost. Franz Kafka, quoted in Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka (1951; 2nd expanded ed., 1971)

QUOTATION CAUTION: In 1920, Janouch was a 17-year-old aspiring Czech writer when he first met Kafka, a friend of his father’s, and a man twenty years his senior (Kafka and Janouch’s father both worked at Prague’s Workman’s Accident Insurance Institute). For the next several years, Kafka became something of a mentor to the young man, and Janouch attempted to faithfully record each of their interactions (Kafka died at age 40 in 1924, of complications related to tuberculosis). In 1951, a heavily-edited version of Janouch’s decades-old original manuscript was published by Kafka’s literary executor, Max Brod. In 1971, Janouch came out with his own complete version. Some of Kafka’s most popular quotations come from Conversations with Kafka, but many Kafka scholars have questioned their authenticity, arguing that Janouch took creative liberties with Kafka’s actual words.

• The heights by great men reached and kept/Were not attained by sudden flight,/But they, while their companions slept,/Were toiling upward in the night. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Ladder of Saint Augustine,” in Birds of Passage (1845)

• Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything. Thomas Merton, in New Seeds of Contemplation (1962)

• If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. Sir Isaac Newton, in letter to Robert Hooke (Feb. 5, 1676)

QUOTE NOTE: This is the modernized version of one of intellectual history’s most famous observations (Newton’s original wording was: If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants). The metaphor beautifully captures the notion that all current thinkers build on the efforts of those who preceded them. The basic idea was not original with Newton, however. He was merely restating an observation from the twelfth-century French philosopher Bernard of Chartres: “We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants.” For more on the history of the quotation, go to: "Shoulders of Giants"

• Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible. Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one’s sights and pushing toward the horizon. Daniel Pink, in Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2009)

• Happiness does not come from doing easy work but from the afterglow of satisfaction that comes after the achievement of a difficult task that demanded our best. Theodore Isaac Rubin, in Love Me, Love My Fool: Thoughts from a Psychoanalyst’s Notebook (1976)

• No great achievement happens by luck. Howard Schultz, in Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time (1997; with Dori Jones Yang)

A bit earlier, Schultz had written: “Life is a series of near misses. But a lot of what we ascribe to luck is not luck at all. It’s seizing the day and accepting responsibility for your future. It’s seeing what other people don’t see and pursuing that vision, no matter who tells you not to.”

• Man can climb to the highest summits; but he cannot dwell there long. George Bernard Shaw, in Candida (1898)

(see also COMPLIANCE and CONSENT and SUBMISSION)

• All that the Devil asks is acquiescence. Suzanne Massie, in Robert and Suzanne Massie, Journey (1975)

(see also COMPLIANCE and CONSENT and SUBMISSION)

• The collector walks with blinders on; he sees nothing but the prize. In fact, the acquisitive instinct is incompatible with true appreciation of beauty. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, in Gift From the Sea (1955)

• Desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it. Laurence Sterne, the title character describing his uncle Toby’s studies, in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67)

(see also ACTORS & ACTRESSES and ACTORS—ON THEMSELVES and ACTORS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS and CINEMA and FILM and DIRECTING & DIRECTORS and PRODUCERS & PRODUCING and SHOW BUSINESS and STAGE and THEATER)

• Acting is in everything but the words. Stella Adler, in The Art of Acting (2000)

• Acting is a form of confession. Tallulah Bankead, in Tallulah (1952)

• For acting, darlings, is the world’s most perilous trade. Compared with actors, steeple jacks and deep-sea divers lead snug and placid lives. Tallulah Bankhead, in a 1958 issue of Good Housekeeping (specific issue undetermined)

• Acting is experience with something sweet behind it. Humphrey Bogart, quoted by Anthony Hopkins in Films Illustrated (December, 1980)

• If you’re successful, acting is about as soft a job as anybody could ever wish for. But if you’re unsuccessful, it’s worse than having a skin disease. Marlon Brando, in B. Thomas, Marlon: Portrait of the Rebel as an Artist (1973)

• Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It’s a bum’s life. Marlon Brando, quoted in G. Carey, Marlon Brando: The Only Contender (1985).

Brando added: “The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.”

• Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts. Whenever we want something from somebody or when we want to hide something or pretend, we’re acting. Most people do it all day long. Marlon Brando, quoted in The New York Times (July 2, 2004)

• The main thing about acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made. George Burns, quoted in Playboy magazine (March, 1984)

QUOTE NOTE: Four years earlier, in The Third Time Around: An Autobiography (1980), Burns expressed the thought this way: “And remember this for the rest of your life: To be a fine actor, when you’re playing a role you’ve got to be honest. And if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” Similar observations have been attributed to Groucho Marx and Samuel Goldwyn as well, but with no supporting evidence.

According to quotation researcher Garson O'Toole, the earliest appearance of the faking honesty sentiment was in 1962, when actress Celeste Holm attributed the following remark to an unnamed actor: “Honesty. That’s the thing in the theater today. Honesty…and just as soon as I can learn to fake that, I’ll have it made.” For more on the many iterations of the saying, see this informative 2011 Quote Investigator post.

• Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation. Bette Davis, in The Lonely Life (1962)

• Acting is like prizefighting. The downtown gyms are smelly, but that’s where the champions are. Kirk Douglas, in a 1970 issue of Esquire magazine (specific issue undetermined)

• Acting is make-believe. Dylan, my kid, when he was young he said, “I do that in the park everyday.” Michael Douglas, quoted in People magazine (Sep. 7, 2016)

• Acting is the conveyance of truth through the medium of the actor's mind and person. The science of acting deals with the perfecting of that medium. Minnie Maddern Fiske, quoted in Alexander Woollcott, Mrs. Fiske (1917)

Fiske continued: “The great actors are the luminous ones.”

• Acting is half shame, half glory. Shame at exhibiting yourself, glory when you can forget yourself. John Gielgud, in Gielgud Stories: Anecdotes, Sayings, and Impressions of Sir John Gielgud (1988; Clive Fisher, ed.)

• Acting is the use of human experience with talent added. Ruth Gordon, in An Open Book (1980)

• Acting a part is not always synonymous with lying; it is far more often the best way of serving the truth. Elizabeth Goudge, in The Bird in the Tree (1940)

Goudge continued: “It is more truthful to act what we should feel if the community is to be well served rather than behave as we actually do feel in our selfish private feelings.”

• Acting is happy agony. Alec Guinness, quoted in Christopher P. Anderson, The New Book of People (1986). Also an example of oxymoronica.

• More than in the other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic. Uta Hagen, in Respect for Acting (1973; with Haskel Frankel)

• The role of the Do-Gooder is not what actors call a fat part. Margaret Halsey, in The Folks at Home (1952)

• Acting in the theater is the most direct and effective approach to emotion that has ever been devised, isn’t it? Helen Hayes, quoted in Lewis Funke and John E. Booth, Actors Talk About Acting (1961)

• No matter how real the emotion, the habit of acting is hard to break. If you are a star, then it follows that you must twinkle mightily. There is a price for stardom and, unfortunately, one’s family shares in the payment. Helen Hayes, in On Reflection, An Autobiography (1968; with Sandford Dody)

• Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to make a living. Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four. Katharine Hepburn, quoted in Nigel Rees, Cassell’s Movie Quotations (2000)

• Acting is a way of living out one’s insanity. Isabelle Huppert, quoted in Ronald Warren Deutsch, Inspirational Hollywood (1997)

• Acting is like making love. It’s better if your partner is good, but it’s probably possible if your partner isn’t. Jeremy Irons, remark on French TV show Cinéma, Cinémas (1991)

• The important thing in acting is to be able to laugh and cry. If I have to cry, I think of my sex life. If I have to laugh, I think of my sex life. Glenda Jackson, quoted in a 1980 syndicated column by L.M. Boyd.

• Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. Glenda Jackson, in Sunday Telegraph (London, 1992)

Jackson continued: “The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant.”

• Acting is a wild ride, shared in the company of other actors. Diane Keaton, in Then Again (2011)

• Acting requires absorption, but not self-absorption and, in the actor’s mind, the question must always be “Why am I doing this?” not “How am I doing it?” Maureen Lipman, in How Was It for You? (1985)

• Acting forces you to ask yourself, “Can my constitution take a decade of constant rejection?” And after ten years, you either make it or you don’t. And the problem is they don’t tell you in advance. Camryn Manheim, in Wake Up, I’m Fat! (1999)

• Acting isn’t a profession, it’s a way of living. Jeanne Moreau, in Penelope Gilliatt, Three-Quarter Face (1980)

• Acting is like letting your pants down; you’re exposed. Paul Newman, in Time magazine (Dec. 6, 1982)

• Acting is a question of absorbing other people’s personalities and adding some of your own experience. Paul Newman, quoted in Leslie Halliwell’s Filmgoers’ Companion (1984)

• Acting has been described as farting about in disguise. Peter O’Toole, in Scene magazine (Dec. 12, 1992)

• What is acting but lying, and what is good acting but convincing lying? Laurence Olivier, in Confessions of an Actor: An Autobiography (1982)

• Acting is a masochistic form of exhibitionism. It is not quite the occupation of an adult. Laurence Olivier, quoted in Time magazine (July 3, 1978)

• I must say acting was good training for the political life which lay ahead for us. Nancy Reagan, in Nancy (1980; with Bill Libby)

• A lot of what acting is is paying attention. Robert Redford, quoted in a 1984 issue of Newsweek magazine (specific issue undetermined)

• Acting is not being emotional, but being able to express emotion. Kate Reid, in a 1988 issue of Theater Week (specific date undetermined)

• Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing. Ralph Richardson, quoted in The New York Herald Tribune (May 19, 1946)

QUOTE NOTE: Richardson reprised this sentiment on other occasions as well. Another popular version is: “The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.”

• Acting and painting have much in common. You begin with the external appearance and then strip away the layers to get to the essential core. This is reality and that is how an artist achieves truth. Edgar G. Robinson, quoted in Jim McMullan and Dick Gautier, Actors as Artists (1994)

Robinson continued: “When you are acting, you are playing a part, you are being somebody else. You are also, at the same time, being yourself.”

• Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly. Rosalind Russell, in Life is a Banquet (1977; with Chris Chase)

• Acting is like roller skating. Once you know how to do it, it is neither stimulating nor exciting. George Sanders, in 1961 issue of Films in Review (specific issue undetermined)

• Acting is being susceptible to what is around you, and it’s letting it all come in. Acting is a clearing away of everything except what you want and need—and it’s wonderful in that way. And when it’s right, you’re lost in the moment. Meryl Streep, quoted in Kristen Golden and Barbara Findlen, Remarkable Women of the Twentieth Century (1998)

• I love acting. It is so much more real than life. Oscar Wilde, the character Lord Henry Wotten speaking, in The Picture of Dorian Grey (1891)

• Acting is the developing of one’s own personality, too, you know. That’s what the public buys in a star, shall we say, the personality thing. Shelley Winters, quoted in Lewis Funke and John E. Booth, Actors Talk About Acting (1961)

• Acting is like painting pictures on bathroom tissues. Ten minutes later you throw them away and they are gone. Shelley Winters, in 1962 issue of the Saturday Evening Post

• Acting is like sex. You should do it, but not talk about it. Joanne Woodward, in “You” supplement to The Mail on Sunday (London, 1987)

(see also INACTION and DEEDS and DOING and INTENTION and THOUGHT and THOUGHT & ACTION and SPEECH and WORDS & DEEDS )

• Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul. Edward Abbey, in A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1989)

ERROR ALERT: Scores of blogs and web sites mistakenly present this quotation as: “Belief without action is the ruin of the soul.”

• As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe the only antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth. Edward Abbey, in A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1989)

• We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them. Abigail Adams, in letter to husband John Adams (Oct. 16, 1774)

• Action is indeed the sole medium of expression for ethics. Jane Addams, in Democracy and Social Ethics (1902)

• Action is only coarsened thought. Henri-Frédéric Amiel, an 1850 entry in his Journal Intime

• Thought is sad without action, and action is sad without thought. Henri-Frédéric Amiel, quoted in Cesare Lombroso, The Man of Genius (1896)

• In the arena of human life the honors and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities in action. Aristotle, in Nicomachean Ethics (4th c. B.C.)

• Action is the antidote to despair. Joan Baez, in Rolling Stone (1983)

• A thought which does not result in an action is nothing much, and an action which does not proceed from a thought is nothing at all. Georges Bernanos, “France Before the World of Tomorrow,” in The Last Essays of George Bernanos (1955)

• Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in 1944 letter to Renate and Eberhard Bethge; reprinted in Letters and Papers from Prison (1953; Eberhard Bethge, ed.)

QUOTE NOTE: This famous sentiment from Bonhoeffer has also been translated this way: “It is not the thought but readiness to take responsibility that is the mainspring of action.”

• The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye. Jacob Bronowski, in The Ascent of Man (1973)

Bronowski added: “We are active; and indeed we know, as something more than a symbolic accident in the evolution of man, that it is the hand that drives the subsequent evolution of the brain. We find tools today made by man before he became man. Benjamin Franklin in 1778 called man ‘a tool-making animal’, and that is right.” (For a lovely elaboration of this thought, see the Bronowski entry under MIND).

• A good action is never lost; it is a treasure laid up and guarded for the doer's need. Pedro Calderón de la Barca, in The Constant Prince (1629)

• Be careful how you live your life, it is the only Gospel many people will ever read. Dom Hélder Câmara, quoted in a 1985 issue of Basta (national newsletter of the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America; specific issue undetermined)

QUOTE NOTE: Câmara, a Brazilian Catholic priest who went on to serve as Archbishop of Olinds and Recife from 1964 to 1985, was a proponent of social justice and liberation theology. He devoted so much of his time to fighting poverty that he became known as “The Bishop of the Slums.” For more, see Hélder Câmara.

• Every action of your life touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity. E. H. Chapin, “Advice to the Young,” in Charles W. Sanders, Sanders’ Union Fourth Reader (1873)

• I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act. G. K. Chesterton, “On Holland,” in Generally Speaking (1928)

• Action is the language of the body and should harmonize with the spirit within. Marcus Tullius Cicero, in De Oratore (55 B.C.)

• He who believes is strong. he who doubts is weak. Strong convictions precede great actions. James Freeman Clarke, “Salvation by Faith,” in Common-Sense in Religion: A Series of Essays (1875)

ERROR ALERT: This observation is often mistakenly attributed to Louisa May Alcott:

QUOTE NOTE: Clarke was a prominent Unitarian minister, abolitionist, and early exponent of what went on to be called the Social Gospel. He continued: “The man strongly possessed of an idea is the master of all who are uncertain and wavering. Clear, deep living convictions rule the world.”

• Our actions must clothe us with an immortality loathsome or glorious. Charles Caleb Colton, in Lacon (1820)

• A man’s most open actions have a secret side to them. Joseph Conrad, the character Razumov speaking, in Under Western Eyes (1911)

• The result of a single action may spread like the circles that expand when a stone is thrown into a pond, until they touch places and people unguessed at by the person who threw the stone. Robertson Davies, “Literature and Moral Purpose” (1990), in The Merry Heart: Selections 1980-1995 (1996)

• I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions. Dorothy Day, in The Long Loneliness (1952)

• The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action. John Dewey, in Democracy and Education (1916)

• Action may not always be happiness; but there is no happiness without action. Benjamin Disraeli, the General speaking, in Lothair (1870)

ERROR ALERT: This quotation is often mistakenly presented as if it read may not always bring happiness.

• There is only one proof of ability—action. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, in Aphorisms (1880–93)

• The ancestor of every action is a thought. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Spiritual Laws,” in Essays: First Series (1841)

• An action is the perfection and publication of thought. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Discipline,” in Nature, Addresses and Lectures (1849)

• A man’s action is only a picture-book of his creed. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Letters and Social Aims (1876)

• An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory. Friedrich Engels, quoted in Reg Groves, The Strange Case of Victor Grayson (1975)

ERROR ALERT: There is no evidence that Engels ever said such a thing, even though the quotation appears all over the internet and in a number of respected quotation anthologies. In most cases, no source is given, but when one is provided, the Groves book is generally cited. Groves was a pioneering figure in the British Communist Party until he was expelled in 1932 for supporting Leon Trotsky over Josef Stalin. To be fair, Groves didn’t formally quote Engels, but simply asked rhetorically: “And did not wise old Frederick (sic) Engels once say: An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory?” For a thorough discussion of the erroneous Engels attribution, as well as some similar English sayings that preceded it, go to: Ounce of Action.

• All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. Louise Erdrich, a reflection of the character Cally, in The Antelope Wife (1998)

• Action is character. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in “Notes for The Last Tycoon” (1941)

• Acting without thinking is like shooting without aiming. B. C. Forbes, in Forbes Epigrams: Or 1,000 Thoughts on Life (2010)

• Action is the proper fruit of knowledge. Thomas Fuller, M.D., in Gnomologia: Adages and Proverbs (1732)

• A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle. Kahlil Gibran, in A Second Treasury of Kahlil Gibran (1962; Anthony R. Ferris, trans. & ed.)

• Think wisely, weighing Word and Fact,/But never Think too much to Act. Arthur Guiterman, in A Poet’s Proverbs (1924)

• In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action. Dag Hammarskjöld, in Markings (1963)

• You must make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation. T. H. Huxley, in letter to Anton Dohrn (Oct. 17, 1873)

• Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers. Learned Hand, in a speech in New York City (Jan. 27, 1952)

• Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one’s balance and keep afloat. Eric Hoffer, in The Passionate State of Mind (1955)

Hoffer reprised the theme in The Ordeal of Change (1964): “Action is basically a reaction against loss of balance—a flailing of the arms to to regain one’s balance. To dispose a soul to action, we must upset its equilibrium.”

• Our acts make or mar us; we are the children of our own deeds. Victor Hugo, quoted in Henry Southgate, Things A Lady Would Like To Know (1875)

QUOTATION CAUTION: The saying, even though widely cited for more than a century, has not been found in Hugo’s works and should be used with this caveat.

• No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one’s character may remain entirely unaffected for the better. With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially paved. William James, “Habit,” in The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1 (1890)

James went on to add: “There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a Weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed.”

• The smallest deed is greater than the grandest intention. Patti LaBelle, in Patti’s Pearls (2001; with Laura Randolph Lancaster)

• Oh, words are action, good enough, if they’re the right words. D. H. Lawrence, in a letter to Rolf Gardiner (Aug. 9, 1924); reprinted in The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence (1997; James T. Boulton, ed.)

• Each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. Alan Lightman, in Einstein’s Dreams (2004)

• I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts. John Locke, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

ERROR ALERT: This quotation is often mistakenly presented as The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.

• Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action. James Russell Lowell, in North American Review (July, 1867)

• Action is thought made visible. Orison Swett Marden, in The Consolidated Encyclopedic Library (1903)

• Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret. Mary McCarthy, “My Confession” (1953), in On the Contrary (1961)

• A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury. John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty (1859)

• Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time. Malcolm Muggeridge, “Twilight of Greatness,” in The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge (1966)

• One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear. Friedrich Nietzsche, in Human, All Too Human (1878)

• Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the action stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living. Anaïs Nin, a June, 1946 diary entry, in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4 (1971)

• Dreams grow holy put in action. Adelaide Procter, “Philip and Mildred,” in The Poems of Adelaide Proctor (1869)

• For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out. Theodore Roosevelt, in an 1898 speech in New York City

QUOTE NOTE: The notion that people, like machines, might rust out or wear out was popular by Roosevelt’s time, but the idea originated with Richard Cumberland (1631-1718), a seventeenth-century Anglican bishop. In Contending for the Faith (1786), George Horne, an Anglican cleric, quoted Cumberland as saying: “It is better to wear out than to rust out. There will be time enough for repose in the grave.”

• Moral action is the meeting-place between the human and the divine. Leon Roth, in Jewish Thought as a Factor in Civilization (1954)

• Some men are born committed to action: they do not have a choice, they have been thrown on a path, at the end of that path, an act awaits them, their act. Jean Paul Sartre, the character Orestes speaking, in The Flies (1943)

• There is no reality except in action. Jean-Paul Sartre, in “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (1946 lecture); reprinted in Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (1956)

• Action is eloquence. William Shakespeare, the character Volumnia speaking, in Coriolanus (1607)

QUOTE NOTE: Volumnia, the mother of the title character, is advising Coriolanus to look humble in order to win the votes of Roman citizens. The full passage is a timeless lesson in political oratory: “In such business/Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th’ ignorant/More learned than the ears.”

• Every act alters the soul of the doer. Oswald Spengler, in The Decline of the West (1918-22)

• It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Reflections and Remarks on Human Life” (1878), reprinted in Complete Works, Vol. 26 (1924)

• All poetry is a call to action. Amor Towles, the character Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov speaking, in A Gentleman in Moscow (2016)

• From thinking proceeds speaking; thence to acting is often but a single step. But how irrevocable and tremendous! George Washington, in letter to John Jay (Aug. 1, 1786)

• Thought and theory must precede all action that moves to salutary purposes. Yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory. William Wordsworth, quoted in Edwin Paxton Hood, William Wordsworth: A Biography (1856)

(see also AGITATION [Social & Political] and CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE and DEMONSTRATIONS and DISSENT and MILITANCY & MILITANTS and OPPOSITION and OUTRAGE and REBELLION and PROTEST and [Protest] SONG and RESISTANCE and REVOLUTION)

• The church…is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question” (1933), reprinted in No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures and Notes 1928-1936 (1965)

QUOTE NOTE: Bonhoeffer’s 1933 lecture on the need for church activism was addressed to fellow German clerics, many of whom were turning a blind eye to the anti-semitic pronouncements of the emerging Nazi party. Arguing that “The church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community,” he said the church had three options. The first was to question the legitimacy of the state’s actions, the second was to provide aid to the victims, and the third was beautifully captured by his “spoke in the wheel” metaphor. That phrase became so centrally associated with Bonhoeffer that Renate Wind used it in the title of her 1992 biography: Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Spoke in the Wheel.

• We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims. R. Buckminster Fuller, quoted in L. Steven Sieden, A Fuller View (2012)

• If I seem to take part in politics, it is only because politics encircle us today like the coil of a snake from which one cannot get out, no matter how much one tries. I wish therefore to wrestle with the snake. Mohandas K. Gandhi, quoted in Young India (May 12, 1920)

• It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion. W. R. Inge, in Outspoken Essays; First Series (1919)

• An activist is the guy who cleans the river, not the guy who concludes it’s dirty. Ross Perot, quoted in Ken Gross, Ross Perot: The Man Behind the Myth (1992)

QUOTE NOTE: This was one of Perot’s favorite sayings, offered in slightly different ways over the years. A 1992 issue of Reader’s Digest carried the following version: “The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river.”

• Words and thoughts concerning compassionate action that are not put into practice are like beautiful flowers that are colorful but have no fragrance. Thich Nhat Hanh, in Creating True Peace (2003)

• [Activism] pays the rent on being alive and being here on this planet. Alice Walker, in an interview with Claudia Dreifus, in The Progressive (August 1989)

QUOTE NOTE: In the interview, Dreifus asked the question “What do you get from activism?” and Walker formally began her answer by saying, “Well, it pays the rent on….” Over the years, as the quotation grew in popularity, all of the versions of the saying mistakenly had Walker actually using activism as the first word. For more on the history of the saying, see this excellent post by Garson O’Toole, aka The Quote Investigator.

