- WIST is my personal collection of quotations, curated for thought, amusement, turn of phrase, historical significance, or sometimes just (often-unintentional) irony.
Please feel free to browse and borrow.
-
Quote Search
- 18,867 quotes and counting ...
Authors
Author Cloud
Adams, John • Aristotle • Bacon, Francis • Bible • Bierce, Ambrose • Billings, Josh • Butcher, Jim • Chesterfield (Lord) • Chesterton, Gilbert Keith • Churchill, Winston • Cicero, Marcus Tullius • Einstein, Albert • Eisenhower, Dwight David • Emerson, Ralph Waldo • Franklin, Benjamin • Fuller, Thomas (1654) • Gaiman, Neil • Galbraith, John Kenneth • Gandhi, Mohandas • Hazlitt, William • Heinlein, Robert A. • Hoffer, Eric • Homer • Huxley, Aldous • Ingersoll, Robert Green • Jefferson, Thomas • Johnson, Lyndon • Johnson, Samuel • Kennedy, John F. • King, Martin Luther • La Rochefoucauld, Francois • Lewis, C.S. • Lincoln, Abraham • Mencken, H.L. • Orwell, George • Pratchett, Terry • Roosevelt, Eleanor • Roosevelt, Theodore • Russell, Bertrand • Seneca the Younger • Shakespeare, William • Shaw, George Bernard • Sophocles • Stevenson, Robert Louis • Twain, Mark- Only the 45 most quoted authors are shown above. Full author list.
Most Quoted Authors
Topic Cloud
action age America beauty belief change character death democracy education ego error evil faith fear freedom future God government happiness history human nature humanity integrity leadership liberty life love morality perspective politics power pride progress reality religion science society success truth virtue war wealth wisdom writing- I've been adding topics since 2014, so not all quotes have been given one. Full topic list.
Popular Quotables
- “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National… (9,117)
- Agamemnon, ll. 175-183 [tr. Johnston (2007)] (6,388)
- “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) (6,148)
- “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (5,399)
- Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (4,931)
- “On The Conduct of Life” (1822) (4,578)
- “Tips for Teens,” Social Studies (1981) (4,394)
- “In Search of a Majority,” Speech,… (4,043)
- “A Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek (21 Jan 1980) (3,857)
- “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of… (3,792)
Recent Feedback
- Snyder, Timothy - On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) | WIST on “Notes on Nationalism” (1945)
- Dave on Notice to email subscribers
- Nina on Notice to email subscribers
- ~~Admin - Notice to email subscribers | WIST on Subscribe/Feeds
- France, Anatole - (Spurious) | WIST on A Writer’s Notebook (1949)
- Dave on The Odyssey [Ὀδύσσεια], Book 6, l. 180ff [Odysseus to Nausicaa] (c. 700 BC) [tr. Rieu (1946)]
- Marcus Aurelius - (Spurious) | WIST on Meditations, Book 2, #11 [tr. Gill (2014)]
- Elizabeth II - Address to the Nation (5 Apr 2020) | WIST on “We’ll Meet Again” (1939) [with Hughie Charles]
- Pratchett, Terry - The Last Hero (2001) | WIST on Gnomologia: Adages and Proverbs, #3366 (1732)
- King, Stephen - On Writing, ch. 12 (2000) | WIST on In “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction,” The Guardian (20 Feb 2010)
Quotations about attention
Note that not all quotations have been tagged, so the Search function may find additional quotations on this topic.
Not listening is probably the commonest unkindness of married life, and one that creates — more devastatingly than an eternity of forgotten birthdays and misguided Christmas gifts — an atmosphere of not loving and not caring.
Judith Viorst (b. 1931) American writer, journalist, psychoanalysis researcher
Yes, Married (1972)
If at a ball, a supper, or a party of pleasure, a man were to be solving, in his own mind, a problem in Euclid, he would be a very bad companion, and make a very poor figure in that company; or if, in studying a problem in his closet, he were to think of a minuet, I am apt to believe that he would make a very poor mathematician. There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once; but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.
Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773) English statesman, wit [Philip Dormer Stanhope]
Letter to his son (4 Apr 1747)
(Source)
I hate to be a kicker,
I always long for peace,
But the wheel that does the squeaking,
Is the one that gets the grease.Josh Billings (1818-1885) American humorist [pseud. of Henry Wheeler Shaw]
“The Kicker” (c. 1870)
A "kicker" was idiom in the era for a complainer. This is a common citation for the origin of "the squeaky wheel gets the grease," but the existence of such a poem has never been verified. The earliest documented version of the phrase is in the Wall Street Journal (20 May 1910): "The wheel that squeaks the loudest / Is the wheel that gets the grease." The metaphor itself can be found in various versions back to at least the 15th Century.
A man is what he does with his attention.
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
Simone Weil (1909-1943) French philosopher
Letter to Joë Bousquet (13 Apr 1942)
Quoted in Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life (1976) [tr. Rosenthal].
The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnified world in itself.
Henry Miller (1891-1980) American novelist
Plexus, ch. 2 (1953)
(Source)
Sometimes misquoted as "magnificent world".
LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Reaper Man (1991)
Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.
Punctuality is the politeness of kings.
[L’exactitude est la politesse des rois.]
Louis XVIII (1755-1824) French monarch (1814-1824) ["Louis the Desired"]
(Attributed)
Attributed in Souvenirs de J. Lafitte (1844)
Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.
H. Jackson "Jack" Brown, Jr. (b. 1940) American writer
Life’s Instructions for Wisdom, Success, and Happiness (2001)
There cannot be mental atrophy in any person who continues to observe, to remember what he observes, and to seek answers for his unceasing hows and whys about things.
Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) Scottish-American scientist, inventor, engineer
(Attributed)
Comment to a reporter a few months before he died, as quoted in the Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress.
To do two things at once is to do neither.
Publilius Syrus (d. 42 BC) Assyrian slave, writer, philosopher [less correctly Publius Syrus]
Sententiae [Moral Sayings], # 7 [tr. Lyman (1862)]
Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.
George Eliot (1819-1880) English novelist [pseud. of Mary Ann Evans]
The Mill on the Floss (1860)
(Source)
