- 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.
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Popular Quotables
- “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National… (7,110)
- “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) (5,840)
- Agamemnon, ll. 175-183 [tr. Johnston (2007)] (5,796)
- “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (4,899)
- Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (4,873)
- “On The Conduct of Life” (1822) (3,937)
- “In Search of a Majority,” Speech,… (3,834)
- “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of… (3,686)
- “A Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek (21 Jan 1980) (3,124)
- “The Historian as Participant,” Daedalus… (3,119)
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Adams, John • Bacon, Francis • Bible • Bierce, Ambrose • Billings, Josh • Butcher, Jim • Chesterton, Gilbert Keith • Churchill, Winston • Einstein, Albert • Eisenhower, Dwight David • Emerson, Ralph Waldo • Franklin, Benjamin • Fuller, Thomas (1654) • Gaiman, Neil • Galbraith, John Kenneth • Gandhi, Mohandas • Goethe, Johann von • Hazlitt, William • Heinlein, Robert A. • Hoffer, Eric • Huxley, Aldous • Ingersoll, Robert Green • James, William • 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 • Stevenson, Adlai • Stevenson, Robert Louis • Twain, Mark • Watterson, Bill • Wilde, Oscar- Only the 45 most quoted authors are shown above. Full author list.
Recent Feedback
- 17-Sep-20 - Tristam Shandy, 1.17 (1759-67) | WIST on Religio Medici, Part 1, sec. 25 (1642) [ed. Symonds (1886)].
- 16-Sep-20 - Dave on “To Those Born Later [An die Nachgeborenen],” (1938) [tr. Horton (2008)].
- 16-Sep-20 - (Attributed) | WIST on Thus Spoke Zarathustra [Also Sprach Zarathustra], Part 2, “Of the Compassionate [Von den Mitleidigen]” (1892) [tr. Hollingdale (1961)].
- 16-Sep-20 - "One Must Not Forget," interview by Alvin P. Sanoff, US News & World Report (27 Oct 1986) | WIST on Thus Spoke Zarathustra [Also Sprach Zarathustra], Part 2, “Of the Compassionate [Von den Mitleidigen]” (1892) [tr. Hollingdale (1961)].
- 9-Sep-20 - William Timberman on “To Those Born Later [An die Nachgeborenen],” (1938) [tr. Horton (2008)].
- 9-Sep-20 - Dave on “To Those Born Later [An die Nachgeborenen],” (1938) [tr. Horton (2008)].
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Quotations about story
Note that not all quotations have been tagged, so the Search function may find additional quotations on this topic.
Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your tale.
Frank McCourt (1930-2009) Irish-American teacher and writer
Angela’s Ashes (1996)
Also included in the dedication to Teacher Man (2006).
The murderer, the victim, the witness, each of us thinks our role is the lead.
Chuck Palahniuk (b. 1962) American novelist and freelance journalist
Invisible Monsters, ch. 1 (1999)
(Source)
It would seem that in youth we sow our wild oats, in old age our tame anecdotes.
Clifton Fadiman (1904-1999) American critic, lecturer, editor
The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes, Introduction (1985)
(Source)
Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form.
Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930) French-Swiss film director, screenwriter, critic
(Attributed)
It should be quite unnecessary to point the moral; the right telling of the story should be sufficient. Do not moralize, but let the facts produce their own moral in the child’s mind.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) English mathematician and philosopher
Education and the Good Life, ch. 11 (1926)
(Source)
There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) American writer, folklorist, anthropologist
Dust Tracks on a Road, ch. 8 (1942)
Sometimes misattributed to Maya Angelou.
The sharpness of a refusal or the edge of a rebuke may be blunted by an appropriate story so as to save wounded feelings and yet serve the purpose.
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) American lawyer, politician, US President (1861-65)
(Attributed)
In Anthony Gross, ed. Lincoln's Own Stories, ch. 6 (1912).
Chapter the Eleventh: In Which the Plot, Behaving in Much the Manner Of a Soup to which Corn Starch Has been Added, Begins, at Last, to Thicken
Steven Brust (b. 1955) American writer, systems programmer
The Phoenix Guards (1991)
If you have anything to tell me of importance, for God’s sake begin at the end.
Sara Jeannette Duncan (1861-1922) Canadian author and journalist
The Imperialist (1904)
HENRY: I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
The Real Thing, Act 2, sc. 5 (1982)
Don’t let them tell us stories. Don’t let them say of the man sentenced to death “He is going to pay his debt to society,” but: “They are going to cut off his head.” It looks like nothing. But it does make a little difference.
Albert Camus (1913-1960) Algerian-French novelist, essayist, playwright
“Entre oui et non,” in L’Envers et l’endroit (1937)
Translated as "Between Yes and No", in World Review (Mar 1950).
Depend upon it if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) English writer, lexicographer, critic
Comment (1780)
(Source)
In Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ch. 51 "1780" (1791)