(see also ACTING and ACTORS—ON THEMSELVES and ACTORS–DESCRIBED BY OTHERS and CINEMA & FILM and DIRECTING & DIRECTORS and STAGE and THEATER)

• An actor’s success has the life expectancy of a small boy about to look into a gas tank with a lighted match. Fred Allen, quoted in Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon (1992)

• For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of a Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros. Ethel Barrymore, quoted in George Jean Nathan, The Theatre in the Fifties (1953)

• An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow. Edwin Booth, widely ascribed, but never verified (also commonly attributed to American actor Lawrence Barrett)

• To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty, to interpret it his problem, and to express it his dedication. Marlon Brando, quoted in David Shipman, Marlon Brando (1974)

• An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer. Marlon Brando, quoted in G. McCann, Rebel Males: Clift, Brando, and Dean (1991)

Brando added: “You can’t be a poet by really trying hard. It’s like being charming. You can’t be charming by working at it.”

• The movie actor, like the sacred king of primitive tribes, is a God in captivity. Alexander Chase, in Perspective (1966)

• The real actor–like any real artist—has a direct line to the collective heart. Bette Davis, in The Lonely Life: An Autobiography (1962)

Davis wasn’t nearly so kind in her assessment of the younger, sexier actresses who were beginning to make waves in Hollywood: “Some young Hollywood starlets remind me of my grandmother's old farmhouse–all painted up nice on the front side, a big swing on the backside, and nothing whatsoever in the attic.”

• Actors are a nuisance in the earth, the very offal of society. Timothy Dwight, in An Essay on the Stage (1824)

• Actors are often thought of as talking props. Emilio Estevez, in Film Yearbook, 1986 (1986)

• Actors may know how to act, she said, but a lot of them don’t know how to behave. Carrie Fisher, the character Lucy speaking, in Postcards From the Edge (1987)

• The best actors do not let the wheels show. Henry Fonda, quoted in R. A. & G. W. Nowlan, Movie Characters of Leading Performers of the Sound Era (1990)

Fonda added: “This is the hardest kind of acting, and it works only if you look as if you are not acting at all.”

• Modesty is the artifice of actors, similar to passion in call-girls. Jackie Gleason, quoted in Jonathan Green, Cassell Dictionary of Cynical Quotations (1994)

• Essentially what actors do is put colors on a palette for directors to paint with. Scott Glenn, in Photoplay (1986)

• The actor must know that since he, himself, is the instrument, he must play on it to serve the character with the same effortless dexterity with which the violinist makes music on his. Uta Hagen, in A Challenge for the Actor (1991)

• Actor: A musician who plays on a homemade instrument—himself. Helen Hayes, quoted in a 1993 issue of Television Guide (specific issue undetermined)

• An actor can remember his briefest notice well into senescence and long after he has forgotten his phone number and where he lives. Jean Kerr, in Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1957)

• Movie actors are just ordinary mixed-up people—with agents. Jean Kerr, the character Dirk speaking , in the play Mary, Mary (1961)

• A struggle with shyness is in every actor more than anyone can imagine. Marilyn Monroe, quoted in Richard Meryman, “Marilyn Lets Her Hair Down About Being Famous,” Life magazine (Aug. 3, 1962)

• In The Paradox of Acting she’d read: All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you. Joyce Carol Oates, in Blonde: A Novel (2000)

In the novel, the person reading the book is “The Blonde Actress” (think Marilyn Monroe). After reading the passage, she thinks: “If I am a whore, that explains me!”

• The difference between being a director and being an actor is the difference between being the carpenter banging the nails into the wood, and being the piece of wood the nails are being banged into. Sean Penn, quoted in The Guardian (London; Nov. 28, 1991)

• Insecurity, commonly regarded as a weakness in normal people, is the basic tool of the actor’s trade. Miranda Richardson, quoted in The Guardian (London; Dec. 5, 1990)

• Actors are the jockeys of literature. Others supply the horses, the plays, and we simply make them run. Ralph Richardson, quoted in L. Shilling & L. Fuller, Dictionary of Quotations in Communication (1997)

• The body of an actor is like a well in which experiences are stored, then tapped when needed. Simone Signoret, in J. Gruen, Close-Up (1968)

• In the language of an actor, to know is synonymous with to feel. Konstantin Stanislavsky, in Creating a Role (1949)

QUOTE NOTE: This is the way the quotation is almost always presented, but it originally came in a fuller discussion of an actor’s first impressions of a script. Here’s the full passage: “Since, in the language of an actor, to know is synonymous with to feel, he should give free rein, at a first reading of a play, to his creative emotions. The more warmth of feeling and throbbing, living emotion he can put into a play at first acquaintance, the greater will be the appeal of the dry words of the text to his senses.”

• The imagination of the actor adorns the text of the playwright with fanciful patterns and colors from his own invisible palette. Konstantin Stanislavsky, in Creating a Role (1949)

• The actor is/A metaphysician in the dark, twanging/An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives/Sounds. Wallace Stevens, in “Of Modern Poetry,” in The Palm at the End of the Mind (1990)

• Perhaps society should give actors the same sort of protection it gives to those who follow a religious life. Actor/priest was originally the same job. The theater is left wing magic and theology is right wing magic. Jennifer Stone, “Loners and Losers,” in Mind Over Media (1988)

• An actor is never so great as when he reminds you of an animal—falling like a cat, lying like a dog, moving like a fox. François Truffaut, in New Yorker (Feb. 20, 1960)

• The French philosopher Denis Diderot said that the best actor sits inside his own performance as a cool spectator of the effects he is creating in an audience. Garry Wills, in Certain Trumpets: The Nature of Leadership (1994)

QUOTE NOTE: Wills cited Diderot’s The Paradox of Acting, written between 1773-77 and published posthumously in 1830, as the source for his observation, which should be regarded as a paraphrase rather than a direct quote. Wills added: “Such actors will sense it if an audience thinks they are playing a scene too ‘broad,’ and will rein in the effects. The actor is working at several different levels of awareness—fiery in the character’s emotions, icy in the adjustment of those emotions to the intended results in onlookers. Feigned tears must be used to elicit real tears.”

(see also ACTING and ACTORS & ACTRESSES and ACTORS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS)

• Never go on stage without your motor running. Stella Adler, in New York Times obituary (Dec. 22, 1992)

• It does get old to have to always be a monkey in a zoo. In the day-to-day thing to have people looking, talking, grabbing, needing something—I don't know what it’s like anymore to be anonymous. Kevin Bacon, quoted on Internet Movie Database website (www.imdb.com)

• I am really a cat transformed into a woman. Brigitte Bardot, quoted in Tony Crawley, BéBé (1975)

• My favorite review described me as the cinematic equivalent of junk mail. Steve Buscemi, quoted on Internet Movie Database website (www.imdb.com)

• Stand-up is like drawing with primary colors crayons—it’s a beautiful and satisfying world—but acting is like the big box of 148. Brett Butler, comparing stand-up comedy with acting, in Mark Wyckoff, “Stand-Up Keeps Butler Sane,” Tucson Citizen (June 8, 1995)

• Be like a duck, my mother used to tell me. Remain calm on the surface and paddle like hell underneath. Michael Caine, in a publicity release for the film Deathtrap (1972)

QUOTE NOTE: It is not clear who originally authored the famous advice about ducks, but it was almost certainly not Caine’s mother. Jacob M. Braude, whose Complete Speaker’s and Toastmaster Library is legendary among platform speakers, is commonly cited as the author (“Always behave like a duck—keep calm and unruffled on the surface, but paddle like the devil beneath”), but without citation.

• I’m the female equivalent of a counterfeit $20 bill. Half of what you see is a pretty good reproduction, the rest is a fraud. Cher, quoted in D. McClelland, Star Speak (1987)

• Acting is the greatest answer to my loneliness that I have found. Claire Danes, quoted in Dotson Rader, “I Needed a Connection That Was Real,” in Parade magazine (Oct. 2, 2005)

• I have always been driven by some distant music—a battle hymn no doubt—for I have been at war from the beginning. Bette Davis, in The Lonely Life (1962)

• I am doomed to an eternity of compulsive work. No set goal achieved satisfies. Success only breeds a new goal. The golden apple devoured has seeds. It is endless. Bette Davis, in The Lonely Life (1962)

• My passions were all gathered together like fingers that made a fist. Drive is considered aggression today; I knew it then as purpose. Bette Davis, in The Lonely Life (1962)

• My purpose in life does not include a hankering to charm society. James Dean, quoted in Neil Grant, James Dean: In His Own Words (1994)

• I guess a film in which I didn’t end up in bed, in the sea, or in a hot tub, would have the same appeal as a Clint Eastwood movie in which nobody got shot. Bo Derek, in The Independent (March 25, 1995)

• The stage might be the only place I really feel at home. I like the greasepaint, the lights, the romance of it all. Faye Dunaway, in Esquire The Meaning of Life (2004, Brendan Vaughan, ed.)

Dunaway continued: “I like going backstage. I like the ensemble: it’s the family that you’ve always wanted to have; it’s like a perfect love, a relationship that is always growing and changing and deepening.”

• To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory vault and mix in a sad memory from one’s own life. Albert Finney, quoted in International Herald Tribune (Mar. 29, 1985)

• For years people have asked if I mind being remembered as Princess Leia. I used to say no. But now I will say that it sometimes bothers me, yes. It follows me around like a little smell. Carrie Fisher, “What I’ve Learned,” in Fortune magazine (Jan. 29, 2007; originally appeared June, 2002)

• I don’t use any particular method. I’m from the let’s pretend school of acting. Harrison Ford, in G. Shalit, Great Hollywood Wit (2003)

• Acting in Star Wars, I felt like a raisin in a gigantic fruit salad. Mark Hamill, in Screen International (Dec., 1977)

• I’m a whore. All actors are whores. We sell our bodies to the highest bidder. William Holden, in Nigel Rees, Cassell’s Movie Quotations (2002)

• We in the theater are paradoxes. Our agonizing shyness is equalled only by the tremendous need for acceptance. Helen Hayes, in On Reflection: An Autobiography (1968; with Sandford Dody)

• When people ask me about my story, I just go through the positive stuff: the tent-pole moments, the big landmark checkpoints. Shia LaBeouf, in interview on The A. V. Club (http://www.avclub.com; April 11, 2007)

• I look at myself like a show dog. I’ve got to keep her clipped and trimmed and in good shape. Dolly Parton, in Dream More: Celebrate the Dreamer in You (2012)

• Norman Bates is the Hamlet of horror roles. Anthony Perkins, in Photoplay (Nov. 1986)

• It’s hard to act in the morning. The muse isn’t even awake. Keanu Reeves, in B. Robb, Keanu Reeves (2003)

• I can sing as well as Fred Astaire can act. Burt Reynolds, in Photoplay (April, 1976)

• I’m not handsome in the classical sense. The eyes droop, the mouth is crooked, the teeth aren’t straight, the voice sounds like a Mafioso pallbearer, but somehow it all works. Sylvester Stallone, quoted in Jon Winokur, True Confessions (1992)

• Working for Mr. DeMille was like playing house in the world’s most expensive department store. Gloria Swanson, on Cecil DeMille, in Swanson on Swanson (1980)

• I dress for women and I undress for men. Mae West, in an interview with Charlotte Chandler, reported in Chandler’s book The Ultimate Seduction (1984)

• My comedy is like emotional hang-gliding. Robin Williams, in Playboy interview (Oct., 1982)

(see also ACTING and ACTORS & ACTRESSES and ACTORS—ON THEMSELVES & THEIR WORK and INSULTS & PUT-DOWNS)

• What Einstein was to physics, what Babe Ruth was to home runs, what Emily Post was to table manners—that’s what Edward G. Robinson was to dying like a dirty rat. Russell Baker, in There’s a Country in My Cellar (1990)

• He moved through a movie scene like an exquisite paper knife. Heywood Broun, on John Barrymore, quoted in Leslie Halliwell, The Filmgoer’s Book of Quotes (1973)

• This man, in words of Emerson’s, carries the holiday in his eye; he is fit to stand the gaze of millions. Stanley Cavell, on Cary Grant’s performance in the film The Awful Truth (1937), in Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981)

QUOTE NOTE: Cavell, an American philosopher and Harvard professor who was also a great fan of the “screwball comedies” of the 1930s, was inspired by two phrases in an essay on “Manners” that Emerson published in English Traits (1856). In describing “the creation of the gentleman” in Western society, Emerson wrote at length about the heroic properties of people who form a natural aristocracy (a “fraternity of the best,” he called them). The portion of the essay containing the phrases the holiday in his eye and fit to stand the gaze of millions may be seen at Emerson on “Manners”

• Meryl Streep is an acting machine in the same sense that a shark is a killing machine. Cher, in Film Yearbook (1989)

• To see him act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on actor Edmund Kean, in an 1823 issue of Table-Talk

• Joan always cries a lot. Her tear ducts must be very close to her bladder. Bette Davis, on Joan Crawford, quoted in S. Considine, Bette & Joan: The Divine Feud (1990)

• Lana Turner is to an evening gown what Frank Lloyd Wright is to a pile of lumber. Rex Harrison, on Lana Turner, at the 1946 Academy Award ceremonies

• There’s a lot of poetry in his face. Walter Hill, on Charles Bronson, in Photoplay (Jan., 1987)

About his own face, Bronson was quoted as saying in 1976: “I guess it looks like a rock quarry that somebody has dynamited.”

• There is something elemental about Bette—a demon within her which threatens to break out and eat everybody, beginning with their ears. John Huston, on Bette Davis, in An Open Book (1980)

• It’s like being bombed by water-melons. Alan Ladd, on working with Sophia Loren, quoted in Donald Zec, Sophia: An Intimate Biography (1975)

• I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin. Oscar Levant, quoted in Max Wilk, The Wit and Wisdom of Hollywood (1972)

QUOTE NOTE: An original source for this classic oxymoronic insult has never been found, and it may simply be a variant of something Levant wrote in The Memoirs of an Amnesiac (1965): “My last picture for Warners was Romance on the High Seas. It was Doris Day’s first picture; that was before she became a virgin.”

• A deer in the body of a woman, living resentfully in the Hollywood zoo. Clare Booth Luce, on Greta Garbo, quoted in Leslie Halliwell, Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion (1984)

• She made voluptuousness a common American commodity as accessible as chewing gum. Lloyd Morris, on Theda Bara, in Not so Long Ago (1949)

• She’s like a delicate fawn, crossed with a Buick. Jack Nicholson, on Jessica Lange, in Vanity Fair (Oct. 1984)

• If they tell you that she died of sleeping pills you must know that she died of a wasting grief, of a slow bleeding at the soul. Clifford Odets, on Marilyn Monroe, in Show Magazine (Oct., 1962)

• Working with her is like being hit over the head by a Valentine’s Day card. Christopher Plummer, on Julie Andrews, his The Sound of Music co-star, in L. Halliwell, The Filmgoer’s Book of Quotes (1973)

A less flattering observation about Andrews, anonymously authored, was also offered around the same time that Plummer made his remark: “Julie Andrews is like a nun with a switchblade.”

• A vacuum with nipples. Otto Preminger, on Marilyn Monroe, in J. R. Colombo, Popcorn in Paradise (1980)

• A graduate of the Mount Rushmore School of Acting. Edgar G. Robinson, on Charlton Heston, in Nigel Rees, Cassell’s Movie Quotations (2002)

QUOTE NOTE: A similar remark has been made of many actors, including Clint Eastwood. Usually these “school of acting” references are insulting, but they can sometimes be charming. In the 1950 film All About Eve, Marilyn Monroe made her screen debut as the ingénue Claudia Casswell. At a party, she is introduced by George Sanders, as critic Addison De Witt, this way: “Miss Casswell is an actress, a graduate of the Copacabana School of the Dramatic Arts.”

• Tony Randall was the Laurence Olivier of light comic actors. Tom Shales, in Washington Post (May, 5, 2004)

• A fellow with the inventiveness of Albert Einstein but with the attention span of Daffy Duck. Tom Shales, on Robin Williams, quoted in C. Jarman, The Book of Poisonous Quotes (1993)

• It seems to me you lived your life/like a candle in the wind. Bernie Taupin, on Marilyn Monroe, lyric in the 1973 song “Candle in the Wind” (music by Elton John)

• It has been said that she died in harness. That expression of a plodder overtaken by death is inadequate for so gallant, so defiantly twinkling an exit. She was a boat that went to the bottom with its orchestra playing gaily. Alexander Woollcott, on Sarah Bernhardt, “Bernhardt,” in The Portable Woollcott (1946)

• Even her eyelashes acted. Virginia Woolf, on Ellen Terry, in The Moment (1947)

(see APHORISMS)

(see also MALE-FEMALE DYNAMICS and MEN & WOMEN)

• Imagination seems to be a glory and a misery, a blessing and a curse. Adam, to his sorrow, lacked it. Eve, to her sorrow, possessed it. Had both been blessed—or cursed—with it, there would have been much keener competition for the apple. Stella Benson, the voice of the narrator, in I Pose (1915)

• It wasn’t sin that was born on the day Eve picked her apple: what was born that day was a splendid virtue called disobedience. Oriana Fallaci, a reflection of the unnamed narrator, in the heavily autobiographical Letter to a Child Never Born: A Novel (1975)

• Ever since Eve gave Adam the apple, there has been a misunderstanding between the sexes about gifts. Nan Robertson, in a column on Christmas shopping (“‘Misunderstood’ Men Offer Words on Gifts; Most Bought Presents”), in The New York Times (Nov. 28, 1957).

(see also ADJUSTMENT and ALTERATION and CHANGE and GROWTH & DEVELOPMENT and PROGRESS)

• Adaptability is the simple secret of survival. Jessica Hagedorn, in Dogeaters: A Novel (1990)

• We human beings cause monstrous conditions, but precisely because we cause them we soon learn to adapt ourselves to them. Only if we become such that we can no longer adapt ourselves, only if, deep inside, we rebel against every kind of evil, will we be able to put a stop to it. Etty Hillesum, in An Interrupted Life (1983)

Hillesum went on to add: “While everything within us does not yet scream out in protest, so long will we find ways of adapting ourselves, and the horrors will continue.”

• If one is willing to adapt, the darkness offers a place to step beyond the known edge and explore, a place of silence and sound, a place both unpopulated and populous, filled with things we may not see by day. Cathy Johnson, in The Nocturnal Naturalist: Exploring the Outdoors at Night (1989)

• Happiness for the average person may be said to flow largely from common sense—adapting oneself to circumstances—and a sense of humor. Beatrice Lillie, in Every Other Inch a Lady (1972)

• Unadaptability is often a virtue. Flannery O'Connor, a 1957 remark, in The Habit of Being (1979; Sally Fitzgerald, ed.)

• Nearly all great civilizations that perished did so because they had crystallized, because they were incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions, new methods, new points of view. It is as though people would literally rather die than change. Eleanor Roosevelt, in Tomorrow Is Now (1963)

• The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. George Bernard Shaw, in Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

• Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature’s inexorable imperative. H. G. Wells, in Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945)

(see also ALCOHOL & ALCOHOLISM and COCAINE and DRINKING & DRUNKENNESS and DRUGS and LIQUOR and MARIJUANA and RECOVERY)

• Of all the tyrannies which have usurped power over humanity, few have been able to enslave the mind and body as imperiously as drug addiction. Freda Adler, in Sisters in Crime (1975)

• A junkie is someone who uses their body to tell society that something is wrong. Stella Adler

QUOTE NOTE: This is one of Adler’s most widely quoted observations (sometimes with addict replacing the word junkie), but it has never been verified. When I contacted the Stella Adler School of Acting in 2012, a spokesperson considered the quotation authentic, and surmised that Adler first offered it in one of her acting classes.

• Every habit he’s ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom. Margaret Atwood, describing the character Snowman, in Oryx and Crake (2004)

• All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation. W. H. Auden, in A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970)

• I’m extremely skeptical of the “language of addiction.” I never saw heroin or cocaine as “my illness.” I saw them as some very bad choices that I walked knowingly into. I fucked myself—and, eventually, had to work hard to get myself un-fucked. Anthony Bourdain, in Medium Raw (2010)

• The priority of any addict is to anesthetize the pain of living to ease the passage of day with some purchased relief. Russell Brand, in a 2011 blog post about the death of Amy Winehouse (NOTE: in his post, Brand used the British spelling: anaesthetise)

• I’ll die young, but it’s like kissing God. Lenny Bruce, on his heroin use, quoted in Richard Neville, Play Power: Exploring the International Underground (1970)

QUOTE NOTE: No original source for this legendary quotation has ever been found, and its appearance in Neville’s book is one of the earliest (if not the earliest) print citations. Neville told master quotation researcher Bob Deis that he did not personally hear Bruce make the remark, adding “I can’t recall the first time I heard it, though I do remember the saying being quoted in the London OZ office in the late Sixties.” For more on the quote, go to: Kissing God.

• A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency, need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: Wouldn’t you? Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. William S. Burroughs, a reflection of narrator William Lee, in The Naked Lunch (1959)

Burroughs preceded the thought by writing: “The face of ‘evil’ is always the face of total need.”

• Junk is the ideal product…the ultimate merchandise [ellipsis in original]. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy. William S. Burroughs, narrator William Lee speaking, in The Naked Lunch (1959)

Burroughs, who used the term junk for heroin, continued with this oft-quoted example of chiasmus: “The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product.”

• Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite. William S. Burroughs, narrator William Lee speaking, in The Naked Lunch (1959)

• You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in any other direction. Junk wins by default. William S. Burroughs, in Junky (1977)

• Corporations are addicted to profit and governments to power. Helen Caldicott, in If You Love This Planet (1992)

• To be an addict is to be something of a cognitive acrobat. You spread versions of yourself around, giving each person the truth he or she needs—you need, actually—to keep them at a remove. David Carr, “Me and My Girls,” in The New York Times Magazine (July 20, 2008)

QUOTE NOTE: The article is Carr’s brutally honest—and even emotionally riveting—account of his struggle with addiction and alcoholism, told more fully in the book The Night of the Gun (2008). After his recovery, Carr went on to become a respected and influential culture reporter and media columnist for the Times. Here are the opening paragraphs of his powerful piece:

“Where does a junkie’s time go? Mostly in 15-minute increments, like a bug-eyed Tarzan, swinging from hit to hit. For months on end in 1988, I sat inside a house in north Minneapolis, doing coke and listening to Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’ and finding my own pathetic resonance in the lyrics. ‘Any place is better,’ she sang. ‘Starting from zero, got nothing to lose.’

After shooting or smoking a large dose, there would be the tweaking and a vigil at the front window, pulling up the corner of the blinds to look for the squads I was always convinced were on their way. All day. All night. A frantic kind of boring. End-stage addiction is mostly about waiting for the police, or someone, to come and bury you in your shame.” The full article may be seen at: “Me and My Girls”.

• Sometimes people who need help look nothing like people who need help. Glennon Doyle Melton, in Carry On Warrior (2013)

Doyle Melton was thinking about herself in this observation, writing, “I was what they call a ‘highly functional addict.’”

