Explore well-known and useful English quotes, phrases and sayings. Quotes in English with translations.
“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”
“Silence at the proper season is wisdom, and better than any speech.”
“Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed”
Letter, written in collaboration with John Gay, to William Fortescue (23 September 1725).
A similar remark was made in a letter to John Gay (16 October 1727): "I have many years magnify'd in my own mind, and repeated to you a ninth Beatitude, added to the eight in the Scripture: Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed."
Variant: Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.
Context: "Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed" was the ninth Beatitude which a man of wit (who, like a man of wit, was a long time in gaol) added to the eighth.
“Your clothes should be tight enough to show you're a woman but loose enough to show you're a lady”
“O, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!”
Canto VI, st. 17.
Variant: Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive
Source: Marmion (1808)
Said to Samuel J Woolf, Berlin, Summer 1929. Cited with additional notes in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice and Freeman Dyson, Princeton UP (2010) p 230
1920s
Variant: If A is success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.
“Red hair, sir, in my opinion, is dangerous.”
Source: Very Good, Jeeves!
“The covers of this book are too far apart.”
Context: Please don't make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe. I don't mind making jokes, but I don't want to look like one... I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity... If fame goes by, so long, I've had you, fame. If it goes by, I've always known it was fickle. So at least it's something I experienced, but that's not where I live.
Her last taped interview, with Richard Meryman, published in LIFE magazine a few days before her death. (3 August 1962); quoted in Ms. magazine (August 1972) <!-- p. 42 -->
“And I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinking.”
“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.”
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Wednesday
“It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.”
A Preface to Morals (1929)
“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”
Source: War and Peace
“Intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life.”
Source: The Alchemist
Variant: Before marriage, a girl has to make love to a man to hold him. After marriage, she has to hold him to make love to him.
“A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.”
Original from Zig Ziglar https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zig_Ziglar
Misattributed
“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
No known source in Emerson's works; first found as a piece of anonymous folk-wisdom in a 1936 newspaper column:
: Every minute you are angry, you lose 60 seconds of happiness.
:* Junius, "Office Cat" https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/85995624/, The Daily Freeman [Kingston, NY] (30 December 1936), p. 6
Misattributed
“It's a match made in heaven… by a retarded angel.”
“The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.”
March 1937
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
“The beautiful is always bizarre.”
Variant: The Beautiful is always strange.
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
Si hortum in bibliotheca habes, nihil deerit.
To Varro, in Ad Familiares IX, 4
“I don't believe in failure. It's not failure if you enjoy the process.”
“You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you.”
“The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.”
“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”
“To be great is to be misunderstood.”
Source: Self-Reliance and Other Essays
“Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.”
“A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.”
“Never, never, never give in!”
Variant: Never, never, never give up.
Source: The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Part One, Chapter III
Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them.
Letter to Samuel Bowles (August 1858 or 1859), letter #193 of The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958), edited Thomas H. Johnson, associate editor Theodora Ward
Variant: My friends are my "estate." Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them.
“Sex without love is an empty experience. But as empty experiences go, it's one of the best.”
Love and Death (1975)
“Doing what you love is the cornerstone of having abundance in your life.”
“But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.”
pg 71
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body
“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”
Source: A Confession
“God is silent. Now if only man would shut up.”
“It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them.”
Reportedly in: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Mistrust, Conspiracy, and Lack of Internet Ethics (1980) Hearings Before the Committee on Agriculture, House of Representatives, Ninety-second Congress. p. 32
Attributed
“He who knows all the answers has not been asked all the questions.”
“No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.”
Variant: No force on earth can stop an idea whose time has come
“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.”
Source: Anna Karenina
“Mercy is the golden chain by which society is bound together.”
“Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.”
Variant: Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.
Original Latin: Veritatem inquirenti, semel in vita de omnibus, quantum fieri potest, esse dubitandum
Variant translation: If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things.
Principles of Philosophy (1644)
Variant: In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life, to doubt, as far as possible, of all things.
Variant: People understand me so little that they do not even understand when I complain of being misunderstood.
Source: The Journals of Kierkegaard
Source: Jonathan Livingston Seagull
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
The Roycraft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams (1923)
Source: The Roycroft Dictionary Concocted by Ali Baba and the Bunch on Rainy Days
“The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have.”
Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell
“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”
“Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?”
“Always be smarter than the people who hire you.”
“Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.”
“Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.”
Success
1870s, Society and Solitude (1870)
“You really can change the world if you care enough.”
“A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.”
pg 27
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight
“Life is a traveling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.”
“I never made a mistake in my life; at least, never one that I couldn't explain away afterwards.”
Source: Under The Deodars
“In times of war, the law falls silent.”
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
“The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.”
“Be bad, but at least don't be a liar, a deceiver!”
Source: Anna Karenina
“If you want things to be different, perhaps the answer is to become different yourself.”
“Love is a better master than duty.”
“Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine.”
“I'm very definitely a woman and I enjoy it.”
“Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.”
Attributed
Source: As quoted in The Book of Positive Quotations (2007) by John Cook, p. 548
“There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you.”
Source: What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
“Just because you fail once doesn't mean you're gonna fail at everything.”
“Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure”
Life Without Principle (1863)
Context: The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer. I am surprised, as well as delighted, when this happens, it is such a rare use he would make of me, as if he were acquainted with the tool.
“Laugh often, long and loud. Laugh until you gasp for breath.”
“If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.”
Interview with Robert van Gelder (April 1947), as quoted in John Steinbeck : A Biography (1994) by Jay Parini