• I shot through my twenties like a luminous thread through a dark needle, blazing toward my destination: Nowhere. Carrie Fisher, a diary entry of protagonist Suzanne Vale during her fifth day in detox, in Postcards From the Edge (1987)

Vale preceded the thought by writing: “The positive way to look at this is that from here things can only go up. But I’ve been up, and I always feel like a trespasser. A transient at the top. It’s like I’ve got a visa for happiness, but for sadness I’ve got a lifetime pass.”

• I was into pain reduction and mind expansion, but what I’ve ended up with is pain expansion and mind reduction. Carrie Fisher, a diary entry of protagonist Suzanne Vale during her seventh day in detox, in Postcards From the Edge (1987)

Vale added: “Everything hurts now, and nothing makes sense.”

• Saying you’re an alcoholic and an addict is like saying you’re from Los Angeles and from California. Carrie Fisher, in Wishful Drinking (2008)

• Junkies are at the top of the crazy chain. Michael Thomas Ford, in Suicide Notes: A Novel (2010)

• Addiction is the disease of our age. It is cunning and powerful. It proceeds from our chronic spiritual hunger and is nourished by our focus on getting and spending, and on news and gossip outside ourselves. Erica Jong, in Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir (1994)

Jong continued: “Everything we need is happening within us. The focus on reports of others is only a distraction from the needs of our own spirit. Addiction grows fat from our chronic quashing of the inner life. We believe the spiritual does not exist because we have made insufficient space for it to manifest in our lives.”

• Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine, or idealism. Carl Jung, in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)

• There’s an image I’ve heard people in recovery use—that getting all of one’s addictions under control is a little like putting an octopus to bed. Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

• Trying to reason with an addict was like trying to blow out a lightbulb. Anne Lamott, in Imperfect Birds (2010)

• While susceptibility varies, addiction can happen to any of us, through a subtle process where the bonds of degradation are too light to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. Charlie Munger, in “How to Guarantee a Life of Misery,” a commencement speech to The Harvard School for Boys (Los Angeles, California; June 13, 1986)

• Imagine everything feeling wrong. Imagine a hole in your chest the size of God. Amy Reed, the words of a character attempting to describe addiction, in Clean (2011)

(see PARTS OF SPEECH)

(see also APPLAUSE and APPRECIATION and AWE and PRAISE and RECOGNITION)

• Admiration is a very short-lived passion, that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object. Joseph Addison, in The Spectator (Dec. 24, 1711)

QUOTE NOTE: In what I have always regarded as an important insight into relationships, Addison added that admiration will decay “unless it be still fed with fresh discoveries, and kept alive by a new perpetual succession of miracles rising up to its view.”

• Between flattery and admiration there often flows a river of contempt. Minna Antrim, in Naked Truth and Veiled Allusions (1901)

• A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment. Jane Austen, the character Mr. Darcy speaking, in Pride and Prejudice (1813)

• Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves. Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

• A fool can always find a greater fool to admire him. Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, in L’Art Poétique (1674)

• Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and insensibly approximate to the characters we most admire. Christian Nestell Bovee, in Intuitions and Summaries of Thought, Vol. II (1862)

• Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities. Elizabeth Bowen, the voice of the narrator, in The Death of the Heart (1938)

• The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness. F. H. Bradley, in Aphorisms (1930)

• No nobler feeling than this, of admiration for one higher than himself, dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's life. Thomas Carlyle, “The Hero as Divinity,” in Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840)

• One may have staunch friends in one’s own family, but one seldom has admirers. Willa Cather, the voice of the narrator, in The Song of the Lark (1915)

• Ignorance is the mother of admiration. George Chapman, in The Widow’s Tears (1612)

• Admiration, like love, wears out. Luc de Clapiers (Marquis de Vauvenargues), in Reflections and Maxims (1746)

• To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration. Charles Horton Cooley, in Human Nature and the Social Order (1902)

• It is not enough to become admired, one must also be forgiven for it. Comtesse Diane, in Les Glanes de la Vie (1898)

• Admiration is the daughter of ignorance. Thomas Fuller, in The Holy and Profane State (1642)

ERROR ALERT: The saying is often misattributed to Benjamin Franklin, who presented the observation without attribution in a 1736 issue of Poor Richard’s Almanack.

• Those who are formed to win general admiration, are seldom calculated to bestow individual happiness. Marguerite Gardiner (Lady Blessington), in Desultory Thoughts and Reflections (1839)

• To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind. Théophile Gautier, quoted in Frederick W. Morton, Love in Epigram, (1899)

• Children need admiration rather than affection. Celia Green, in Advice to Clever Children (1981)

• Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration. William Hazlitt, in Characteristics (1823)

QUOTE NOTE: The meaning of this altered aphorism is clear, even if it does have a somewhat awkward phrasing. Many books and internet sites have changed the original wording to make it read: “…it takes the edge off of admiration.”

• There’s nothing makes you admire people like seeing yourself in them. Victoria Holt, the character Ben Henniker speaking, in The Pride of the Peacock (1976)

• You can’t ever be really free if you admire somebody too much. Tove Jansson, the character Shufkin speaking, in Tales From Moominvalley (1963)

• By simple definition, a hero is someone we can admire without apology. Kitty Kelley, “An 80-Year Hitting Streak,” The New York Times (Feb. 25, 1995)

• Americans respect talent only insofar as it leads to fame, and we reserve our most fervent admiration for famous people who destroy their lives as well as their talent. Florence King, in Lump It Or Leave It (1990)

King continued: “The fatal flaws of Elvis, Judy, and Marilyn register much higher on our national applause meter than their living achievements. In America, talent is merely a tool for becoming famous in life so you can become more famous in death— where all are equal.”

• I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift of admiration to be, by all odds, the most indispensable for self-improvement. Frankly, I cannot imagine where I would now be without it. Thomas Mann, in a 1950 letter to Hans Mater, quoted in André Von Gronicka, Thomas Mann: Profile and Perspectives (1970)

• A mixture of admiration and pity is one of the surest recipes for affection. André Maurois, in Ariel: The Live of Shelley (1923)

• I always wish to find great virtues where there are great talents, and to love what I admire. Elizabeth Montagu in a 1774 letter, quoted in Anna Letitia Le Breton, Memoir of Mrs. Barbauld (1874)

• Is admiration simply a refined form of envy? Hart Pomerantz, in a personal communication (June 29, 2019)

• Fools admire, but men of sense approve. Alexander Pope, in An Essay on Criticism (1711)

• You always admire what you really don't understand. Eleanor Roosevelt, in a 1956 appearance of NBC-TV's Meet the Press (specific date undetermined)

• Admiration and familiarity are strangers. George Sand, quoted in Maturin Murray Ballou, Edge-Tools of Speech (1886)

QUOTATION CAUTION: This quotation has not been found in Sand’s works.

• Admiration is one of the chief delights of living. Florida Scott-Maxwell, in The Measure of My Days (1968)

• We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word “admire” then means “marvel at.” B. F. Skinner, in Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1972)

• The modern world is not given to uncritical admiration. It expects its idols to have feet of clay, and can be reasonably sure that press and camera will report their exact dimensions. Barbara Ward, “First Lady, First Person,” in a 1961 issue of The Saturday Review (specific issue undetermined)

(see also AGE & AGING and CHILDREN & CHILDHOOD and FAMILY and TEENAGER and PUBERTY and YOUTH and YOUTH & AGE)

• Adolescence is society’s permission slip for combining physical maturity with psychological irresponsibility. Terri Apter, in Altered Loves: Mothers and Daughters During Adolescence (1990)

QUOTE NOTE: A bit earlier. Apter had written: “One of the main tasks of adolescence is to achieve an identity—not necessarily a knowledge of who we are, but a clarification of the range of what we might become, a set of self-references by which we can make sense of our responses, and justify our decisions and goals.”

• Snow and adolescence are the only problems that disappear if you ignore them long enough. Author Unknown, quoted in his syndicated “It Happened Last Night” column (June, 1955)

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet sites attribute this quotation directly to Wilson, but in his column, he presented the quotation under the heading: “Wish I’d Said That.”

• When they reach the age of fifteen and their beauty arrives, it’s very exciting—like coming into an inheritance. Eve Babitz, “The Sheik,” in Eve’s Hollywood (1974)

Babitz, who was talking about the adolescent daughters of Hollywood’s elite, added: “And, as with inheritances, it’s fun to be around when they first come into the money and watch how they spend it and on what.”

• As I vaguely recalled from my own experience, adolescence was a time when you firmly believed that sex hadn’t been invented until the year you started high school, when the very idea that anything interesting might have happened during your parents’ lifetime was unthinkable. Russell Baker, “Life with Mother,” in William Zinsser, Inventing the Truth (1987)

• Young children grow, but adolescents change—and change is confusing. It confuses the sprouting adolescent to wake up every morning in a new body. It confuses the mother and father to find a new child every day in a familiar body—a child contumelious of the things that yesterday’s child wanted, a child with a different rhythm of living, a child who talks knowingly about things that yesterday’s child never heard of. Donald Barr, in Who Pushed Humpty Dumpty? Dilemmas in American Education Today (1971)

Barr continued: “By and large adolescents welcome their own confusion because it affords them a sort of argumentative freedom of action.”

QUOTE NOTE: If the word contumelious is unfamiliar to you, you have lots of company. The American Heritage Dictionary lists it as an adjective for the noun contumely, which they define as “Rudeness or contempt arising from arrogance; insolence.”

• Adolescence goes to at least the age of 49. Alan Berman, in Adolescent Suicide (1991)

• Young birds on their first flight. Georges Bernanos, on adolescence, in The Diary of a Country Priest (1936)

QUOTE NOTE: I found this wonderful phrase in a slightly longer passage that went this way: “What a cunning mixture of sentiment, pity, tenderness, irony surrounds adolescence, what knowing watchfulness! Young birds on their first flight are hardly so hovered around.”

• Adolescence is just one big walking pimple. Carol Burnett, on The Phil Donahue Show (Oct. 16, 1986)

• Adolescence is the time when even the dullest clod knows that he possesses a soul and the genius that he lives in a perpetual adolescence. Raymond B. Cattell, in An Introduction to Personality (1950)

• You don’t have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. John Ciardi, in Saturday Review (Fall, 1962)

• I have always pondered a tragic law of adolescence. (On second thought, the law probably applies to all ages to some extent). That law: People fall in love at the same time—often at the same stunning moment—but they fall out of love at different times. One is left sadly juggling the pieces of a fractured heart while the other has danced away. Robert Cormier, in Introduction to Eight Plus One: Stories (1991)

Cormier opened his Introduction with these words: “The transient quality of adolescence and the emotional debris accumulated by adolescents along the way has always fascinated me. Not merely as an observer. I have carried my own emotional luggage from those adolescent years for a long long time.”

• Adolescence is to life what baking powder is to cake. (And it’s better to have too much than too little). Marcelene Cox, in a 1946 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal (date not determined)

• It is a jesting universe where the longing for first romance couples with acne. Gwen Davis, in How to Survive in Suburbia When Your Heart’s in the Himalayas (1976)

• Mope—Hope—Grope. Maxine Davis, her characterization of adolescence, in The Lost Generation: A Portrait of American Youth Today (1936)

• All the best human impulses can be traced back to adolescence. Helene Deutsch, in Confrontations With Myself: An Epilogue (1973)

• You have a wonderful child. Then, when he’s thirteen, gremlins carry him away and leave in his place a stranger who gives you not a moment’s peace. You have to hang in there, because two or three years later, the gremlins will return your child, and he will be wonderful again. Jill Eikenberry, “On Raising Teenagers,” in Parade magazine (July 12, 1987)

• With any child entering adolescence, one hunts for signs of health, is desperate for the smallest indication that the child’s problems will never be important enough for a television movie. Delia Ephron, in Funny Sauce (1986)

ERROR ALERT: Many internet sites mistakenly attribute this quotation to Delia Ephron’s elder sister, Nora.

• At sixteen I was stupid, confused and indecisive. At twenty-five I was wise, self-confident, prepossessing, and assertive. At forty-five I am stupid, confused, insecure, and indecisive. Who would have supposed that maturity is only a short break in adolescence? Jules Feiffer, self-dialogue in a Feiffer cartoon; quoted in The Observer (London; Feb. 3, 1974)

• Adolescents often behave much like members of an old-fashioned aristocracy. They maintain private rituals, which they often do not really understand themselves. They are extremely conservative in their dress and tastes, but the conventions to which they adhere are purely those of their own social group; they try to ignore the norms of the larger society if these conflict with their own. Edgar Z. Friedenberg, in The Vanishing Adolescent (1959)

Friedenberg continued: “They can be extravagantly generous and extravagantly cruel, but rarely petty or conniving. Their virtues are courage and loyalty; while even the necessity for even a moderate degree of compromise humiliates them greatly. They tend to be pugnacious and quarrelsome about what they believe to be their rights, but naive and reckless in defending them. They are shy, but not modest. If they become very anxious they are likely to behave eccentrically, to withdraw, or to attack with some brutality; they are less likely to blend themselves innocuously into the environment with an apologetic smile. They are honest on occasions when even a stupid adult would have better sense.”

• Human life is a continuous thread which each of us spins to his own pattern, rich and complex in meaning. There are no natural knots in it. Yet knots form, nearly always in adolescence. Edgar Z. Friedenberg, in Coming of Age in America (1963)

• Adolescence is located in the foothills of Jackass Mountain. William Fuerste, in a personal communication to Robert Byrne; quoted in Byrne’s The 2,548 Wittiest Things Ever Said (2012)

• The conveyer belt that transported adolescents into adulthood has broken down. Dr. Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr., quoted in Peg Tyre, “Bringing Up Adultolescents”, Newsweek magazine (March 25, 2002)

Tyre’s article introduced the portmanteau word adultolescent to American culture. Her piece was based on the growing number of young adults between ages 25–34 who were still living with their parents (nearly four million, according to 2000 Census data). The week before Tyre’s article appeared, an online job-search firm (MonsterTRAK.com) reported that 60 percent of college students surveyed said they planned to live at home after graduation, with more than one in five estimating that they were likely to remain in their childhood homes for more than a year. Furstenberg, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist, had been awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant to study the phenomenon.

• Adolescence isn’t a training ground for adulthood now; it is a holding pattern for aging youth. Ellen Goodman, in At Large (1981)

• Instinct told her that childhood’s garden had been barred and there was no return. In some measure this simple truth is known to every adolescent. Bertita Harding, the narrator describing a realization on the part of the title character, in Farewell ’Toinette: A Footnote to History (1938)

• Adolescence is the period of life when we first become obsessed with trying to prove we are not a child—an obsession that can last a lifetime. Cullen Hightower, in Wit Kit (1983)

• We carry adolescence around in our bodies all our lives. Garrison Keillor, in The Book of Guys (1993)

Keillor continued: “We get through the Car Crash Age alive and cruise through our early twenties as cool dudes, wily, dashing, winsome, wearing white socks and black loafers, saying incredibly witty things, shooting baskets, the breeze, the moon, and then we try to become caring men, good husbands, great fathers, good citizens, despite the fact that guys are fundamentally unfaithful.”

• The rich loam of adolescence—a time of constant crisis and ceaseless calamity—beckons writers to till and retill youthful memories; “just like a criminal; goes back to the place of his crime,” said Isaac Beshevis Singer. Ralph Keyes, in The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear (1995)

• Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness. Both are funny, but only in retrospect. Arthur Koestler, in Arrow in the Blue: An Autobiography, Vol. 1 (1952)

Koestler continued: “The youth of sixteen that I was with the plastered-down hair and the fatuous smirk, at once arrogant and sheepish, was emotionally seasick: greedy for pleasure, haunted by guilt, torn between feelings of inferiority and superiority, between the need for contemplative solitude and the frustrated urge for gregariousness and play.”

• Children from ten to twenty don’t want to be understood. Their whole ambition is to feel strange and alien and misinterpreted so that they can live austerely in some stone tower of adolescence, their privacies unviolated. Phyllis McGinley, “New Year and No Resolutions,” in Merry Christmas, Happy New Year (1958)

• It is too often the case to be a mere accident that men who become eminent for wide compass of understanding and penetrating comprehension, are in their adolescence unsettled and desultory. John Morley, “Edmund Burke,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica (1876)

• Adolescence is a twentieth-century invention most parents approach with dread and look back on with the relief of survivors. Faye Moskowitz, in A Leak in the Heart: Tales From a Woman’s Life (1985)

• O Adolescence, O Adolescence,/I wince before thine incandescence./Thy constitution young and hearty/Is too much for this aged party. Ogden Nash, “Tarkington, Thou Should’st Be Living in This Hour,” in The New Yorker magazine (Sep. 20, 1947); reprinted in Versus (1949)

QUOTE NOTE: These are the opening lines of Nash’s poetic reflection on life with his own teenage children. The title of the poem is borrowed from the first line of William Wordsworth’s 1802 poem “London, 1802,” which begins: “Milton, thou should’st be living at this hour.” Nash’s poem may also be seen as an admiring nod to Booth Tarkington’s portrayal of adolescent psychology in his bestselling 1916 novel Seventeen: A Tale of Youth and Summer Time and the Baxter Family, Especially William.

• Adolescence is like cactus. Anaïs Nin, the character Lillian speaking, in Seduction of the Minotaur (1961; orig. pub. as Solar Barque in 1958)

• The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise. Alden Nowlan, in “Scratchings“ (1971)

• The ripeness of adolescence is prodigal in pleasures, skittish, and in need of a bridle. Plutarch, “The Education of Children,” in Moralia (c. 100 A.D.)

• I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box. Anna Quindlen, “Mom, Dad, and Abortion,” in The New York Times (July 1, 1990), reprinted in Thinking Out Loud (1993)

• Adolescence is a tough time for parent and child alike. It is a time between: between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal responsibility, between life stage-managed by grown-ups and life privately held. Anna Quindlen, “Parental Rites,” in The New York Times (Sep. 25, 1991); reprinted in Thinking Out Loud (1993)

• The transformation into a werewolf in particular is a metaphor for adolescence and the sexual transformation of a child. Anne Rice, in an interview in Lightspeed magazine (June, 2012)

Rice continued: “You have a basically neuter-gender person who’s on an equal footing with all other neuter-gender people, and then suddenly adolescence comes and one child turns into a woman, another child turns into a man, both experience sexuality, and sexuality really turns their world upside down.”

• So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying,/An intolerable waiting,/A longing for another place and time,/Another condition. Theodore Roethke, “I’m Here,” in The Collected Verse of Theodore Rothke (1961)

• The end of adolescence is the beginning of adulthood. What hasn’t been finished then will have to be finished later. Virginia Satir, in The New Peoplemaking (1988)

Satir preceded the observation by writing: “I feel that adolescence has served its purpose when a person arrives at adulthood with a strong sense of self-esteem, the ability to relate intimately, to communicate congruently, to take responsibility, and to take risks.”

• Adolescents are like cockroaches: They come out the minute you leave town, crawl the walls, feed indiscriminately, reproduce alarmingly unless drugged, and will certainly outlast you. Gail Sheehy, in Spirit of Survival (1986)

• Parental trust is extremely important in the guidance of adolescent children as they get further and further away from the direct supervision of their parents and teachers. I don’t mean that trust without clear guidance is enough, but guidance without trust is worthless. Benjamin Spock, in Raising Children in a Difficult Time (1985)

• In no order of things is adolescence a time of the simple life. Janet Erskine Stuart, quoted in Maud Monahan, Life and Letters of Janet Erskine Stuart (1922)

Stuart went on to say about adolescents: “When we recommend the simple life to them, it is quite useless, for it is not understood.”

• Although I was well past my teenage troubles, our music was specifically designed to lubricate the passage from adolescence to adulthood. Pete Townshend, quoted in BBC News: World Edition (Jan. 12, 2003)

• Many of us are done with adolescence before we are done with adolescent love. Judith Viorst, in Necessary Losses (1986)

• A normal adolescent isn’t a normal adolescent if he acts normal. Judith Viorst, in Necessary Losses (1986). Also an example of oxymoronica.

(see also ADOLESCENCE and AGE & AGING and AGE & AGING—MIDDLE AGE and AGE & AGING—OLD AGE and AGE & AGING—SPECIFIC AGES & DECADES and CHILDREN & CHILDHOOD and IMMATURITY and MATURITY and YOUTH and YOUTH & AGE)

• When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names for hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay. Brian Aldiss, in The Guardian (Manchester; Dec. 31, 1971)

• Adults need to have fun so children will want to grow up. Erica Bauermeister, Sara’s father speaking, repeating the motto of a kinetic sculpture race they are competing in, in Joy for Beginners (2011)

• What is an adult? A child blown up by age. Simone de Beauvoir, in The Woman Destroyed (1967)

• The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults. Peter De Vries, the voice of the unnamed narrator, in The Tunnel of Love (1954). Also an example of chiasmus.

• Adults are just obsolete children. Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), quoted in Thomas Fensch, Of Sneetches and Whos and the Good Dr. Seuss: Essays on the Writings and Life of Theodor Geisel (1997)

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the quotation almost always appears, but the full quotation reflected Geisel’s strong preference in favor of writing for children instead of adults: “Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.”

• We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice—that is, until we have stopped saying “It got lost,” and say, “I lost it.” Sydney J. Harris, in On the Contrary (1962)

• A boy becomes an adult three years before his parents think he does, and about two years after he thinks he does. Gen. Lewis B. Hershey, in remarks to the press (Dec. 30, 1951)

QUOTE NOTE: General Hershey, the Director of Selective Service at the time, was making remarks about the maturity of teenage boys who were approaching military draft age.

• The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise. Alden Nowlan, in “Scratchings“ (1971)

• To be adult is to be alone. Jean Rostand, in Pensées d’un Biologiste [Thoughts of a Biologist] (1939)

• A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong. Thomas Szasz, “Childhood,” in The Second Sin (1973)

(see INFIDELITY)

(see also IMPROVEMENT and PROGRESS and PROMOTION)

• A thousand things advance, nine hundred and ninety-eight retreat: this is progress. Henri-Frédéric Amiel, entry in Journal Intime (Oct. 4, 1873)

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet sites mistakenly say “nine-hundred and ninety-nine.”

• Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. John Dewey, in The Quest for Certainty (1929)

• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C. Clarke, “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination,” in Profiles of the Future (1962)

QUOTE NOTE: This is commonly referred to as “Clarke’s Third Law.” For all three, as well as the story behind them, go to: Clarke’s Three Laws.

• If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power. Dwight D. Eisenhower, in address at the 4th Annual Republican Women’s National Conference, Washington, D.C. (March, 6, 1956)

• The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery. Erik H. Erikson, in Childhood and Society (1950)

• I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance. Seth Godin, in Poke the Box (2011)

• The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced. Victor Hugo, the old revolutionary speaking, in Les Misérables (1862)

• All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance. Edward Gibbon, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. VI (1788)

• It is, however, reasonable to have perfection in our eye; that we may always advance towards it, though we know it never can be reached. Samuel Johnson, in The Adventurer (Aug. 28, 1753)

• Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly. Amy Lowell, in Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917)

Lowell preceded the thought by writing: “Poetry, far more than fiction, reveals the soul of humanity.”

• Walks. The body advances, while the mind flutters around it like a bird. Jules Renard, a December 1907 journal entry, in The Journals of Jules Renard (1964; Louise Bogan & Elizabeth Roget, eds.)

• When natural inclination develops into a passionate desire, one advances towards his goal in seven-league boots. Nikola Tesla, in My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla (1919)

• The defining moments in our lives often don’t come with advance warning. Sally Yates, in Class Day speech at Harvard Law School (May 24, 2017)

(see also DANGER and DISCOVERY and EXCITEMENT and EXPLORATION and RISKS & RISK-TAKING and THRILLS & THRILL-SEEKING)

• People often ask me where they might go to find adventure. Adventure is not something you must travel to find, I tell them, it’s something you take with you. Diane Ackerman, “Worlds Within Worlds,” in The New York Times (Dec. 17, 1995)

• Adventure is just bad planning. Roald Amundsen, quoted in Adrian Raeside. Return to Antarctica (2009)

• Always remember, it’s simply not an adventure worth telling if there aren’t any dragons. Sarah Ban Breathnach, in Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy (1995)

• Never forget that Life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely, gallantly, as a splendid Adventure, in which you are setting out into an unknown country, to face many a danger, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle. Annie Besant, quoted in a 1924 article in The Theosophist (specific date undetermined)

• The adventurer is within us, and he contests for our favor with the social man we are obliged to be. These two sorts of life are incompatible; one we hanker after, the other we are obliged to. There is no other conflict so deep and bitter as this. William Bolitho, in Introduction to Twelve Against the Gods (1929)

Later in the book, Bolitho wrote on the subject: “An adventure differs from a mere feat in that it is tied to the eternally unattainable. Only one end of the rope is in the hand, the other is not visible, and neither prayers, not daring, nor reason can shake it free.”

• One of the inescapable encumbrances of leading an interesting life is that there have to be moments when you almost lose it. Jimmy Buffett, in A Pirate Looks at Fifty (1998)

• The great object in life is Sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain; it is this “craving void” which drives us to gaming, to battle, to travel, to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment. George Noel Gordon (Lord Byron), in letter to Annabella Millbanke, later Lady Byron (Sep. 6, 1813)

QUOTE NOTE: Byron borrowed the term craving void from Alexander Pope, who introduced it in the poem Eloisa to Abelard (c. 1716). In the throes of love (“Oh happy state!” according to Pope), two souls are drawn so close together that “All then is full” and “No craving void is left aching [aking in the original] in the breast.”)

• A little tumult, now and then, is an agreeable quickener of sensation; such as a revolution, a battle, or an adventure of any lively description. George Noel Gordon (Lord Byron), journal entry (Nov. 22, 1813)

• An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. G. K. Chesterton, “On Running After One’s Hat,” in All Things Considered (1908). Also an example of chiasmus.

• Adventure is the champagne of life, but I prefer my adventures and my champagne dry. G. K. Chesterton, in A Shilling for My Thoughts (1916)

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet sites present only the first portion of the quotation, failing to accurately capture Chesterton’s full thought.

• A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance. Joseph Conrad, in A Personal Record (1912)

QUOTE NOTE: Conrad was specifically referring to the adventurous spirit of the English people, but his observation applies to all people.

• We pay for security with boredom, for adventure with bother. Peter De Vries, the protagonist Chick Swallow speaking, in Comfort Me With Apples (1956)

• An adventure is when you know where you’re going but you don’t know what you will find when you get there. Brad and Martha Lynne Dixon, in personal communication to the compiler (Dec. 2, 2018)

• Adventure must be held in delicate fingers. It should be handled, not embraced. It should be sipped, not swallowed at a gulp. Ashley Dukes, the Nobleman speaking, in The Man with a Load of Mischief (1924)

• Hooray for the last grand adventure! I wish I had won but it was worthwhile anyway. Amelia Earhart, in letter to her father (May 20, 1928); quoted in Melinda Blau, Whatever Happened to Amelia Earhart? (1977)

QUOTE NOTE: Earhart wrote the letter on the eve of her first transatlantic flight, leaving instructions that it be delivered only in the event of her death. She continued: “You know that I have no faith we’ll meet anywhere again, but I wish we might. Anyway, goodbye and good luck to you.” The letter was never delivered. Earhart lived nine more years, disappearing somewhere over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937 after taking off from an airport in New Guinea. She was thirty-nine years of age (two more years would elapse, though, before she was legally declared dead).

• The thirst for adventure is the vent which Destiny offers; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new country, speak to the imagination and offer swing and play to the confined powers. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Boston,” in Natural History of the Intellect (1893)

• One way to get the most out of life is to look upon it as an adventure. William Feather, in The Business of Life (1949)

• Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually. E. M. Forster, in A Passage to India (1924)

• It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves—in finding themselves. André Gide, journal entry (Oct. 26, 1924)

• We love because it’s the only true adventure. Nikki Giovanni, quoted in Ebony magazine (Aug. 1981)

• Adventure is not outside a man; it is within. It is a strange thing, once the mind goes free, what may happen to any man. David Grayson, in Adventures in Solitude (1931)

• Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science. Edwin Hubble, in “The Exploration of Space,” Harper’s Magazine (May, 1929)

• Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith! Robert C. Ingersoll, in The Gods (1872)

• Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Helen Keller, in Let Us Have Faith (1940)

QUOTE NOTE: This observation has become indelibly associated with Keller, whose life personified the words. Here’s the full passage in which her signature line originally appeared: “Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run that outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold. Faith alone defends. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.”

• Adventure is nothing but a romantic name for trouble. Louis L’Amour, in Education of a Wandering Man (1989)

L’Amour continued: “What people speak of as adventure is something nobody in his right mind would seek out, and it becomes romantic only when one is safely at home.”

• There are two kinds of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won’t. William Least Heat Moon (pen name of William Trogdon), in Blue Highways (1982)

• Adventure is the point where you toss your life on the scales of chance and wait for the pointer to stop. Murray Leinster (pen name of W. F. Jenkins), in First Contact (1945)

• The Call of the Wild. Jack London, title of 1903 novel, and a popular adventure metaphor

• Having adventures comes natural to some people. You just have a gift for them or you haven’t. L. M. Montgomery, the title character speaking, in Anne of Avonlea (1909)

• How narrow is the line which separates an adventure from an ordeal. Harold Nicolson, in Small Talk (1937)

• They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm. Dorothy Parker, in poem “Fair Weather,” in Sunset Gun (1928)

ERROR ALERT: Many quotation anthologies mistakenly present the final portion as: “who know the storm”

• A man practices the art of adventure when he breaks the chain of routine and renews his life through reading new books, traveling to new places, making new friends, taking up new hobbies and adopting new viewpoints. Wilferd A. Peterson, in The Art of Living: Thoughts on Meeting the Challenges of Life (1997)

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet quotation sites mistakenly present the author’s name as Wilfred.

• We learn what is significantly new only through adventures. However, going into the unknown is invariably frightening. M. Scott Peck, in The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace (1987)

• Adventure is something you seek for pleasure, or even for profit, like a gold rush or invading a country; for the illusion of being more alive than ordinarily, the thing you will to occur. Katherine Anne Porter, “Adventure in Living,” in Mademoiselle magazine (Aug., 1955)

• Take a walk on the wild side. Lou Reed, lyric from the hit song “Walk on the Wild Side,” on the Transformer album (1972)

QUOTE NOTE: The title of Reed’s song was borrowed from Nelson Algren’s 1956 novel (see the Algren entry in TITLES—OF BOOKS & PLAYS. Reed’s song went in a different direction, though, celebrating an array of counter-cultural characters who had inhabited the world of artist Andy Warhol (for more, see the Wikipedia entry on the song). See also the music video, which brings the characters to life.

• All adventures—especially into new territory—are scary. Sally Ride, in To Space and Back (1986; with Susan Okie)

• Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure. J. K. Rowling, Dumbledore speaking to Harry, in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005)

• But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called. Agnes Smedley, a reflection of protagonist Marie Rogers, in Daughter of Earth (1929)

• Beauty and adventure have a certain value of their own, which can be weighed only in spiritual scales. Elva S. Smith, offering a “considered conviction” of Amelia Earhart, in Adventure Calls: True Stories and Some That Might Have Been True (1953)

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet sites attribute the observation to Amelia Earhart, but it is clear from Smith’s book that she was summarizing a belief of the legendary aviator.

• What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in every thing; and who, having eyes to see what time and chance are perpetually holding out to him as he journeyeth on his way, misses nothing he can fairly lay his hands on! Laurence Sterne, the voice of narrator and protagonist, the Rev. Mr. Yorick, in A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

• The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek. Robert Louis Stevenson, the concluding line to An Inland Voyage (1878)

• Adventure is hardship aesthetically considered. Barry Targan, the narrator, quoting an unnamed former teacher, in Kingdoms (1980)

• I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate. Vincent van Gogh, in an 1886 letter; reprinted in The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Vol. 2 (1958)

• So life ought to be a struggle of desire towards adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul. Rebecca West, in “The Gospel According to Granville-Barker,” in The Freewoman (March 7, 1912)

• Without adventure civilization is in full decay. Alfred North Whitehead, in Adventures of Ideas (1933)

Whitehead preceded the thought by writing: “A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be; and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past.”

• The test of an adventure is that when you’re in the middle of it, you say to yourself, “Oh, now I’ve got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home.” Thornton Wilder, the character Barnaby speaking, in The Matchmaker (1955)

Barnaby went on: “And the sign that something’s wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.”

• If we didn’t live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I’ve no doubt, but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged. Virginia Woolf, a 1924 diary entry, quoted in Leonard Woolf, A Writer’s Diary (1954)

(see PARTS OF SPEECH)

(see also ALLIES and ANTAGONISTS and ENEMIES and FOES and FRIENDS and FRIENDS & ENEMIES and OPPOSITION)

• He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. Edmund Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

• May Providence protect me from/The fool as adversary,/Whose mind to him a kingdom is/Where reason lacks dominion,/Who calls conviction prejudice/And prejudice opinion. Phyllis McGinley, “Moody Reflections,” in The New Yorker (Feb. 13, 1954). Note the chiastic reversal in the last two lines.

McGinley began the piece of verse by writing: “When blithe to argument I come,/Though armed with facts, and merry.”

• Let us do as mighty adversaries do in law, strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends. William Shakespeare, the character Triano speaking, in The Taming of the Shrew (1592)

• In all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane. Mark Twain, in Christian Science (1907)

(see also BURDENS and CALAMITY and CRISIS and DANGER and DIFFICULTIES and HARDSHIP and MISERY & WOE and MISFORTUNE and OBSTACLES and PROBLEMS and PROSPERITY and PROSPERITY & ADVERSITY and TEST and TRIALS & TRIBULATIONS and TROUBLE and STUMBLES & STUMBLING and STRUGGLE and SUFFERING & SORROW)

• People and nations are forged in the fires of adversity. John Adams, in letter to Abigail Adams (July 3, 1776)

• Do not let adversity break you. Think of it as a learning experience that will make you stronger. Gloria Allred, in More (2006)

• Gold is tried in fire, and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity. Apocrypha—Ecclesiasticus: 2:5

See the similar thought by Seneca the Younger below.

• Even in adversity, nobility shines through, when a man endures repeated and severe misfortune with patience, not owing to insensibility but from generosity and greatness of soul. Aristotle, in The Nicomachean Ethics (4th c. B.C.)

• Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; and adversity is not without comforts and hopes. Francis Bacon, “Of Adversity,” in Essays (1625)

QUOTE NOTE: in that same essay, Bacon offered these additional thoughts:

“Prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.”

“Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New.”

• In any adversity gold can find friends. Amelia E. Barr, in The Maid of Maiden Lane (1900)

• A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity. The Bible, Proverbs 17:17 (KJV)

• If thou faint in the day of adversity thy strength is small. The Bible Proverbs 24:10 (KJV)

• Adversity has the same effect on a man that severe training does on the pugilist—it reduces him to his fighting weight. Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw), in Affurisms: Slips of the Pen (1865)

QUOTE NOTE: Shaw, a New York journalist, adopted the name Josh Billings in the 1860s and became famous for a cracker-barrel philosophy that was filled with aphorisms written in a phonetic dialect (he called them “affurisms”). Mark Twain was a big fan, once even comparing Billings to Ben Franklin. Almost all of the Billings quotations seen today first appeared in a phonetic form and were later changed into standard English (the original form of this saying was: “Adversity haz the same effekt on a man that severe training duz on the pugilist—it reduces him tew his fighting waight”).

• As the flint contains the spark, unknown to itself, which the steel alone can awaken to life, so adversity often reveals to us hidden gems which prosperity or negligence would forever have hidden. Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw), in The Complete Works of Josh Billings (1873)

The phonetic version of this quotation was as follows: “Az the flint kontains the spark, unknown tew itself, which the steel alone kan wake into life, so adversity often reveals tew us hidden gems which prosperity or negligence would forever hav hid.”

• If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome. Anne Bradstreet, in Meditations Divine and Moral (1664)

Bradstreet was the first published poet (of either gender) in the American colonies. She wrote the book for her son Simon, writing in the dedication: “You once desired me to leave something for you in writing that you might look upon when you should see me no more.” In 1630, the teenage Bradstreet, her parents, and her new husband set sail on the ship Arbella for the New World (the captain was John Winthrop). While her husband went on to become the colony’s governor, she raised eight children and privately wrote poetry.

• Adversity is a good school. Charlotte Brontë, in an 1839 letter, in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, Vol. 1 (1995; Margaret Smith, ed.)

• Adversity is the first path to truth. George Noel Gordon (Lord Byron), in Don Juan (1823)

QUOTE NOTE: This is the first line of a quatrain that continues: “He who hath proved war, storm or woman’s rage,/Whether his winters be eighteen or eighty,’Has won the experience which is deem'd so weighty.”

• In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. Albert Camus, “Return to Tipasa,” originally published in the French literary magazine Combat (August 28, 1952); reprinted in Lyrical and Critical Essays (1968)

• Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity. Thomas Carlyle, “The Hero as Man of Letters,” in Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840)

• He that has never known adversity is but half acquainted with others, or with himself. Charles Caleb Colton, in Lacon (1820)

Colton added: “Constant success shows us but one side of the world. For, as it surrounds us with friends who will tell us only our merits, so it silences those enemies from whom alone we can learn our defects.”

• Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition, such as lifting weights, we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity. Stephen R. Covey, in First Things First (1994)

• Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it. Robertson Davies, quoted in J. Madison Davis, Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

• There is no education like adversity. Benjamin Disraeli, the character Sidney Wilton speaking, in Endymion (1880)

• Keen adversity is the best crucible in which to try a man’s integrity. William Scott Downey, in Downey’s Proverbs (1853)

• Between prosperity and adversity there can be little real fellowship. Amelia B. Edwards, in Half a Million of Money (1866)

• Adversity is so rough a teacher! Fanny Fern, in Ruth Hall (1854)

• Adversity is like a strong wind…it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be. Arthur Golden, in Memoirs of a Geisha (1997)

• One has to protect oneself from the earnest friends who would help you in adversity. Helen Hayes, in On Reflection: An Autobiography (1968; with Sandford Dody)

• Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. William Hazlitt, in “On the Conversation of Cards,” in Essays (1810)

• There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles. Frank Herbert, one of the “Collected Sayings of Muab’Dib,” in Dune (1965)

• To stand alone against all adversity is the most sacred moment of existence. Frank Herbert, a saying of the Gowachin people, in The Dosadi Experiment (1977)

• Every adversity, every defeat, every failure, every disappointment, every human frustration of whatsoever nature or cause, brings with it, in the circumstance itself, the seed of an equivalent benefit. Napoleon Hill, in You Can Work Your Own Miracles (1971)

• It is not given to everyone to shine in adversity. Jane Aiken Hodge, in Marry in Haste (1961)

• Show me a successful coach, a successful anything, and I’m going to show you somebody who has overcome adversity. Lou Holtz, quoted in The Augusta Chronicle (August 2, 1986)

ERROR ALERT: This is the way Coach Holtz originally expressed the thought, but almost all web sites and books present slightly altered versions of the quotation (many not mentioning coaches at all). Thanks to Barry Popik at The Big Apple website for tracking down the original quotation.

• Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant. Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), in Epistles (1st c. B.C.)

• Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test. Robert G. Ingersoll, from an essay on Abraham Lincoln, in Allen Thorndike Rice, Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (1885)

QUOTE NOTE: Ingersoll added: “It is the glory of Lincoln that, having almost absolute power, he never abused it, except upon the side of mercy.” Thanks to Dave Hill of the “Wish I Said That” website, I recently learned that Ingersoll had, in an 1877 lecture, suggested the following words as an inscription for Lincoln’s monument: “Here sleeps the only man in the history of the world, who, having been clothed with almost absolute power, never abused it, except on the side of mercy.”

ERROR ALERT: All over the internet, Abraham Lincoln is mistakenly quoted as the author of the saying: “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” The erroneous Lincoln quotation, which has been in wide circulation since the mid-1970s, was clearly based on Ingersoll’s observation.

• There is in every woman’s heart a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity; but which kindles up, and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity. Washington Irving, in The Sketch Book (1819–20)

• Adversity has ever been considered as the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself. Samuel Johnson, in The Rambler (June 23, 1750)

Johnson continued: “And this effect it must produce by withdrawing flatterers, whose business it is to hide our weaknesses from us.”

ERROR ALERT: All over the internet, this quotation is mistakenly presented in the following way: “Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, then, especially, being free from flatterers.”

• He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity. Ben Jonson, in Timber, or, Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter (1640)

• Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, and stumble from defeat to defeat. Ryszard Kapuscinski, “A Warsaw Diary,” in Granta magazine (No. 15; 1985)

• Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life’s relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth. Søren Kierkegaard, an 1836 journal entry

• For all-around, everyday, all-season wear, farmers can’t be beat. They are inclined to chafe under the burden of leisure (a minor vexation on the farm), but they thrive on neglect and adversity. Patricia Penton Leimbach, in All My Meadows (1977)

• Adversity reminds people of religion. Livy, in History of Rome (1st c. A.D.)

• My ability to survive personal crises is really a mark of the character of my people. Individually and collectively, we react with a tenacity that allows us again and again to bounce back from adversity. Wilma Mankiller, quoted in Melissa Schwarz, Wilma Mankiller: Principal Chief of the Cherokees (1994)

• More than anything else, what keeps a person going in the midst of adversity is having a sense of purpose. It is the fuel that powers persistence. John C. Maxwell, in Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes Into Stepping Stones (2007)

• Adversity is the midwife of genius. Napoleon Bonaparte, quoted in Jules Bertaut, Napoleon in his Own Words (1916)

• Adversity precedes growth. Rosemarie Rossetti, in Take Back Your Life! Regaining Your Footing After Life Throws You a Curve (2003)

• Perhaps adversity is a great teacher, but he charges a high price for his lessons, and often the profit we take from them is not worth the price they have cost us. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in The Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782)

• One who gains strength by overcoming obstacles possesses the only strength which can overcome adversity. Albert Schweitzer, quoted in John C. Maxwell, The Power of Thinking Big (2001)

QUOTATION CAUTION: This is the way the quotation appears on almost all Internet sites, but it has never been found in Schweitzer’s writings or speeches. The closest thing he ever wrote on the subject is the following passage from Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography (1933): “Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way, but must accept his lot calmly if they even roll a few more upon it. A strength which becomes clearer and stronger through its experience of such obstacles is the only strength that can conquer them.”

• In prosperous times I have sometimes felt my fancy and powers of language flag, but adversity is to me at least a tonic and a bracer. Sir Walter Scott, an 1826 journal entry, in J. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Walter Scott (1837)

• Gold is tried by fire, brave men by adversity. Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger), “On Providence,” in Sententiae (1st. cent. B.C.)

• Then know, that I have little wealth to lose;/A man I am cross’d with adversity. William Shakespeare, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1590)

• Let me embrace thee, sour Adversity,/For wise men say it is the wisest course. William Shakespeare, the title character speaking, in King Henry VI (1592)

• Adversity’s sweet milk, philosophy. William Shakespeare, Friar Laurence speaking, in Romeo and Juliet (1595)

• Sweet are the uses of adversity/Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,/Wears yet a precious jewel in his head. William Shakespeare, Duke Senior speaking, in As You Like It (1599)

During adverse times, the Duke suggests that people are most amenable to learning—and from all kinds of sources. He continues: “And this our life, exempt from public haunt,/Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,/Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

• The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all of our adversities. Sophocles, in Oedipus Rex (5th c. B.C.)

• By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean. Mark Twain, “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar,” in Following the Equator (1897)

• Adversity is the touchstone of character: it is not in success but in misfortune that hidden powers bear fruit. Not in such poverty as this, however, which but stunts the growth, and blunts senses and morals alike. Ethel Brilliana Tweedie, in Sunny Sicily: Its Rustics and Its Ruins (1904; written under the penname Mrs. Alec-Tweedie)

QUOTE NOTE: Mrs. Tweedie was appalled by the “indescribable” poverty she found in certain sections Sicily. In cases of such severe poverty, she believed, character was not built, but crushed. See the similar observation by John Updike below.

• Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes. John Updike, in Hugging the Shore (1983)

• What molting time is to birds, so adversity or misfortune is…for us humans. Vincent van Gogh, in letter to brother Theo, quoted in Robert Wallace, The World of Van Gogh (1969)

• No difficulty can discourage, no obstacle dismay, no trouble dishearten the man who has acquired the art of being alive. Difficulties are but dares of fate, obstacles but hurdles to try his skill, troubles but bitter tonics to give him strength; and he rises higher and looms greater after each encounter with adversity. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, in The Art of Being Alive: Success Through Thought (1914)

• I think I love most people best when they are in adversity; for pity is one of my prevailing passions. Mary Wollstonecraft, in a 1785 letter to George Blood (1785), reprinted in The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (2003; Janet M. Todd. ed.)

(see also ADVERTISING SLOGANS and BUSINESS and COMMERCE and CUSTOMERS and INFLUENCE and MARKETING and PERSUASION and PUBLIC RELATIONS and PUBLICITY and SALES & SELLING)

• Time spent in the advertising business seems to create a permanent deformity like the Chinese habit of footbinding. Dean Acheson, from letter to a friend, in David S. McLellan & David C. Acheson, Among Friends: Personal Letters of Dean Acehson (1980)

• An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission. Fred Allen, in Treadmill to Oblivion (1954)

• Advertising isn’t a science. It’s persuasion. And persuasion is an art. William Bernbach, quoted in Stuart Berg Flexner and Anne H. Soukhanov, Speaking Freely: A Guided Tour of American English (1997)

• Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does. Steuart H. Britt, quoted in New York Herald Tribune (Oct., 1956)

• Advertising is the ability to…put the very heart throbs of a business into type, paper, and ink. Leo Burnett, quoted in J. Kufrin, Leo Burnett: Star Reacher (1995)

• Politics is not really politics any more. It is run, for the most part, by Madison Avenue advertising firms, who sell politicians to the public the way they sell bars of soap or cans of beer. Helen Caldicott, in If You Love This Planet: A Plan to Save the Earth (1992)

• Our advertising is based to a great extent on the common desire to look, act and feel young. Dorothy Carnegie, in Don’t Grow Old—Grow Up! (1956)

Carnegie preceded the observation by writing: “Economically and socially, our national accent is on youth.”

• It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country. Raymond Chandler, letter to Carl Brandt, his literary agent (Nov. 15, 1951), in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962)

• Advertising nourishes the consuming power of men. Winston Churchill, quoted in David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963)

• An ad should be an appetizer, not a buffet. Lee Clow, quoted in J. Fox, leeclowsbeard (2012)

QUOTE NOTE: Clow is the man behind Apple Computer’s most famous advertising campaigns, including the 1984 Super Bowl commercial and the “Think Different” manifesto. Fox’s book, a collection of Clow tweets, also included the following advice to advertising professionals: “Your ad begins as an interruption. Make paying attention to it feel like a reward.”

• You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements. Norman Douglas, the Bishop speaking, in South Wind (1917)

• Historians differ on when the consumer culture came to dominate American culture. Some say it was in the twenties, when advertising became a major industry and the middle class bought radios to hear the ads and cars to get to the stores. Barbara Ehrenreich, in Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (1989)

Ehrenreich went on to add: “But there is no question that the consumer culture had begun to crowd out all other cultural possibilities by the years following World War II.”

• A good ad should be like a good sermon: it must not only comfort the afflicted—it must afflict the comfortable. Bernice Fitz-Gibbon, in Macy’s, Gimbels, and Me (1967)

In this chiasticobservation, Fitz-Gibbon was clearly inspired by a famous Finley Peter Dunn observation on newspapers, to be seen here. Fits-Gibbon's memoir also contained these other observations on the subject:

“To be a success in advertising you must want to fill other people with a passion for possession.”

“Of course advertising creates wants. Of course it makes people discontented, dissatisfied. Satisfaction with things as they are would defeat the American dream.”

“Advertising prods people into wanting more and better things. Of course advertising makes people dissatisfied with what they have—makes them raise their sights. Mighty good thing it does. Nothing could be worse for the United States than 200,000,000 satisfied Americans.”

• Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero. F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter to daughter Frances (Aug. 24, 1940), in The Crack-Up (1945; Edmund Wilson, ed.)

• We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion. Zelda Fitzgerald, in Save Me the Waltz (1932)

• Advertising—a judicious mixture of flattery and threats. Northrop Frye, quoted in R. Fitzhenry, The Harper Book of Quotations (1993)

• The same people who tell us that smoking doesn’t cause cancer are now telling us that advertising cigarettes doesn’t cause smoking. Ellen Goodman, from a 1986 column in The Boston Globe (specific date undetermined)

• In the world of advertising, there is no such thing as a lie, Maggie. Only The Expedient Exaggeration. Cary Grant, as advertising executive Roger Thornhill, speaking to his secretary, in the 1959 film North by Northwest (screenplay by Ernest Lehman)

• Copywriters may struggle to distill their messages of enthusiasm in bright prose and snappy slogans, but the one word favored by advertisers over the years, is still the old word new. Judith Groch, in The Right to Create (1970)

Groch preceded the observation by writing: “The advertising industry is well aware of the persuasive power of such words as dynamic, up-to-date, young, growing, latest.”

• I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. Aldous Huxley, “Advertisement,” in On the Margin (1923)

Huxley went on to write: “It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.”

• In my firm, we dealt in lies. Advertising is that…the skillful use of the truth to mislead, to spoil, to debase. Storm Jameson, in The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell (1945)

• Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement. Dr. Samuel Johnson, in The Idler (Jan 20, 1759)

• All our advertising is propaganda, of course, but it has become so much a part of our life, is so pervasive, that we just don’t know what it is propaganda for. Pauline Kael, in I Lost It at the Movies (1965)

• The trouble with us in America isn’t that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned into advertising copy. Louis Kronenberger, “The Spirit of the Age,” in Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life (1954)

• Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising. John Lahr, quoted in the Guardian (Aug. 2, 1989)

• Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it. Stephen Leacock, in The Perfect Salesman (1924)

• Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century. Marshall McLuhan, in Culture is Our Business (1970)

• Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century. Marshall McLuhan, in Advertising Age (Sep. 3, 1976)

• Unless your campaign has a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. David Ogilvy, in Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963)

• Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket. George Orwell, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

• The hidden persuaders. Vance Packard, his term for advertisers, and ultimately the title of his book, The Hidden Persuaders (1957)

• Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. Brad Pitt, as the character Tyler Durden, in the 1999 film Fight Club (screenplay by Jim Uhls, based on 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk)

Durden continued: “We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war . . . our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.” To see how the passage was originally expressed in the novel, go to: Fight Club: A Novel.

• The more we think we’re not affected by media—stereotypes, advertising—the more potential those forms of media have. Jennifer L. Pozner, in Bitch (2013)

• No, I most certainly do not think advertising people are wonderful. I think they are horrible, and the worst menace to mankind, next to war; perhaps ahead of war. They stand for the material viewpoint, for the importance of possessions, of desire, of envy, of greed. And war comes from these things. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, quoted in Rodger L. Tarr, Max and Marjorie (1999)

• In our factory we make lipstick. In our advertising, we sell hope. Charles Revson, Revlon founder, quoted in N. Augustine, Augustine’s Laws (6th Edition, 1997)

QUOTE NOTE: “Selling hope” was a key ingredient in Revlon’s success, according to Revson, and he returned to the theme again and again in his interviews and talks. One of the earliest articulations of the idea occurred in a 1976 issue of New York magazine, when he was quoted as saying, “In the factory we make cosmetics; in the stores we sell hope.”

• Advertising is the foot on the accelerator, the hand on the throttle, the spur on the flank that keeps our economy surging forward. Robert W. Sarnoff, quoted in L. Shilling & L. Fuller, Dictionary of Quotations in Communication (1997)

• Of course, there is some truth in advertising. There’s yeast in bread, but you can’t make bread with yeast alone. Truth in advertising is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal. It provides a suitable quantity of gas, with which to blow out a mass of crude misrepresentation into a form that the public can swallow. Dorothy L. Sayers, in Murder Must Advertise (1933)

• All advertising tells lies, but there are little lies and there are big lies. Little lie: This beer tastes great. Big lie: this beer makes you great. Leslie Savan, in The Sponsored Life: Ads, TV, and American Culture (1994)

• Advertising never sold a bad product twice. Dorothy L. Sayers, quoted in Ralph E. Hone, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Literary Biography (1979)

• The art of advertisement—untruthfulness combined with repetition. Freya Stark, in East is West (1945)

• Only a man seated before a television set watching a cigarette carton perform a tap dance can extract the full relish from Dr. Samuel Johnson’s pronouncement of nearly two hundred years ago: “The trade of advertising is now so near to perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement.” E. S. Turner, in The Shocking History of Advertising (1953)

• Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising. Mark Twain, a reflection of the narrator and protagonist Hank Morgan, in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)

• I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half. John Wanamaker, quoted in Martin Mayer, Madison Avenue, USA (1958)

QUOTE NOTE: In his 1963 book Confessions of an Advertising Man, David Ogilvy credited this observation to British businessman William Lever (of Lever Brothersfame), but he provided no documentation.

• Advertising is legalized lying. H. G. Wells, in Across the Board (1979, Vol. 16)

• Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams. E. B. White, in “Truth in Advertising,” The New Yorker (July 11, 1936)

White added: “Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our lives with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword.”

• As advertising blather becomes the nation’s normal idiom, language becomes printed noise. George F. Will, in The Pursuit of Happiness, and Other Sobering Thoughts (1976)

• Advertising tries to be a pyromaniac, igniting conflagrations of desires for instant gratification. George F. Will, “The Madison Legacy,” in The Washington Post (Dec. 7, 1981); reprinted in The Morning After: American Successes and Excesses, 1981–1986 (1986)

(see also ADVERTISING and BUSINESS and COMMERCE and CUSTOMERS and INFLUENCE and MARKETING and PERSUASION and SALES & SELLING)

• Between love and madness lies Obsession. Obsession perfume, by Calvin Klein (first appeared 1985)

• Fly the friendly skies. United Airlines (1966)

• Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach. Heineken beer (1975)

• Let your fingers do the walking. The Yellow Pages, by AT&T (1964)

• Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. State Farm Insurance (1971)

• Merrill Lynch is bullish on America. Merrill Lynch (1973)

• Milk from contented cows. Carnation milk (1906)

• Obey your thirst. Sprite (1994)

• Put a tiger in your tank. Esso (later Exxon) gasoline (1964)

• Say it with flowers. Society of American Florists (1917)

QUOTE NOTE: This is one of advertising history’s most successful slogans, but it wasn’t the first try out of the box, according to Jonathon Green in Says Who? A Guide to the Quotations of the Century (1988). The first slogan submitted by adman Major Patrick O’Keefe was “Flowers are words that even a babe can understand.” When this was rejected as over-wordy, O’Keefe replied, “Why, you can say it with flowers in so many words.” Green writes: “Suitably abbreviated, a slogan was born.”

• Test drive a Macintosh. Macintosh, by Apple computer (1984)

• The antidote for civilization. Club Med (1982)

• We answer to a higher authority. Hebrew National (1975)

(includes COUNSEL; see also ADVICE—EXAMPLES OF and EXPERIENCE and LEARNING and WISDOM and WRITING ADVICE)

• A woman seldom asks advice before she has bought her wedding clothes. Joseph Addison, in The Spectator (Sep. 4, 1712)

• There is nothing which we receive with so much reluctance as advice. Joseph Addison, in The Spectator (Oct. 17, 1712)

Addison added: “We look upon the man who gives it [to] us as offering an affront to our understanding, and treating us like children or idiots.”

• It is an easy thing for one whose foot/Is on the outside of calamity/to give advice. Aeschylus, in Prometheus Bound (5th c. B.C.)

• Distrust interested advice. Aesop, “The Fox Without a Tale,” in Fables (6th c. B.C.)

• Never trust the advice of a man in difficulties. Aesop, “The Fox and the Goat,” in Fables (6th c. B.C.)

• We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain. William R. Alger, quoted in Maturin Murray Ballou, Treasury of Thought (1884)

ERROR ALERT: This quotation is widely misattributed to Tom Stoppard. Alger was a nineteenth-century Unitarian clergyman, a lesser-known member of Emerson’s “Concord Circle,” an outspoken abolitionist, and the cousin of Horatio Alger.

• Something occurred while they were at Hartfield, to make Emma want their advice; and, which was still more lucky, she wanted exactly the advice they gave. Jane Austen, the voice of the narrator, in Emma (1816)

• He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other. Francis Bacon, “Of Great Place,” in Essays (1625)

• The worst men often give the best advice. Philip James Bailey, the title character speaking, in Festus (1813)

Festus continued: “Our deeds are sometimes better than our thoughts.”

• Asking for advice is an act of humility. Dennis W. Bakke, in Joy at Work (2005)

Bakke went on to add: “The act alone says, ‘I need you.’ The decision maker and the adviser are pushed into a closer relationship.”

• Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov” (1936), reprinted in Illuminations (1968)

• As time passes we all get better at blazing a trail through the thicket of advice. Margot Bennett, in Farewell Crown and Goodbye King (1953)

• The wanting of advice is the sign that the Spirit in you has not yet spoken with the compelling voice that you ought to obey. Annie Besant, in Theosophy and Life’s Deeper Problems (1916)

• The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice. The Bible—Proverb 12:15 (RSV)

• Advice, n. The smallest current coin. Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

• We hate those who will not take our advice, and despise them who do. Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw), in Josh Billings, His Sayings (1865)

• Most of the advice we receive from others is not so much an evidence of their affection for us, as it is an evidence of their affection for themselves. Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw), in Josh Billings, His Sayings (1865)

• Advice is like kissing; it costs nothing and is a pleasant thing to do. Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw), in The Complete Works of Josh Billings (1873).

On the same subject, Billings wrote:

“Advice is like castor oil, easy enough to give but dreadful uneasy to take.”

“When a man comes to me for advice, I find out the kind of advice he wants, and give it to him.”

“I never had a man come to me for advice yet, but what I soon discovered that he thought more of his own opinion than he did of mine.”

• When your mother asks, “Do you want a piece of advice?” it’s a mere formality. It doesn’t matter if you answer yes or no. You’re going to get it anyway. Erma Bombeck, widely attributed, but not verified.

• The best advice is often your own, that which you would give to others you care about in the same situation. Dan Brooks, in Brook’s Book (2017)

• Who cannot give good counsel? ’Tis cheap, it costs them nothing. Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621–51)

• A woman’s advice is not worth much, but he who does not heed it is a fool. Pedro Calderón, in El Médico de su Honra (n.d.); quoted in Jacob. M. Braude, Braude’s Handbook of Stories for Toastmasters and Speakers (1975)

• A leader must have the courage to act against an expert’s advice. James Callaghan quoted in The Harvard Business Review (November 1, 1986)

• The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries. Truman Capote, the character Randolph speaking, in Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948)

QUOTE NOTE: This line is engraved on a memorial stone in Bridgehampton, Long Island, one of the sites where Capote’s ashes were scattered.

• All of us, at certain moments of our lives, need to take advice and to receive help from other people. Alexis Carrell, in Reflections on Life (1935)

• I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss work in progress. Never answer a critic. Raymond Chandler, quoted in D. Gardiner & K. S. Walker, Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962)

• Advice, like snow, the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, attributed in The Saturday Magazine (Sep. 22, 1832)

QUOTE NOTE: This quotation has been repeated countless times for nearly two centuries (sometimes with the opening words “Advice is like snow”), but has always been suspect. Quotation researcher Garson O’Toole was recently motivated to do his own research on the observation and, as usual, he unearthed valuable new information. It now appears that the original author of the sentiment was Jeremiah Seed, an English clergyman and Oxford professor, who advanced the idea in a 1747 collection of his sermons.

• To ask advice is in nine cases out of ten to tout for flattery. John Churton Collins, quoted in L. C. Collins, Life of John Churton Collins (1912)

• When we feel a strong desire to thrust our advice upon others, it is usually because we suspect their weakness; but we ought rather to suspect our own. Charles Caleb Colton, in Lacon (1820)

• We ask advice, but we mean approbation. Charles Caleb Colton, in Lacon (1820)

• There is hardly a man on earth who will take advice unless he is certain it is positively bad. Edward Dahlberg, “Moby Dick: A Hamitic Dream,” in Alms for Oblivion (1964)

• Once you’ve given advice to someone, you’re obligated. Malcolm Forbes, quoted in The Forbes Book of Business Quotations (1997; Ted Goodman, ed.)

• I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice; had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes. Gene Fowler, in Skyline: A Reporter’s Reminiscence of The 1920s (1961)

• Daddy said: “All children must look after their own upbringing.” Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands. Anne Frank, a July 15, 1944 entry, in Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (1947; first English publication in 1952)

• We may give advice, but we cannot give conduct. Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard’s Almanack (Feb., 1751)

QUOTE NOTE: Many of Franklin’s sayings were nothing more than simplified—and Americanized—versions of popular English proverbs. This one was inspired by: “We may give good counsel, but cannot bestow good conduct.”

• Fools need advice most, but wise men only are the better for it. Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard’s Almanack (Jan., 1758)

• People are always willing to follow advice when it accords with their own wishes. Marguerite Gardiner (Lady Blessington), in The Confessions of an Elderly Lady (1838)

• Advice is given freely because so much of it is worthless. James Geary, an aphorism from his website

• Advice is sometimes transmitted more successfully through a joke than grave teaching. Baltasar Gracián, in The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

• When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see. Baltasar Gracián, in The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

• On Venus it is considered a loving gesture to offer advice. But on Mars it is not. Women need to remember that Martians do not offer advice unless it is directly requested. John Gray, in Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (1992)

• Never take the advice of someone who has not had your kind of trouble. Sydney J. Harris, in Strictly Personal (1953)

Harris continued: “it is sure to be based on the assumption that what sounds ‘reasonable’ will turn out to be the right solution.”

• Shun advice/at any price—that’s what I call/good advice. Piet Hein, in Grooks II (1969; originally published under the Danish title Gruks in 1949)

• Advice is sure of a hearing when it coincides with our previous conclusions, and therefore comes in the shape of praise or of encouragement. Arthur Helps, “Advice,” in Essays Written in the Intervals of Business (1843)

QUOTE NOTE: Helps’s essay, written nearly two centuries ago, contains other observations that are still relevant today, including these:

“In seeking for a friend to advise you, look for uprightness in him, rather than for ingenuity.”

“It is a disingenuous thing to ask for advice, when you mean assistance, and it will be a just punishment if you get that which you pretended to want.”

“When you advise a man to do something which is for your own interest as well as for his, you should put your own motive for advising him, full in view, with all the weight that belongs to it.”

“When you have to give advice, you should never forget whom you are addressing, and what is practicable for him. You should not look about for the wisest thing which can be said, but for that which your friend has the heart to undertake, and the ability to accomplish.”

• The greatest luxury of riches is that they enable you to escape so much good advice. The rich are always advising the poor, but the poor seldom return the compliment. Arthur Helps, in Brevia: Short Essays and Aphorisms (1871)

• Know when to speake; for many times it brings/Danger, to give the best advice to kings. Robert Herrick, “Caution in Councell,” in Hesperides (1648)

• The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in a speech in Boston (Jan. 8, 1897)

• A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice. E. W. Howe, in Country Town Sayings (1911)

• It is a little embarrassing that, after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other. Aldous Huxley, quoted in Laura Archera Huxley, This Timeless Moment: A Personal View of Aldous Huxley (1963)

ERROR ALERT: In What About the Big Stuff? (2002) Richard Carlson presented a paraphrased version of Huxley’s famous thought as if it were a verbatim quotation: “It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘Try to be a little kinder.’”

• Advice, as it always gives a temporary appearance of superiority, can never be very grateful, even when it is most necessary or most judicious; but, for the same reason, every one is eager to instruct his neighbors. Samuel Johnson, in a 1761 edition of The Rambler

• Few things are so liberally bestowed, or squandered with so little effect, as good advice. Samuel Johnson, in The Rambler (June 26, 1750)

• Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t. Erica Jong, epigraph to “A Day in the Life…” chapter, in How to Save Your Own Life (1977)

• When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice. Joseph-Louis La Grange, in Pensées (1872)

• If I were asked to give what I consider the single most useful bit of advice for all humanity, it would be this: Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life and, when it comes, hold your head high, look it squarely in the eye and say, “I will be bigger than you. You cannot defeat me.” Ann Landers, in Since You Ask Me (1961)

• One gives nothing so freely as advice. François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, in Maximes (1665)

• We may give advice, but we cannot inspire conduct. François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, in Maximes (1665)

QUOTE NOTE: The observation has also been commonly translated this way: “We give advice, but we do not inspire conduct.”

• Το know how to profit by good advice requires nearly as much ability as to know how to act for one's self. François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, in Maximes (1665)

• Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer provide bad examples. François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, in Maximes (1665)

QUOTE NOTE: This observation is also commonly presented in these ways:

“Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.”

“Old men are fond of giving good advice, to console themselves for being no longer in a position to give bad examples.”

• You will always find some Eskimos ready to instruct the Congolese on how to cope with heat waves. Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, in Unkempt Thoughts (1957)

• I am melancholy when I see, or even hear of, other people behaving badly. I often long to direct them with good advice, and refrain only because I know that friendship itself will not stand the strain of very much good advice for very long. Robert Lynd, in The Peal of Bells (1924)

Lynd continued: “And so, while I am inwardly aching to preach to my errant fellow-creatures, I find myself talking to them instead about diet, diseases, cinemas, Bernard Shaw, and the day on which I backed three winning horses at Ascot.”

• A prince who is not wise himself will never take good advice. Niccolo Machiavelli, in The Prince (1532)

• This is the gist of what I know:/Give advice and buy a foe. Phyllis McGinley, “A Garland of Precepts,” in The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley (1954)

* Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it. Edna St. Vincent Millay, in a letter to the poet Arthur Davison Ficke (October 15, 1920)

• Advice almost never functions as a social lubricant; eight or nine times out of ten it makes people lose face, crushes their will, and creates a grudge. Yukio Mishima, in Mishima on Hagakure (1977)

• All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed. Michel de Montaigne, in Essays (1580)

• When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. Henri J. M. Nouwen, “With Care,” in Out of Solitude (1974)

Nouwen continued: “The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not-knowing, not-curing, not-healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is the friend who cares.”

• I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic. Flannery O’Connor, in letter to a person identified only as “A” (Dec. 11, 1956), in Sally Fitzgerald, The Habit of Being (1979)

• Get the advice of everybody whose advice is worth having–they are very few–and then do what you think best yourself. Charles Stewart Parnell, quoted in Conor Cruise O'Brien, Parnell (1957)

• If you can tell the difference between good advice and bad advice, you don’t need advice. Laurence J. Peter, in Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Times (1977)

• If you want to improve your performance in almost any part of your life, stop asking for feedback and start asking for advice. Daniel H. Pink, in “Stop Asking for Feedback” podcast (Oct. 8, 2023)

QUOTE NOTE: Pink based his recommendation on recent research that showed advice was more effective than feedback because it was more “actionable.”

• Advice after injury is like medicine after death. Proverb (Danish)

• Good advice is like a tight glove; it fits the circumstances, and it does not fit other circumstances. Charles Reade, the character Mr. Rolfe speaking, in A Terrible Temptation, Vol. I (1871)

• We are so happy to advise others that occasionally we even do it in their interest. Jules Renard, journal entry, in Journal, 1887-1910 (1925). Also an example of Oxymoronica.

• A man takes contradiction and advice much more easily than people think, only he will not bear it when violently given, even though it be well-founded. Hearts are flowers; they remain open to the softly-falling dew, but shut up in the violent downpour of rain. Johann Paul Richter (who wrote under the pen name Jean Paul), quoted in Henry Southgate, Many Thoughts of Many Minds (1862)

• I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth. Rainer Maria Rilke, in letter to Franz Xaver Kappus (Feb. 17, 1903); published posthumously in Letters to a Young Poet (in 1929)

QUOTE NOTE: As it turns out, this would not be the only advice contained in the letter. Rilke went on to offer a thought that ultimately became one of his most popular creations:

“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.”

• My advice was delicately poised between the cliché and the indiscretion. Robert Runcie, remark at press conference (July 13, 1981)

QUOTE NOTE: Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was referring to the advice he gave to Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer prior to their wedding.

• To give advice to a friend, either asked or unasked, is so far from a fault that it is a duty; but if a man love to give advice, it is a sure sign that he himself wanteth it. George Savile (Lord Halifax), in Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections (1750)

• One can advise comfortably from a safe port. Johann Friedrich von Schiller, the character Rhodi speaking, in Wilhelm Tell (1804)

QUOTE NOTE: The passage is sometimes rendered in verse form: “Safe in the port,/’Tis easy to advise.”

• The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not, and never persist in trying to set people right. Hannah Whitall Smith, in May 3, 1902 letter; reprinted in Philadelphia Quaker: The Letters of Hannah Whitall Smith (1950; Logan Pearsall Smith, ed.)

• No enemy is worse than bad advice. Sophocles, in Electra (5th c. B.C.)

• Whenever a man seeks your advice he generally seeks your praise. Philip Dormer Stanhope (Lord Chesterfield), in letter to his son (Feb. 10, 1748)

• Advice is seldom welcome; and those who want it the most always like it the least. Philip Dormer Stanhope (Lord Chesterfield), in letter to his son (Jan. 29, 1748)

QUOTE NOTE: In this observation, Chesterfield is using the term want not in the modern sense of desiring something, but in the old-fashioned sense of needing something because it is lacking in one’s life (as in, “He was found wanting”).

• I wish to God that you had as much pleasure in following my advice, as I have in giving it to you. Philip Dormer Stanhope (Lord Chesterfield), in letter to his son (Feb. 5, 1750)

• In matters of religion and matrimony I never give any advice; because I will not have anybody’s torments in this world or the next laid to my charge. Philip Dormer Stanhope (Lord Chesterfield), in letter to A. C. Stanhope (Oct. 12, 1765)

• No one wants advice—only corroboration. John Steinbeck, the narrator and protagonist Ethan Hawley speaking, in The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)

QUOTE NOTE: In crafting this observation, Steinbeck was likely inspired by an 1820 thought from Charles Caleb Colton, to be seen above.

• I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career. Gloria Steinem in an LBC radio interview (April 2, 1984)

• It’s queer how ready people always are with advice in any real or imaginary emergency, and no matter how many times experience has shown them to be wrong, they continue to set forth their opinions, as if they had received them from the Almighty! Anne Sullivan, in a letter (June 12, 1887), quoted in Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (1903)

• How is it possible to expect that mankind will take advice, when they will not so much as take warning? Jonathan Swift, in Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1696–1706 (1711)

• I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. Henry David Thoreau, “Economy,” in Walden (1854)

• Advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill. J. R. R. Tolkien, the character Gildor speaking, in The Fellowship of the Rings (1954)

• I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want, and then advise them to do it. Harry Truman, in interview with Edward R. Murrow on CBS-TV (May 27, 1955)

• He had only one vanity; he thought he could give advice better than any other person. Mark Twain, the character Edward Richards describing a man named Goodson, in the short story “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” in Harper’s Monthly (Dec., 1899)

• It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice. Anne Tyler, the character Jeremy Pauling speaking, in Celestial Navigation (1974)

• The whole purpose of giving advice is to be able to say “I told you so” when it is ignored. William Flynn Wallace, in a personal communication to the compiler (Oct. 9, 2022)

• Give not Advice without being Ask'd, and when desired, do it briefly. George Washington, a “Rule of Civility” that guided his life; quoted in Charles Moore, George Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation (1926).

QUOTE NOTE: This quotation should be properly attributed to “Author Unknown,” but it is because of Washington that we are aware of its existence. Sometime before his sixteenth birthday, Virginia schoolboy George Washington completed a penmanship exercise in which he hand copied a list of 110 “Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.” The list was originally prepared by French Jesuits around 1595 and first published in English in 1640. The Rules, which became popular in the education of young aristocrats, found their way to America in the early 1700s, and ultimately into the hands of Washington’s schoolmaster. For more, including a view of the 110 maxims in Washington’s original teenage handwriting, see Washington’s “Rules of Civility”.

• Advice is one of those things it is far more blessed to give than to receive. Carolyn Wells, in The Rest of My Life (1937)

• Insistent advice may develop into interference, and interference, someone has said, is the hind hoof of the devil. Carolyn Wells, in The Rest of My Life (1937)

• Advice…is a habit-forming drug. Carolyn Wells, in The Rest of My Life (1937)

In the book—her autobiography—Wells added: “You give a dear friend a bit of advice today, and next week you find yourself advising two or three friends, and the week after, a dozen, and the week following, crowds.”

• I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself. Oscar Wilde, the character Lord Goring speaking, in An Ideal Husband (1895)

• It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal. Oscar Wilde, the narrator speaking, in “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” first published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (July, 1889); later republished in Lord Savile’s Crime and Other Stories, 2nd ed. (1901)

• Unsolicited advice is the junk mail of life. Bern Williams

QUOTATION CAUTION: This quotation is extremely popular, but I’ve never found an original source. Nor have I been able to find any biographical information on Bern Williams, despite the frequency with which he has been quoted on web sites. It might be better to consider this an Author Unknown observation.

• I always advise people never to give advice. P. G. Wodehouse, in Fore! The Best of Wodehouse on Golf (1983; D. R. Bensen, ed).

(see also ADVICE and ADMONITIONS and DEHORTATIONS and EXHORTATIONS)

• Never dull your shine for somebody else. Tyra Banks, remark on broadcast of America’s Next Top Model (Oct. 17, 2007)

• If you go through life trading on your good looks, there’ll come a time when no one wants to trade. Lynne Alpern & Esther Blumenfeld, in Oh, Lord, I Sound Just Like Mama (1986)

• You never find yourself until you face the truth. Pearl Bailey, in The Raw Pearl (1968)

• Never forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely, gallantly, as a splendid adventure, in which you are setting out into an unknown country, to face many a danger, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and to lose many a battle. Annie Besant, in The Theosophist (Dec. 1924)

• If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive. Dale Carnegie, in How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)

• Be like the fountain that overflows, not like the cistern that merely contains. Paulo Coelho, in Veronika Decides to Die (2001)

• Make sure your goal isn’t just a means masquerading as an end. Lee Clow, quoted in J. Fox, leeclowsbeard (2012)

• Whatever you do, kid—always serve it with a little dressing. George M. Cohan, acting advice to Spencer Tracy, in J. McCabe, George M. Cohan: The Man Who Owned Broadway (1973).

• A man should live with his superiors as he does with his fire: not too near, lest he burn; nor too far off, lest he freeze. Diogenes (3rd c. B.C.), quoted in Maturin Murray Ballou, Pearls of Thought (1882)

• It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person—“Always do what you are afraid to do.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Heroism,” in Essays: First Series (1841)

• It is not my place to offer pep talks, aphorisms, or dictums. But if I had to give one piece of advice it would be this: Find something that you love that they’re fucking with and then fight for it. If everyone did that-imagine the difference. David Gessner, in My Green Manifesto: Does the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism (2011)

• Make it your habit not to be critical about small things. Edward Everett Hale, quoted in The Christian Register (Nov. 30, 1899)

• Never judge someone by who he’s in love with; judge him by his friends. People fall in love with the most appalling people. Cynthia Heimel, in But Enough About You (1986)

• When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. Cynthia Heimel, “Lower Manhattan Survival Tactics,” in The Village Voice (Nov. 13, 1993)

• It is a little embarrassing that, after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other. Aldous Huxley, quoted in Laura Archera Huxley, This Timeless Moment: A Personal View of Aldous Huxley (1963)

• When you go in search of honey you must expect to be stung by bees. Kenneth Kaunda, quoted in The Observer (London, Jan. 2, 1983)

• If I were asked to give what I consider the single most useful bit of advice for all humanity, it would be this: Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life and, when it comes, hold your head high, look it squarely in the eye and say, “I will be bigger than you. You cannot defeat me.” Ann Landers, in Since You Ask Me (1961)

• If you want to catch a trout, don’t fish in a herring barrel. Ann Landers, in a 1982 appearance on “The John Davidson Show”; reported in Reader’s Digest (specific date undetermined)

QUOTE NOTE: Was the famous advice columnist dispensing fishing advice here? No, this was simply her figurative way of telling women that going to singles bars was not an effective way to meet high-quality men.

• Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts. D. H. Lawrence, in The White Peacock (1911)

QUOTE NOTE: In the novel, this was the motto of Annable, the woodkeeper. It’s possible that Lawrence was inspired by a similar thought expressed by English philosopher Herbert Spencer in Education (1861): “People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life, is to be a good animal.”

• Think before you speak. Read before you think. Fran Lebowitz, “Tips for Teens,” in Social Studies (1981)

Lebowitz was giving advice to teenagers, but her advice applies to people of all ages. She continued: “This will give you something to think about that you didn’t make up yourself—a wise move at any age, but most especially at seventeen, when you are in the greatest danger of coming to annoying conclusions.”

• Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity. Horace Mann, in 1859 commencement address at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio

QUOTE NOTE: Mann, president of the college at the time, collapsed a few days after his address and died at age 63 a few weeks later, on August 2, 1859. This passage from his speech resonated so strongly with the Antioch community that, ever since, the words have been repeated to each graduating class. More than a century later, the saying was adopted as the college’s official motto and inscribed on a monument in Mann’s honor.

ERROR ALERT: Mann’s words are often mistakenly presented as some great victory.

• If you have got a living force and you’re not using it, nature kicks you back. The blood boils just like you put it in a pot. Louise Nevelson, in Dawns + Dusks (1976)

• Be neither too early in the fashion, nor too long out of it, nor too precisely in it…where the eye is the jury, thy apparel is the evidence. Francis Quarles, in Enchiridion (1640)

• Don’t be a pawn in somebody’s game…. Find the attitude which gives you the maximum strength and the maximum dignity, no matter what else is going on. Anne Rice, the protagonist Rowan Mayfair speaking, in The Witching Hour (1990)

• Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. Rainer Maria Rilke, in letter to Franz Xaver Kappus (July 16, 1903); published posthumously in Letters to a Young Poet (in 1929)

He went on to add: “And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

• Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. Bertrand Russell, from the “How to Grow Old,” in Portraits from Memory: And Other Essays (1956)

• We must live as we ride; be supple, avoid checking our steed without need, hold the bridle lightly, go ahead when the wind is favorable. George Sand, in 1842 letter to a friend

• Why not be oneself? That is the whole secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese? Edith Sitwell, at age seventy-five, in E. Salter, Edith Sitwell (1979)

• It is never too late—in fiction or in life—to revise. Nancy Thayer, in Morning (1989)

• Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows. Henry David Thoreau, journal entry ( March 12, 1853)

• Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Henry David Thoreau, in Walden (1854)

• If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Harry S Truman, his motto

QUOTE NOTE: While the saying is often attributed directly to President Truman, he described it as an “old Missouri saying” that he first heard in the 1930s.

• If by nature you are volcanoes, at least be only smoldering ones. Elizabeth von Arnim, in Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898)

• My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate—that’s my philosophy. Thornton Wilder, the character Sabina speaking, in The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)

• One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat. Woodrow Wilson, in a Jan. 29, 1916 speech (Pittsburgh, PA)

• If you can’t add to the discussion, don’t subtract by talking. Lois Wyse, in The Six-Figure Woman (And How to Be One) (1983)

• Think like a wise man but express yourself like the common people. William Butler Yeats, in letter to Dorothy Wellesley (Dec. 21, 1935); reprinted in Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley (1940)

(see also ADULTERY & INFIDELITY and MISTRESS)

• I liken an affair to the shattering of a Waterford crystal vase. You can glue it back together, but it will never be the same again. Dr. John Gottman, quoted in U.S. News & World Report (Jan. 1, 1994)

• An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. John Updike, the voice of the narrator, in Couples: A Novel (1968)

(see also PRETENSE & PRETENSION)

• Those who assume a character which does not belong to them, only make themselves ridiculous. Aesop, “The Crow and Raven,” in Fables (6th c. B.C.)

• Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors. Jean Baudrillard, in Cool Memories (1987)

• Avoid affectation. The more merit, the less affectation, which gives a vulgar flavor. Baltasar Gracián, in The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

About affectation, Gracián added: “The most eminent merits lose most by it, for they appear proud and artificial instead of being the product of nature, and the natural is always more pleasing than the artificial. One always feels sure that the man who affects a virtue has it not.”

• Once the charmer is aware of a mannerism or characteristic that others find charming, it ceases to be a mannerism and becomes an affectation. And good lord, there is nothing less charming than affectations! Rex Harrison, quoted in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner (June 24, 1978)

• All affectation is the vain and ridiculous attempt of poverty to appear rich. Johann Kaspar Lavatar, in Aphorisms on Man (1788)

• Affectation hides three times as many virtues as charity does sins. Horace Mann, in Thoughts (1867)

• I believe an artist is the last person in the world who can afford to be affected. Georgia O’Keeffe, in a 1915 letter to Anita Pollitzer, quoted in Clive Giboire, Lovingly, Georgia (1990)

• Don’t laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own. Logan Pearsall Smith, “Age and Death,” in Afterthoughts (1931)

(see also EMOTION and FEELING and FONDNESS and HEART and HUGS & HUGGING and LOVE and TOUCH)

• Affection is like the noonday sun; it does not need the presence of another to be manifest. Isabel Allende, in Kingdom of the Golden Dragon (2004)

• Nine times out of ten, a woman had better show more affection than she feels. Jane Austen, the character Charlotte Lucas speaking, in Pride and Prejudice (1813)

• When I look back on the pain of sex, the love like a wild fox so ready to bite, the antagonism that sits like a twin beside love, and contrast it with affection…of two people who have lived a life together (and of whom one must die) it’s the affection I find richer. It’s that I would have again. Not all those doubtful rainbow colors. Enid Bagnold, in Autobiography (1969)

• Jealousy is the grave of affection. Mary Baker Eddy, in Science and Health (1875)

• O the anguish of the thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them. George Eliot, a reflection of the title character, in “The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton,” in Scenes of Clerical Life (1857)

• A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections. George Eliot, the narrator describing the somewhat strained relationship between the title character and Sir Hugo, in Daniel Deronda (1876)

ERROR ALERT: Many internet sites and quotation anthologies mistakenly present the observation as if it were phrased: “A difference in taste in jokes.”

• The affections cannot keep their youth any more than men. Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal entry (Feb. 13, 1831)

• And almost the hardest of all is learning to be a well of affection and not a fountain, to show them we love them, not when we feel like it, but when they do. Nan Fairbrother, in An English Year (1954)

• How soothing is affection…this sweetener of life. Marguerite Gardiner (Lady Blessington), in The Victims of Society (1837)

• Children need admiration rather than affection. Celia Green, in Advice to Clever Children (1981)

• Affection was not the flower of his spirit but its rootage. Alice Tisdale Hobart, in Oil for the Lamps of China (1933)

• Trust in my affection for you. Tho’ I may not display it exactly in the way you like and expect it, it is not therefore less deep and sincere. Anna Jameson, in an 1833 letter to Ottilie Von Goethe, in Letters of Anna Jameson to Ottilie Von Goethe (1939; G. H. Needler, ed.)

• Affection exaggerates its own offenses. L. E. Landon, in Romance and Reality (1831)

• Affection is a habit. L. E. Landon, in Ethel Churchill, or, The Two Brides (1837)

• Talk not of wasted affection, affection never was wasted. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in the epic poem Evangeline (1847)

The poem continued: “If it enrich not the heart of another, its waters, returning/Back to their springs, like the rain, shall fill them full of refreshment;/That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain.”

• When someone who’s starved of love is shown something that looks like sincere affection, is it any wonder that she jumps at it and clings to it? Sayo Masuda, in Autobiography of a Geisha (2003)

• A mixture of admiration and pity is one of the surest recipes for affection. André Maurois, in Ariel: The Live of Shelley (1923)

• When affection only speaks, truth is not always there. Thomas Middleton, in The Old Law (1656)

• Few things are more wounding than the confounding moment of discovering an asymmetry of affections where mutuality had been presumed. Maria Popova, in “Brain Pickings” newsletter (Dec. 16, 2018

QUOTE NOTE: Popova’s beautiful observation was inspired by the distraught emotional state of Emily Dickinson when she discovered that her intense feelings for love interest Susan Gilbert were not being reciprocated.

• Affection is a bad advisor. Proverb (German)

• Human nature is so constructed that it gives affection most readily to those who seem least to demand it. Bertrand Russell, in The Conquest of Happiness 1930

• Affection is a coal that must be cool’d/Else, suffered, it will set the heart of fire. William Shakespeare, in Venus and Adonis (1593)

• Human affection…is the one great curse of mankind, the principal obstruction to its progress. Take myself, for instance; all my life affection has been showered on me, and everything that I have done I have had to do in spite of it. George Bernard Shaw, quoted in S. J. Woolf, “George Bernard Shaw,” Drawn From Life (1932)

• One is apt to think of people’s affection as a fixed quantity, instead of a sort of moving sea with tide always going out or coming in but still fundamentally there. Freya Stark, in The Coast of Incense (1953)

• Praise is well, compliment is well, but affection—that is the last and final and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by character or achievement. Mark Twain, “When in Doubt, Tell the Truth,” in Speeches (1923; A. B. Paine, ed.)

(see also BELIEF and MANTRA and MOTTO and SELF-HELP and SELF-TALK)

• Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Montaigne, or the Skeptic,” in Representative Men (1850)

• Affirmations are like prescriptions for certain aspects of yourself you want to change. Jerry Fankhauser, in The Power of Affirmations (1979)

• An affirmation is a strong, positive statement that something is already so. It is a way of “making firm” that which you are imagining. Shakti Gawain, in The Creating True Prosperity Workbook (1998)

Gawain preceded the thought by writing: “Affirmations are one way of supporting and strengthening our vision. To affirm means ‘to make firm,’”

• An affirmation opens the door. It’s a beginning point on the path to change. Louise L. Hay, in I Can Do It: How to Use Affirmations to Change Your Life (2004)

Hays added: “The secret to having your affirmations work quickly and consistently is to prepare an atmosphere for them to grow in. Affirmations are like seeds planted in soil. Poor soil, poor growth. Rich soil, abundant growth.”

(see also ABUSE and INDIGNITY and INJURY and OFFENSE and SLIGHT and WRONG)

• “Revenge,” I shrieked, groping to remember the affront. Mason Cooley, in City Aphorisms (1984)

(see also ANTARCTICA and ASIA and AUSTRALIA and CONTINENTS and EUROPE and NORTH AMERICA and SOUTH AMERICA)

• In the family of continents, Africa is the silent, the brooding sister, courted for centuries by knight-errant empires—rejecting them one by one and severally, because she is too sage and a little bored with the importunity of it all. Beryl Markham, in West With the Night (1942)

(see BLACKS)

(see also DEATH & DYING and ETERNITY and HEAVEN and HELL and IMMORTALITY and REINCARNATION)

• A red-hot belief in eternal glory is probably the best antidote to human panic that there is. Phyllis Bottome, a reflection of the narrator and protagonist, a Viennese psychoanalyst who fled to England in the 1930s, in Survival (1943)

• Death but supplies the oil for the inextinguishable lamp of everlasting life. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Omniana (1812)

• I can imagine myself on my death-bed, spent utterly with lust to touch the next world, like a boy asking for his first kiss from a woman. Aleister Crowley, in The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929)

• I don’t believe in an afterlife. I am an atheist. Darwin proved for me that there is birth and death and in-between evolution and that is all there is to it. John McCarthy [English entrepreneur], quoted in Charlie Berridge, Building a Billion: the Story of John McCarthy (2011)

A moment later, McCarthy added: “I don’t believe in God or some greater being than mortal man here on earth. In the end we’re just like the leaves on the trees. They start as little green shoots, grow into dense foliage, turn golden, and then drop off and fall to the ground. They are gathered up for the bonfire or rot to provide nourishment for the next generation. All the while the tree trunk grows stronger.”

• Seeing death as the end of life is like seeing the horizon as the end of the ocean. David Searls, quoted in S. Safransky, Sunbeams: A Book of Quotations (1990)

• The undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveller returns. William Shakespeare, the title character alluding to death, in Hamlet (1601)

• I believe that when death closes our eyes we shall awaken to a light, of which our sunlight is but the shadow. Arthur Schopenhauer, quoted by William M. Salter, in Harvard Theological Review (July, 1911)

• I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. Carl Sagan, in Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium (1997)

• The grave the last sleep? No; it is the last and final awakening. Sir Walter Scott, 1827 journal entry, in Memoirs of the Life of Sir William Scott, Vol. 5 (1901)

• Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because dawn has come. Rabindranath Tagore, quoted in Vedanta Monthly: Message of the East (1947, Vol. 36)

(see also DAWN & DUSK and EVENING & NIGHT and MORNING)

• The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected. Proverb (Swedish)

(see also EPOCH and ERA and HISTORY & HISTORIANS and PAST and ZEITGEIST)

• Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted. Mary McCarthy, “My Confession,” in On the Contrary (1953; rev. ed., 1961)

(see also ADOLESCENCE and AGE & AGING—OLD AGE and AGE & AGING—SPECIFIC AGES & DECADES and CHILDHOOD and DEATH & DYING and MIDDLE AGE and OLD and SENESCENCE and SENILITY and YOUTH and YOUTH COMPARED TO OLD AGE)

• The surest sign of age is loneliness. A. Bronson Alcott, in Tablets (1868)

• To know how to grow old is the masterwork of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living. Henri-Frédéric Amiel, an 1874 entry in his Journal Intime

• You can only perceive real beauty in a person as they get older. Anouk Aimée, quoted in the Guardian (Aug. 24, 1988)

• The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball—the further I am rolled, the more I gain. Susan B. Anthony, in interview with Nelly Bly, New York World (Feb. 2, 1896); reprinted in Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, Vol. 2 (1898)

• Age will not be defied. Francis Bacon, “Of Regiment and Health,” in Essays (1625)

• The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolor. Beryl Bainbridge, quoted in The Observer (London, 1998; specific date undetermined)

• It’s sad to grow old—but nice to ripen. Brigitte Bardot, quoted in T. Crawley, Bébé: The Films of Brigitte Bardot (1975)

• The minute a man ceases to grow—no matter what his years—that minute he begins to be old. Bruce Barton, from “I Dread the End of the Year,” in More Power to You (1917)

• What is called the serenity of age is only perhaps a euphemism for the fading power to feel the sudden shock of joy or sorrow. Arthur Bliss, in As I Remember (1970)

• I speak the truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little more, as I grow older. Catherine Drinker Bowen, in Family Portrait (1970)

• I’ve found two gray hairs in my head the week before last, and an impertinent crow has planted a delicate impression of his foot under my right eye. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the character Robert Audley speaking, in Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)

• As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you. Gwendolyn Brooks, in Report From Part One: An Autobiography (1972)

• A lady of a “certain age,” which means/Certainly aged. George Noel Gordon (Lord Byron), in Don Juan (1819-24)

• Years steal/Fire from the mind as vigor from the limb. George Noel Gordon (Lord Byron), in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812)

• Most men grow old in a little groove of notions which they have not originated: perhaps there are fewer crooked minds than barren ones. Luc de Clapiers (Marquis de Vauvenargues), in Reflections and Maxims (1746)

• Unexpected bonus of aging: appreciation for the miracles our bodies go about while we’re preoccupied, pretending we’re in charge. Blayney Colmore, “Notes From Zone 10” newsletter (Feb. 23, 2021)

• With age, comfort becomes more seductive than beauty. Mason Cooley, in City Aphorisms, 8th Selection (1991)

• Age is like love, it cannot be hid. Thomas Dekker, in Old Fortunatus (1599)

• Age, death’s twilight. John Donne, in Satires III (c. 1594)

• Age transfigures, or petrifies. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, in Aphorisms (1880-93)

• All of one’s contemporaries and aging friends are living in a delicate balance, and one feels that one’s own consciousness is no longer as brightly lit as it once was. But then, twilight with its more subdued colors has its charms as well. Albert Einstein, in letter to Gertrud Warschauer (April 4, 1952)

• Of all the self-fulfilling prophecies in our culture, the assumption that aging means decline and poor health is probably the deadliest. Marilyn Ferguson, in The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980)

• Age…brings along with him/A terrible artillery. Thomas Flatman, in “The Defiance” (1686)

• Say “no” to the fountain of youth and turn on the fountain of age. Betty Friedan, quoted in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Jan. 30, 1993)

In that same article, Friedan was also quoted as saying: “We need to break through the age mystique by continuing to grow, solving problems, making social changes. We need to see our age as an uncharted adventure.”

• Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth. Age is assessed not by what it is, but by what it is not. Betty Friedan, in The Fountain of Age (1993)

• I have discovered that there is a crucial difference between society’s image of old people and ‘us’ as we know and feel ourselves to be. Betty Friedan, in The Fountain of Age (1993)

• One day, there’s a hand that goes over the face and changes it. You look like an apple that isn’t young anymore. Greta Garbo, in Vanity Fair (Feb., 1994)

• At twenty a man is a peacock, at thirty a lion, at forty a camel, at fifty a serpent, at sixty a dog, at seventy an ape, and at eighty nothing. Baltasar Gracián, in The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

• People had much rather be thought to look ill than old: because it is possible to recover from sickness, but there is no recovering from age. William Hazlitt, “Common Places,” in The Literary Examiner (Sep.–Dec., 1823)

• If you survive long enough, you’re revered—rather like an old building. Katharine Hepburn, in M. Freedland, Katharine Hepburn (1984)

• Age, like distance, lends a double charm. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in Urania: A Rhymed Lesson (1846)

• She realized that to grow old is to have taken away, one by one, all gifts of life, the food and wine, the music, and the company. Nothing unexpected is left, there is only a worn-out body mumbling over crumbs in the sure expectation of death: The gods unloose, one by one, the mortal fingers that cling to the edge of the table. Storm Jameson, the voice of the narrator, in Three Kingdoms (1926)

• Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. James Joyce, the voice of the character Gabriel, from the short story “The Dead,” in Dubliners (1914)

• From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. Carl Jung, in The Soul and Death (1955; orig. pub. in Europäische Revue, April, 1934); reprinted in Collected Works

• Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old. Franz Kafka, quoted in Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka (1951; 2nd expanded ed., 1971)

A moment earlier, Kafka introduced the thought by saying: “Youth is full of sunshine and life. Youth is happy, because it has the ability to see beauty. When this ability is lost, wretched old age begins, decay, unhappiness.” Some Kafka scholars have questioned the authenticity of these observations. See explanation in the Kafka ACHIEVEMENT entry.

• Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art. Garson Kanin, quoted in The New York Times Book Review (Feb. 26, 1978)

• I’ve been waiting a long time to become as old as I am and it was worth the wait. Garrison Keillor, “The Beauty of Falls That You Walk Away From,” a post on www.GarrisonKeillor.com (April 26, 2024)

• Getting older is almost like changing species, from cute middle-aged, white-tailed deer, to yak. We are both grass eaters, but that’s about the only similarity. Anne Lamott, the opening words of “It's Good to Remember: We Are All on Borrowed Time,” in The New York Times (October 30, 2023)

In the opening paragraph, Lamott—writing at age sixty-nine—continued: “At the Safeway sushi bar during lunchtime, I look at the teenage girls in their crop tops with their stupid flat tummies and I feel bad about what lies beneath my big, forgiving shirts but—and this is one of the blessings of aging—not for long.”

• The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball. Doug Larson, quoted in The Pantagraph [Bloomington, Illinois] (Nov. 25, 2006)

• It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years. Tom Lehrer, remark made when introducing his song “Alma,” on the 1965 album That Was the Year That Was

• The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been. Madeleine L’Engle, quoted in S. H. Anderson & D. W. Dunlap, “New York Day By Day”, in The New York Times (April 25, 1985)

• We all run on two clocks. One is the outside clock, which ticks away our decades and brings us ceaselessly to the dry season. The other is the inside clock, where you are your own timekeeper and determine your own chronology, your own internal weather, and your own rate of living. Max Lerner, “Fifty,” in The New York Post (Dec. 18, 1952); reprinted in The Unfinished Country (1959)

Lerner added: “Sometimes the inner clock runs itself out long before the outer one, and you see a dead man going through the motions of living.”

• All one’s life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to be noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It is a positive thing. You can move about, unnoticed and invisible. Doris Lessing, quoted in Robert Andrews, The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1989)

• Age to women is like Kryptonite to Superman. Kathy Lette, in A Stitch in Time: A Novel (2005)

• Age is opportunity no less/Than youth itself, though in another dress,/And as the evening twilight fades away/The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day. Henry Wadsworth Longellow, in Morituri Salutamus (1874)

• As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft. H. L. Mencken, in A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

• Nothing makes people crosser than being considered too old for love. Nancy Mitford, a reflection of the narrator, a woman known only as Linda, in Love in a Cold Climate (1949)

• Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face. Michel de Montaigne, in Essays (1580–88)

• If I had known I was going to live so long, I’d have taken better care of myself. Billy Noonan, quoted in “Billy Noonan: The Sage of Baudette,” by George L. Peterson, Minneapolis Sunday Tribune (Sep. 16, 1951)

ERROR ALERT: According to Garson O’Toole, aka The Quote Investigator, this is the earliest appearance of a saying that went on to become something close to a modern proverb. Noonan, a 70-year-old Minnesota newspaper columnist, offered the thought in a dinner held in his honor by fellow journalists. The saying is commonly attributed to Eubie Blake, Adolph Zukor, and even Mickey Mantle.

Over the centuries, others had expressed a similar sentiment, but never in the eminently quotable way that Noonan did. Perhaps the earliest came around 1770, when Sir Robert Henley, the Earl of Northington and former Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain was quoted by his grandson as saying. “If I had known that these legs were one day to carry a Chancellor, I’d have taken better care of them when I was a lad.”

• I used to think that getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Joyce Carol Oates, in The Guardian (Aug. 18, 1989)

• Age’s terms of peace, after the long interlude of war with life, have still to be concluded—Youth must be kept decently away—so many old wounds may have to be unbound, and old scars pointed to with pride, to prove to ourselves we have been brave and noble. Eugene O’Neill, in Strange Interlude (1928).

• When the roses are gone, nothing is left but the thorn. Ovid, in The Art of Love (1st c. A.D.)

QUOTE NOTE: This quotation has appeared in a number of anthologies on the topic of aging, but it was originally offered in a poem on the fading of beauty. For the fuller quotation, see the Ovid entry in BEAUTY.

• Thank God for the head. Inside the head is the only place you got to be young when the usual place gets used up. Grace Paley, the title character speaking, “Zagrowsky Tells,” in Later the Same Day (1985)

• Years are only garments, and you either wear them with style all your life, or else you go dowdy to the grave. Dorothy Parker, in “The Middle or Blue Period,” (1944)) in The Portable Dorothy Parker (1988)

• The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it. Johann Paul Richter (who wrote under the pen name Jean Paul), quoted in Maturin Murray Ballou, in Treasury of Thought (1894, 15th ed.)

• Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed. Anthony Powell, in Temporary Kings (1973)

• I’m told that after the age of 60, one loses half an inch of height every five years. This doesn’t appear to be a problem for Biden, but it presents a challenge for me, considering that at my zenith, I didn’t quite make it to five feet. If I live as long as my father did, I may vanish. Robert Reich, “A Holiday Question: How Old is Old?” a Substack post (Dec. 25, 2023)

• I wonder if one of the penalties of growing older is that you become more and more conscious that nothing in life is very permanent. Eleanor Roosevelt, in My Days (1938)

• Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art. Eleanor Roosevelt, widely quoted, but not sourced

• There are people whose watch stops at a certain hour and who remain permanently at that age. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, quoted in John W. Gardner & Francesca Gardner Reese, Quotations of Wit and Wisdom (1975)

• A man’s age represents a fine cargo of experiences and memories. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in Wartime Writings 1939- 1944 (1986)

Saint-Exupéry preceded the observation by writing: “A man’s age is something impressive, it sums up his life: maturity reached slowly and against many obstacles, illnesses cured, griefs and despairs overcome, and unconscious risks taken; maturity formed through so many desires, hopes, regrets, forgotten things, loves.”

• It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution. The reverse is true. As one grows older one climbs with surprising strides. George Sand, an 1868 journal entry

• The country of the aged is a land few people think very hard and seriously about before the time of life when they sense they’re arriving there. Maggie Scarf, in Unfinished Business (1980)

• In a wider sense, it can also be said that the first forty years of our life furnish the text, whereas the following thirty supply the commentary. Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Different Periods of Life,” in Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)

QUOTE NOTE: This quotation has also been translated in the following way: “The first forty years of our life give the text, the next thirty furnish the commentary upon it, which enables us rightly to understand the true meaning and connection of the text with its moral and its beauties.”

• The crucial task of age is balance, a veritable tightrope of balance; keeping just well enough, just brave enough, just gay and interested and starkly honest enough to remain a sentient human being. Florida Scott-Maxwell, in The Measure of My Days (1968)

• The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of their blood. Logan Pearsall Smith, in All Trivia (1933)

• Old and young, we are all on our last cruise. Robert Louis Stevenson, in Virginibus Puerisque (1881)

• And what would it be to grow old? For, after a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through. Robert Louis Stevenson, in Virginibus Puerisque (1881)

• Self-parody is the first portent of age. Larry McMurtry, the narrator and protagonist Danny Deck reflecting on life, in Some Can Whistle (1989)

• The art of being officially old seems to lie in cooperative submission. Anne Truitt, in Prospect: The Journey of an Artist (1996)

• When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not; but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter. Mark Twain, quoted in A. E. Paine, Mark Twain, A Biography: The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Vol. 3 (1912)

QUOTE NOTE: This is the most famous version of an oxymoronic sentiment that Twain expressed on a number of occasions. The very first came in a March 1907 article in The North American Review (titled “Memories of a Southern Farm: A Chapter From Mark Twain’s Autobiography”), where Twain wrote: “When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying, now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that happened.” For more, see this excellent 2013 post by Garson O’Toole, aka The Quote Investigator.

• It’s true, some wine improves with age. But only if the grapes were good in the first place. Abigail Van Buren, in “Dear Abby” syndicated column (April 6, 1978)

Van Buren preceded the observation by writing: “Wisdom does not automatically come with old age. Nothing does—except wrinkles.”

• In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways. Edith Wharton, “A First Word,” in A Backward Glance: An Autobiography (1934)

• I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism. Virginia Woolf, diary entry (Oct. 2, 1932), written at age fifty; in A Writer’s Diary (1953; Leonard Woolf, ed.)

• He hated the sight of his beard…. He hated also the outcropping of gray that had insidiously appeared in his mustache, on the left side of his chin, and in his sideburns. These gray bristles were, he knew, the advance scouts of a relentless, wintry invasion. And there would be no stopping the march of the hours, the days, the years. Irvin D. Yalom, in When Nietzsche Wept (1992)

QUOTE NOTE: In this passage, Yalom was describing the reaction of the fictional Dr. Josef Breuer when examining his graying beard in a mirror.

(see also AGE & AGING and AGE & AGING—OLD AGE and AGE & AGING—SPECIFIC AGES & DECADES and ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE and DEATH & DYING and SENILITY and YOUTH and YOUTH COMPARED TO OLD AGE)

• Years ago we discovered the exact point, the dead center of middle age. It occurs when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush up to the net. Franklin P. Adams, in Nods and Becks (1944)

• The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone—but never hustled. Henry Brooks Adams, in The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

• Middle age/Is a time of life/That a man first notices/ In his wife. Richard Armour, in Light Armour: Playful Poems on Practically Everything (1954)

• A person taking stock in middle age is like an artist or composer looking at an unfinished work; but whereas the composer and the painter can erase some of their past efforts, we cannot. We are stuck with what we have lived through. Harry S. Broudy, “Education for Leisure,” in Paradox and Promise: Essays on American Life and Education (1961)

Broudy continued: “The trick is to finish it with a sense of design and a flourish rather than to patch up the holes or merely to add new patches to it.”

• Middle age is Janus-faced. As we look back on our accomplishments and our failures to achieve the things we wanted, we look ahead to the time we have left to us. Stanley H. Cath, quoted in The New York Times (April 18, 1983)

• Forty is ten years older than thirty-nine. Frank Irving Cobb, in a circa 1912 note to Joseph Pulitzer; quoted in Louis M. Starr, “Joseph Pulitzer and His Most ‘Indegaddamnpendent’ Editor,” American Heritage (June 1968)

• The power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged. God has kept that good wine until now. G. K. Chesterton, “The Boyhood of Dickens,” in Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906)

Chesterton continued: “It is from the backs of the elderly gentlemen that the wings of the butterfly should burst.”

• The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you'll grow out of it. Doris Day, quoted in A. E. Hotchner, Doris Day: Her Own Story (1975)

• At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” in Saturday Evening Post (May, 1920); reprinted in Flappers and Philosophers (1920)

• Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man’s life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the character Edward speaking, in Elective Affinities (1809)

Edward continued: “Woe to him who, either by circumstances or by his own infatuation, is induced to grasp at anything before him or behind him.”

• Mere middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden deaths do. Richard Hughes, the voice of the narrator, in The Fox in the Attic (1961)

• I think middle age is the best time, if we can escape the fatty degeneration of the conscience which often sets in at about fifty. W. R. Inge, quoted in The Observer (London; June 8, 1930)

• At fifty, the madwoman in the attic breaks loose, stomps down the stairs, and sets fire to the house. She won’t be imprisoned anymore. Erica Jong, in Fear of Fifty (1994)

• The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning. Carl Jung, in The Stages of Life (1930)

• From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. Carl Jung, in The Soul and Death (1955; orig. pub. in Europäische Revue, April, 1934); reprinted in Collected Works

• Middle age is when you get in the car and immediately change the radio station. Patricia Penton Leimbach, in All My Meadows (1977)

• All one’s life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to be noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It is a positive thing. You can move about, unnoticed and invisible. Doris Lessing, a reflection of protagonist Anna Wulf, in The Golden Notebook (1962)

• He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets, reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards. G. C. Lichtenberg, in Aphorisms: Notebook B (written between 1768–1771)

• Perhaps middle age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, in Gift From the Sea (1955)

Lindbergh continued: “Perhaps one can shed at this stage in life as one sheds in beach-living; one’s pride, one’s false ambitions, one’s mask, one’s armor. Was that armor not put on to protect one from the competitive world? If one ceases to compete, does one need it? Perhaps one can at last in middle age, if not earlier, be completely oneself. And what a liberation that would be!”

• For is it not possible that middle age can be looked upon as a period of second flowering, second growth, even a kind of second adolescence? Anne Morrow Lindbergh, in Gift From the Sea (1955)

Lindbergh continued: “It is true that society in general does not help one accept this interpretation of the second half of life. And therefore this period of expanding is often tragically misunderstood.”

• It’s middle-age which is cursed by the desperate need to cling to some finger-hold halfway up the mountain, to conform, not to cause trouble, to behave well, and it is perhaps mercifully, the period which becomes blurred in the memory, the time when you did nothing more difficult than survive. John Mortimer, in Murderers and Other Friends: Another Part of Life (1995)

• I have discovered that middle-age is not a question of years. It is that moment in life when one realizes that one has exchanged, by a series of subtle shifts and substitutes, the vague and vaporous dreams of youth, for the definite and tangible realization. Kathleen Thompson Norris, in Noon—An Autobiographical Sketch (1925)

Norris continued: “It may be a very beautiful and successful realization; it may be indeed real furs for dream furs, real travel for dream travel—but it is never the dream, it never can be the dream.”

• In middle age we are apt to reach the horrifying conclusion that all sorrow, all pain, all passionate regret and loss and bitter disillusionment are self-made. Kathleen Thompson Norris, in Hands Full of Living: Talks with American Women (1931)

• My mother had demonstrated that the best way to defeat the numbing ambivalence of middle age is to surprise yourself—by pulling off some cartwheel of thought or action never even imagined at a younger age. Gail Sheehy, in Spirit of Survival (1986)

• The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them. Henry David Thoreau, a journal entry (July 14, 1852)

(see also AGE & AGING and AGE & AGING—MIDDLE AGE and AGE & AGING—SPECIFIC AGES & DECADES and ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE and DEATH & DYING and SENILITY and YOUTH and YOUTH COMPARED TO OLD AGE)

• I am not well; I inhabit a weak, frail, decayed tenement, battered by the winds and broken in upon by the storms; and, from all I can learn, the landlord does not intend to repair. John Adams, on his ninety-year-old body, to Daniel Webster on June 17, 1826. Adams died a few weeks later, on July 4, 1826.

• To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent—that is to triumph over old age. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, “Leaves From a Notebook,” in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Of late I appear/To have reached that stage/When people look old/Who are only my age. Richard Armour, in Going Like Sixty: A Lighthearted Look at the Later Years (1974)

• Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. Isaac Asimov, in Pebble in the Sky (1950)

QUOTE NOTE: The words are from the novel's narrator, who added: “They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young.”

• Old Age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young. Fred Astaire, in a 1979 issue of American Opinion magazine (specific issue undetermined)

• Old age ain’t no place for sissies. Author Unknown, but often attributed to Bette Davis, who had a pillow engraved with the saying

QUOTE NOTE: In a 2019 Quote Investigator post, Garson O'Toole wrote: “The adage was popularized by Ruth S. Hain starting in 1968 via an anecdote published in the Reader’s Digest. The creator was anonymous. Bette Davis owned a pillow displaying the adage which also aided its propagation.”

• Old age is the verdict of life. Amelia E. Barr, in All the Days of My Life (1913)

• To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am. Bernard Baruch, quoted in Newsweek magazine (Aug. 29, 1955)

• A man in old age is like a sword in a shop window. Henry Ward Beecher, in Life Thoughts (1858)

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the quotation is normally presented, but the observation takes on a fuller meaning when one sees how Beecher completed the thought: “Men that look upon the perfect blade do not imagine the process by which it was completed. Man is a sword. Daily life is the workshop, and God is the artificer, and those cares which beat upon the anvil, and file his edge, and eat in, acid-like, the inscription upon his hilt—these are the very things that fashion the man.”

• I have begun in old age to understand…that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others. Saul Bellow, “Ralph Ellison in Tivoli” (1998), in There is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction (2015)

Bellow continued: “One of the booby traps of freedom—which is bordered on all sides by isolation—is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life’s banquet.”

• It is as natural for old age to be frail, as for the stalk to bend under the ripened ear, or for the autumnal leaf to change its hue. To this law all who went before you have submitted; and all who shall come after you must yield. After they have flourished for a season, they shall fade, like you, when the period of decline arrives, and bow under the pressure of years. Hugh Blair, “On Duties and Consolations of the Aged,” in Sermons, Vol. I (1822)

Blair preceded the thought by writing: “Throughout the whole vegetable, sensible, and rational world, whatever makes progress towards maturity, as soon as it has passed that point, begins to verge towards decay.”

• With full-span lives having become the norm, people may need to learn how to be aged as they once had to learn how to be adult. Ronald Blythe, in The View in Winter: Reflections on Old Age (1979)

• Old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft. Ray Bradbury, in R is for Rocket (1962)

• What’s old age for if not dispensing bullshit and calling it wisdom? Steven Brust, in Good Guys (2018)

• You know you’re getting old when you stoop to tie your shoes and wonder what else you could do while you’re down there. George Burns, quoted in Robert Byrne, The Fourth and By Far the Most Recent 637 Best Things Ever Said (1990)

• Just because you’re an old guy, you don’t have to sit around drooling in the corner. George H. W. Bush, said just after a parachute jump on his eighty-fifth birthday; quoted in George H. W. Bush, 41: A Portrait of My Father (2014)

The elder Bush continued: “Get out and do something. Get out and enjoy life.”

• The man who works and is not bored is never old. Pablo Casals, quoted in Julian Lloyd Webber, Song of the Birds: Sayings, Stories, and Impressions of Pablo Casals (1985)

• Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative. Maurice Chevalier, quoted in The New York Times (Oct. 9, 1960)

QUOTE NOTE: This has become something of a signature line for the debonair French actor, who likely offered slightly varying versions of the remark on different occasions. Michael Freedland’s biography Maurice Chevalier (1981) reports the actor saying, “Considering the alternative, it’s not too bad at all” when asked how he felt about how he felt on his seventy-second birthday.

• Avarice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey’s end? Marcus Tullius Cicero, in “On Old Age” (44 B.C.)

ERROR ALERT: In one of the most egregious errors on the internet, the vast majority of quotation sites—and, sadly, even many respected published books of quotations—mistakenly begin the observation: “Advice in old age….” (italics mine)

• As a white candle/In a holy place,/So is the beauty/Of an aged face. Joseph Campbell, from 1913 poem “The Old Woman,” in H. Monroe, The New Poetry (1917)

• One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave. Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette), “My Mother and Illness,” in My Mother’s House (1922)

• It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny. Simone de Beauvoir, in The Coming of Age (1970)

• Old age is particularly difficult to assume because we have always regarded it as something alien, a foreign species: “Can I have become a different being while I still remain myself?” Simone de Beauvoir, in The Coming of Age (1970)

• Old age was growing inside me. It kept catching my eye from the depths of the mirror. I was paralyzed sometimes as I saw it make its way for me so steadily when nothing inside me was ready for it. Simone de Beauvoir, in Force of Circumstances (1963)

• Old age is a shipwreck. Charles de Gaulle, quoted in Don Cook, Charles de Gaulle: A Biography (1983)

QUOTATION CAUTION: The words do come from De Gaulle, but he was not describing his own aging process, as is suggested in many quotation anthologies. Rather, they appeared as part of a fuller observation de Gaulle made about the aging French military leader, Marshal Pétain: “The old man is losing his sense of proportion. Nothing and nobody will stop the marshal on the road to senile ambition. Old age is a shipwreck.”

• I don't know how you feel about old age, but in my case I didn't even see it coming. It hit me in the rear. Phyllis Diller, from her stand-up routine

• In all the world there are no people so piteous and forlorn as those who are forced to eat the bitter bread of dependence in their old age, and find how steep are the stairs of another man’s house. Dorothy Dix, in Dorothy Dix—Her Book: Every-Day Help for Every-Day People (1926)

• Age, death’s twilight. John Donne, in Satires III (c. 1594)

• No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace,/As I have seen in one autumnal face.
 
John Donne, “The Autumnal,” in Elegies (1600)

• Old age is an insult. It’s like being smacked. Lawrence Durrell, quoted in Sunday Times (London, Nov. 20, 1988)

• Old age and sickness bring out the essential characteristics of a man. Felix Frankfurter, in Felix Frankfurter Reminisces (1960)

• I have discovered that there is a crucial difference between society’s image of old people and ‘us’ as we know and feel ourselves to be. Betty Friedan, in The Fountain of Age (1993)

• One day, there’s a hand that goes over the face and changes it. You look like an apple that isn’t young anymore. Greta Garbo, in Vanity Fair (Feb., 1994)

• We must not take the faults of our youth into our old age; for old age brings with it its own defects. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a remark in conversation (Aug. 16, 1824 ), quoted in Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe (1836)

• At twenty a man is a peacock, at thirty a lion, at forty a camel, at fifty a serpent, at sixty a dog, at seventy an ape, and at eighty nothing. Baltasar Gracián, in The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

• Old age is somewhat like dieting. Every day there is less of us to be deserved. Doris Grumbach, in Fifty Days of Solitude (1994)

• Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator. Jane Harrison, in Reminiscences of A Student’s Life (1925)

• People had much rather be thought to look ill than old: because it is possible to recover from sickness, but there is no recovering from age. William Hazlitt, “Common Places,” in The Literary Examiner (Sep.–Dec., 1823)

• If you survive long enough, you’re revered—rather like an old building. Katharine Hepburn, in M. Freedland, Katharine Hepburn (1984)

• Old age equalizes—we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world. Eric Hoffer, in Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)

• When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age. Victor Hugo, the narrator describing the character Marius Pontmercy, in Les Misérables (1862)

• Love, the last defense against old age. Aldous Huxley, “Old Age,” in Texts and Pretexts: An Anthology of Poetry with Commentaries (1933)

Huxley continued: “The last, and for those whose good fortune it is to have some one person to care for, or who have learned the infinitely difficult art of loving all their neighbors, the best.”

• She realized that to grow old is to have taken away, one by one, all gifts of life, the food and wine, the music, and the company. Nothing unexpected is left, there is only a worn-out body mumbling over crumbs in the sure expectation of death: The gods unloose, one by one, the mortal fingers that cling to the edge of the table. Storm Jameson, the voice of the narrator, in Three Kingdoms (1926)

• From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. Carl Jung, in The Soul and Death (1955; orig. pub. in Europäische Revue, April, 1934); reprinted in Collected Works

• Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old. Franz Kafka, quoted in Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka (1951; 2nd expanded ed., 1971)

QUOTE NOTE: A moment earlier, Kafka introduced the thought by saying: “Youth is full of sunshine and life. Youth is happy, because it has the ability to see beauty. When this ability is lost, wretched old age begins, decay, unhappiness.” Some Kafka scholars have questioned the authenticity of these observations. See explanation in the Kafka ACHIEVEMENT entry.

• Old age is not a disease—it is strength and survivorship, triumph over all kinds of vicissitudes and disappointments, trials and illnesses. Maggie Kuhn, quoted in D. Hessel, Maggie Kuhn on Aging (1977)

• Old age on a good day is a dance we don’t know the steps to: we falter. Anne Lamott, “Dear Old Friend,” in Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith (2007)

Lamott added: “We may not be going in the direction we’d anticipated, or have any clue at all about which way to turn next.”

• Old age is a tyrant who forbids, upon pain of death, all of the pleasures of youth. François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, in Maximes (1665)

• The reality of old age starts to sink in when you no longer have to ask for the senior citizen’s discount. Doug Larson, in the Green Bay Press-Gazette (Feb. 28, 1985)

• The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been. Madeleine L’Engle, quoted in S. H. Anderson & D. W. Dunlap, “New York Day By Day”, in The New York Times (April 25, 1985)

• In old age our bodies are worn-out instruments, on which the soul tries in vain to play the melodies of youth. But because the instrument has lost its strings, or is out of tune, it does not follow that the musician has lost his skill. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Table-Talk,” in Driftwood (1857)

• Old age is far more than white hair, wrinkles, the feeling that it is too late and the game finished, that the stage belongs to rising generations. The true evil is not the weakening of the body, but the indifference of the soul. André Maurois, in The Art of Living (1940)

• The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude. Gabriel García Márquez, the narrator describing the life of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

• Old age has ts pleasures, which though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth. W. Somerset Maugham, in The Summing Up (1938)

Maugham preceded the thought by writing: “The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquility of the evening.“

• When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long. W. Somerset Maugham, in The Partial View (1954)

Maugham continued: “In old age the taste improves and it is possible to enjoy art and literature without the personal bias that in youth warps the judgment.”

• Old age is never fun. It presents in an acute form the human predicament: everyone must become neglected, forgotten, or replaced. Robert McCrum, in “Gore Vidal: A Lion in Winter,” The Guardian (June 16, 2007)

• Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do. Golda Meir, quoted by Oriana Fallaci, L’Europeo (1973)

Meir continued: “You can’t stop the plane, you can’t stop the storm, you can’t stop time. So one might as well accept it calmly, wisely.”

• One must make the most of old age. We can laugh at it, we can be lachrymose about it, we can certainly deplore it, but we must seek the best in it. Jan Morris, “On Getting Old: An Agnostic Sermon,” in Allegorizings (2021)

In the essay, Morris also offered these other observations on the subject:

“There are a few advantages in getting old, and to some degree they compensate for the disadvantages. Make the most of them! With luck, never again will you have to stand in a crowded train: somebody is sure to offer you their seat with a sweet smile.”

“One of the prizes of old age is its release from competition.”

“Old age is the right to be absolutely ourselves. Laugh, cry, satirize it my friends, when your time comes—but make the most of it too!”

• If I had known I was going to live so long, I’d have taken better care of myself. Billy Noonan, quoted in “Billy Noonan: The Sage of Baudette,” by George L. Peterson, Minneapolis Sunday Tribune (Sep. 16, 1951)

ERROR ALERT: According to Garson O’Toole, aka The Quote Investigator, this is the earliest appearance of a saying that went on to become something close to a modern proverb. Noonan, a 70-year-old Minnesota newspaper columnist, offered the thought in a dinner held in his honor by fellow journalists. The saying is commonly attributed to Eubie Blake, Adolph Zukor, and even Mickey Mantle.

Over the centuries, others had expressed a similar sentiment, but never in the eminently quotable way that Noonan did. Perhaps the earliest came around 1770, when Sir Robert Henley, the Earl of Northington and former Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain was quoted by his grandson as saying. “If I had known that these legs were one day to carry a Chancellor, I’d have taken better care of them when I was a lad.”

• I used to think that getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Joyce Carol Oates, in The Guardian (Aug. 18, 1989)

• The last act is bloody, however delightful the rest of the play may be. Blaise Pascal, in Pensées (1670)

• It is easier to counterfeit old age than youth. Elizabeth Peters, in The Snake, the Crocodile, and the Dog (1992)

• What’s an old man to do,/But reshape/The landscape of desire. Louis Phillips, “What’s An Old Man To Do,” in Sunlight Falling to the Lake (2020)

• Old men, for the most part, are like old chronicles that give you dull but true accounts of times past, and are worth knowing only on that score. Alexander Pope, in Thoughts on Various Subjects (1727)

• Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed. Anthony Powell, in Temporary Kings (1973)

• When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground. Proverb (African)

• For the unlearned, old age is winter; for the learned, it is the season of harvest. Proverb (Yiddish)

• The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it. Johann Paul Richter (who wrote under the pen name Jean Paul), quoted in Maturin Murray Ballou, in Treasury of Thought (1894, 15th ed.)

• Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art. Eleanor Roosevelt, widely quoted, but not sourced

• Old age isn’t a battle. Old age is a massacre. Philip Roth, in Everyman (2006).

• It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution. The reverse is true. As one grows older one climbs with surprising strides. George Sand, an 1868 journal entry

• For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was. May Sarton, in Kinds of Love (1974)

• Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light. May Sarton, in “The Family of Woman,” in Ms magazine (1982)

• I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward. May Sarton, in At Seventy (1984)

• Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force. Dorothy L. Sayers, the character Sir Impey speaking, in Clouds of Witness (1956)

• The country of the aged is a land few people think very hard and seriously about before the time of life when they sense they’re arriving there. Maggie Scarf, in Unfinished Business (1980)

• The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped. Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Different Periods of Life,” in Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)

QUOTE NOTE: This quotation, and a bit more, has also been translated in the following way: “Towards the end of life, much the same happens as at the end of a masked ball when the masks are removed. We now see hothouse really were with whom we had come in contact during the course of our life. Characters have revealed themselves, deeds have borne fruit, achievements have been justly appreciated, and all illusions have crumbled away.”

• In a wider sense, it can also be said that the first forty years of our life furnish the text, whereas the following thirty supply the commentary. Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Different Periods of Life,” in Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)

QUOTE NOTE: This quotation has also been translated in the following way: “The first forty years of our life give the text, the next thirty furnish the commentary upon it, which enables us rightly to understand the true meaning and connection of the text with its moral and its beauties.”

• Old age is an incurable disease. Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger), in Letters to Lucilius (c. 65 A.D.)

• Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go. B. F. Skinner, in Enjoy Old Age: A Program of Self-Management (1983; with M. E. Vaughan)

• There are people who, like houses, are beautiful in dilapidation. Logan Pearsall Smith, “Age and Death,” in Afterthoughts (1931)

• The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of their blood. Logan Pearsall Smith, in All Trivia (1933)

• One evil in old age is, that as your time is come, you think that every little illness is the beginning of the end. When a man expects to be arrested, every knock at the door is an alarm. Sydney Smith, in letter to Sir Wilmot Horton (Feb. 8, 1836); quoted in Lady Holland (Saba Smith), A Memoir of The Reverend Sydney Smith: by His Daughter (1855)

• And what would it be to grow old? For, after a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through. Robert Louis Stevenson, in Virginibus Puerisque (1881)

• Old age is an illness in itself. Terence, in Phormio (2nd c. B.C.)

• Do not go gentle into that good night./Old age should burn and rave at close of day;/Rage, rage, against the dying of the light. Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” in In Country Sleep (1952)

This is the most famous portion of one of Thomas's most famous poems. You can hear the author reciting the entire poem on: YouTube

• Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man. Leon Trotsky, diary entry (May 8, 1935), in Diary in Exile—1935 (1958)

• The art of being officially old seems to lie in cooperative submission. Anne Truitt, in Prospect: The Journey of an Artist (1996)

• Lord save us all from old age and broken health and a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms. Mark Twain, in letter to Joe T. Goodman (April, 1891); reprinted in The Letters of Mark Twain, Vol. 4: 1886–1900 (A. B. Paine, ed.)

QUOTE NOTE: Twain was writing to console an old friend who had become ill. He preceded the thought by writing: “It is dreadful to think of you in ill health—I can’t realize it; you are always to me the same that you were in those days when matchless health and glowing spirits and delight in life were commonplaces with us.”

• I will offer here, as a sound maxim, this: That we can’t reach old age by another man’s road. Mark Twain, in a Dec. 5, 1905 speech at Delmonico’s restaurant, at a party to celebrate Twain’s 70th birthday

• In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways. Edith Wharton, “A First Word,” in A Backward Glance: An Autobiography (1934)

• Old age is a special problem for me because I’ve never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself—a lad of about nineteen. E. B. White, a remark on his seventieth birthday, in “E. B. White: Notes and Comment by Author” (interview with Israel Shenker), The New York Times (July 11, 1969)

• The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. Oscar Wilde, the character Harry speaking, in The Picture of Dorian Grey (1891)

• Never lose sight of the fact that old age needs so little but needs that little so much. Margaret A. Willour, quoted in a 1982 issue of Reader’s Digest (specific issue undetermined)

QUOTE NOTE: I consider this one of the most powerful things ever said on the subject of old age. While researching the quotation’s authenticity, I learned that it did indeed come from Willour (pronounced Will-HOUR), although I was unable to locate a precise original source. Born in Troy, Pennsylvania in 1892, Willhour served as a combat nurse during WWI. After the war, she worked as a Pennsylvania public heath nurse for 18 years before becoming one of the first—if not the first—female agents for New York Life. In 1985, at age ninety-two (and three years before her death), she was honored by New York Life for fifty years of service with the company. According to a family member I interviewed, she made the foregoing “needs so little” remark in the last decade of her life.

• An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick. William Butler Yeats, in “Sailing to Byzantium” (1926), in The Tower (1928)

QUOTATION CAUTION: This is how the couplet appears in almost every quotation anthology I’ve seen. Presented this way, it is a depressing sentiment, but the full stanza in Yeats’s famous poem indicates that he added an extremely important unless caveat: “An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick, unless/Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing/For every tatter in its mortal dress.”

(see also AGE & AGING and AGE & AGING—OLD AGE and DEATH & DYING and MIDDLE AGE and YOUTH and YOUTH COMPARED TO OLD AGE)

• When you’re forty, half of you belongs to the past—and when you are seventy, nearly all of you. Jean Anouilh, the Duchess speaking, in Time Remembered (1939)

• Sex after ninety is like trying to shoot pool with a rope. George Burns, a signature line

QUOTE NOTE: Burns offered numerous versions of this line in his later years, but it looks like he may have borrowed the quip from Jack Benny. In B. S. I Love You: Sixty Funny Years with the Famous and the Infamous (1989), Milton Berle wrote: “Jack Benny’s line about Burns and sex was a big winner too: ‘George Burns having sex is like shooting pool with a rope’”).

• Forty is ten years older than thirty-nine. Frank Irving Cobb, in a circa 1912 note to Joseph Pulitzer; quoted in Louis M. Starr, “Joseph Pulitzer and His Most ‘Indegaddamnpendent’ Editor,” American Heritage (June 1968)

• Being seventy-five means you sometimes get up in the morning and feel like a bent hairpin. Hume Cronyn, in 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace (April 12, 1987)

• I shot through my twenties like a luminous thread through a dark needle, blazing toward my destination: Nowhere. Carrie Fisher, diary entry of protagonist Suzanne Vale during her fifth day in detox, in Postcards From the Edge (1987)

Vale preceded the thought by writing: “The positive way to look at this is that from here things can only go up. But I’ve been up, and I always feel like a trespasser. A transient at the top. It’s like I’ve got a visa for happiness, but for sadness I’ve got a lifetime pass.”

• At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” in Saturday Evening Post (May, 1920); reprinted in Flappers and Philosophers (1920)

• Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. F. Scott Fitzgerald, a reflection of the narrator, Nick Carraway, in The Great Gatsby (1925)

• To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., quoted by Richard Henry Dana in remarks at 1906 meeting of the Cambridge Historical Society (April 27, 1906)

QUOTE NOTE: I’ve read that Holmes offered the observation at a party celebrating the seventieth birthday of Julia Ward Howe in 1889, but have been unable to confirm this.

• When I was as you are now, towering in [the] confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am. Samuel Johnson, in letter to Bennet Langton (Jan. 9, 1759), quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)

ERROR ALERT: Most internet sites, and many published volumes of quotations, mistakenly present this observation as if it read, “Towering is the confidence of twenty-one.”

• At fifty, the madwoman in the attic breaks loose, stomps down the stairs, and sets fire to the house. She won’t be imprisoned anymore. Erica Jong, in Fear of Fifty (1994)

• There’s a point, around the age of twenty…when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities. Ursula K. Le Guin, the character Bedap speaking, in The Dispossessed (1974)

QUOTE NOTE: In the novel, Bedap makes this remark to the character Shevek, who replies: “Or at least accept them with resignation.” The Dispossessed is one of LeGuin’s most acclaimed works, one of a small number of sci-fi novels to win the Hugo, Lotus, and Nebula Awards for Best Novel.

• He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets, reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards. G. C. Lichtenberg, in Aphorisms: Notebook B (written between 1768–1771)

• By the age of fifty you have made yourself what you are, and if it is good, it is better than your youth. If it is bad, it is not because you are older but because you have not grown. Marya Mannes, in More in Anger: Some Opinions, Uncensored and Unteleprompted (1958)

Mannes preceded the thought by writing: “There is no “trick” in being young: it happens to you. But the process of maturing is an art to be learned, an effort to be sustained.”

• As you get older, you have to watch it [free will] dwindle. At twenty your choices are almost unlimited. At fifty you’re a prisoner of past decisions. At seventy you have no free will left at all. Helen McCloy (pen name of Helen Clarkson), the character Alcott speaking, Mr. Splitfoot (1968)

• Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and dying as on a battlefield. Muriel Spark, in Memento Mori (1959)

• I'll never make the mistake of being 70 again. Casey Stengel, in 1960 remarks to the press after being fired as manager of the New York Yankees

• With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs. James Thurber, cartoon caption, New York Post (June 30, 1955)

• Let her who is forty call herself forty; but if she can be young in spirit at forty, let her show that she is so. Anthony Trollope, a reflection of the narrator, in The Small House at Allington (1864)

• To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or may not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in an 1877 letter

• Approaching eighty I sometimes see myself from a little distance, as a man I know, but not intimately. John Updike, a reflection of the unnamed narrator, in the short story “The Full Glass,” in My Fathers Tears and Other Stories (published posthumously in 2009)

(see also ABUSE and ANGER and BELLIGERENCE and BULLYING and COMBATIVENESS and CRUELTY and HATRED and HOSTILITY and PUGNACITY and RAGE and VIOLENCE)

(see also ABUSE and ANGER and BELLIGERENCE and COMBATIVENESS and CRUELTY and HOSTILITY and PUGNACITY and VIOLENCE)

• The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even to murder, with the truth. Alfred Adler, in The Problems of Neurosis (1929)

• In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong. Martin Amis, “Gore Vidal” (1977), in The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)

• There’s an aggressive element to wit. Rita Mae Brown, in Starting From Scratch (1988)

• In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It's an aggressive, even a hostile act. Joan Didion, “Why I Write,” in Janet Sternburg, The Writer on Her Work, Vol. 1 (1980)

Didion continued: “You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”

• Aggression is part of the masculine design; we are hardwired for it. John Eldredge, in Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secrets of a Man’s Soul (2001)

Comparing boys and girls, Eldredge added: “Little girls do not invent games where large numbers of people die, where blood is a prerequisite for having fun. Hockey, for example was not a feminine creation. Nor was boxing. A boy wants to attack something—and so does a man, even if it’s only a little white ball on a tee.”

• Writing is an aggressive act because you aren’t leaving well enough alone. Some people will love you for it and others will feel threatened by your nerve. Whenever you write you reject being a passive receiver or a victim. When you finish a piece, you’re refusing to be silenced or ignored. Writing is brave. Bonni Goldberg, in Room to Write (1996)

• The crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness, and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o’clock. Margaret Halsey, in The Folks at Home (1952)

• Success only feeds the appetite of aggression. Lyndon Johnson, in a press conference (July 28, 1965)

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the quotation is usually presented, but when LBJ was defending his decision to keep troops in Vietnam, his fuller remark indicates he was talking about totalitarian aggression: “We learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression.” President Jimmy Carter returned to the theme in a 1980 speech: “Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease.”

• A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it. Lewis H. Lapham, “Citizen Goetz,” in Harper’s magazine (March, 1985)

• Rape is not aggressive sexuality, it is sexualized aggression. Audre Lorde, in 1980 speech (“Age, Race, Class, and Sex”); reprinted in Sister Outsider (1984)

• No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched. George Jean Nathan, “Undeveloped Notes,” in The Smart Set magazine (Aug. 1922)

• Aggression in normal daily interactions is like activating a smoke alarm when there is no smoke. Gwen Randall-Young, in Growing Into Soul: The Next Step in Human Evolution (2004)

She added: “Actually, it is worse. The ringing alarm would be annoying, but it would do no harm. Aggression at best is annoying, and at worst, itself, becomes life threatening.”

• So much attention is paid to the aggressive sins, such as violence and cruelty and greed with all their tragic effects, that too little attention is paid to the passive sins, such as apathy and laziness, which in the long run can have a more devastating and destructive effect upon society than the others. Eleanor Roosevelt, in You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life (1960)

• Evasion can be a form of aggression. Carol Shields, in The Stone Diaries (1994)

• The most destructive element in the human mind is fear. Fear creates aggressiveness; aggressiveness engenders hostility; hostility engenders fear—a disastrous circle. Dorothy Thompson, in The Courage to Be Happy (1957)

(see ANXIETY and DISTRESS)

• I feel so agitated all the time, like a hamster in search of a wheel. Carrie Fisher, a reflection of protagonist Suzanne Vale, in Postcards From the Edge (1987)

(see also ACTIVISM and CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE and DEMONSTRATIONS and DISSENT and MILITANCY & MILITANTS and OPPOSITION and OUTRAGE and REBELLION and PROTEST and [Protest] SONG and RESISTANCE and REVOLUTION)

• Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. Frederick Douglass, in an 1857 speech

• Agitation is the marshalling of the conscience of a people to mold its laws. Robert Peel, quoted in The Missionary Review (1894, Vol. 17)

• Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. Oscar Wilde, in The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

Wilde added: “That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilization. Slavery was put down in America…through the grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators in Boston and elsewhere who…set the torch alight, who began the whole thing.”

(see also ATHEISM & ATHEISTS and BELIEF and CHRISTIANITY and DOUBT and FAITH and HERESY & HERETICS and RELIGION and SKEPTICISM & SKEPTICS and THEOLOGY)

• Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? Douglas Adams, a reflection of the character Ford Prefect, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

• I say that I am an agnostic. People think that's pusillanimous and covering your bets. But it's not based on any belief or yearning for an afterlife but on the fact that we actually know so little about the cosmos. It is a tribute to the complexity and, at our present stage of development, the unknowability of the universe. Martin Amis, in “The New Amis” in The Telegraph (London; May 13, 2000)

• Agnostics: atheists without balls. Stephen Colbert, in I am America (And So Can You!) (2007)

• I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure—that is all that agnosticism means. Clarence Darrow, in speech at the trial of biology teacher John T. Scopes for teaching evolution, popularly known as the “Monkey Trial” (Dayton, Tennessee; July 13, 1925)

• An agnostic is a doubter. The word is generally applied to those who doubt the verity of accepted religious creeds of faiths. Clarence Darrow, in Why I Am an Agnostic (1929)

• I think I'm a love agnostic—not sure, one way or another, if it really exists. Joan M. Drury, in Silent Words (1996)

• One should not have the arrogance to declare that God does not exist. Umberto Eco, quoted in “Belief or Nonbelief?: A Confrontation By Umberto Eco and Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini,” The Los Angeles Times (March 18, 2000)

• My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment. Albert Einstein, in letter to Morton Berkowitz (Oct. 25, 1950)

QUOTE NOTE: Einstein sometimes described himself as an agnostic, and at other times as something closer to a pantheist. Never, however, did he express a belief in a personal God. In 1929, Herbert S. Goldstein a rabbi at the Institutional Synagogue in New York sent a cable to Einstein in which he famously asked: “Do you believe in God? Stop. Prepaid reply fifty words.” Einstein needed only twenty-nine words to reply, and his answer has become part of his legacy: “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”

• [I call myself] an atheist. Agnostic for me would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this. Richard Feynman, his response when asked whether he called himself an atheist or an agnostic; quoted in Denis Brian, The Voice of Genius: Conversations with Nobel Scientists and Other Luminaries (1995)

• Agnosticism is a perfectly respectable and tenable philosophical position; it is not dogmatic and makes no pronouncements about the ultimate truths of the universe. It remains open to evidence and persuasion; lacking faith, it nevertheless does not deride faith. Sydney J. Harris, “Atheists, Like Fundamentalists, are Dogmatic,” in Pieces of Eight (1982)

Harris was contrasting agnosticism with atheism. He continued: “Atheism, on the other hand, is as unyielding and dogmatic about religious belief as true believers are about heathens. It tries to use reason to demolish a structure that is not built upon reason; because, though rational argument may take us to the edge of belief, we require a ‘leap of faith’ to jump the chasm.”

• It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to agnosticism. T. H. Huxley, “Agnosticism” (1889), in The Nineteenth Century (Feb., 1889)

• Tolerance is thin gruel compared to the rapture of absolute truths. It’s not surprising that religious people are often better protected by atheists and agnostics than each other. Wendy Kaminer, “Absolutisms on Parade,” in Free Inquiry (2001)

• I could become like that dyslexic agnostic in the old joke— the one who lies in bed and tries to figure out if his dog exists. Anne Lamott, in Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year (1993)

• In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist. H. P. Lovecraft, in letter to Robert E. Howard (Aug. 16, 1932)