For some reason I have always been fascinated by quotations from interesting people. There are, of course, compendiums of such quotations, some quite well known such as Bartletts & Famous Quotes for Life and Happiness. There are more specifically assigned volumes of quotations for many varieties of interest. Each of these verbal gems are distilled kernels of human knowledge and insight, sometimes launched almost frivolously, other times painstakingly fashioned.

There are literary quotations, (Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way. – Marcel Proust) sports quotations (It ain’t over toll it’s over – Yogi Berra), movie & teevee quotations (Forget it Jake. It’s Chinatown – Jack Nicholson in “Chinatown.” or perhaps Fuck you asshole – Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator), various technical and business quotations (If you do something for someone else, never remember. If someone does something for you, never forget – Dale Carnegie), etc.

My interest in this subject has a lot to do with my curiosity around why people seem to think the way they do and how they (sub)unconsciously conjure words to illustrate often deep held feelings and beliefs. In a brisk conversation with another, or perhaps in an interior stream of consciousness while speaking to one’s self, why do certain combinations of words, signifying some specific concept, come into our minds(s)? Often, when I inadvertently or even perhaps deliberately say something clever or seemingly weighted with some actual relevance, I am surprised. Where did that come from? Do I really have anything of value or intelligence to add to the gargantuan body of human knowledge? Was that insight that stumbled out of my brain something my thought process actually generated? Did it grow in my brain? Or was it somehow delivered to my dull senses from some alien, other dimensional, or perhaps supernatural entity? Are others pondering similar philological concepts when they say or think something smart, rather than the more typical expressions most people (myself included) tend to spew that are intrinsically dull or simply stupid? I wonder.

I fell into the habit of collecting favorite quotations from a variety of writers, musician, scientists, historical figures, mythology and other sectors some years ago. I will typically add a quotation to the very end of email messages, usually a quote that I believe reflects the essence of the larger correspondence (2-way) or simple declaration (1-way). For a range of content and intent I provide the following two  examples: To live at all is miracle enough.” – Mervyn Peake AND “I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.” – Robert Louis Stevenson. The range of sentiments represented by specific quotations that exist between these polar opposites, sentiments that are expressible in this fashion, are legion.

Short, insightful or merely clever quotations, the cream of seemingly spontaneous (though perhaps on occasion carefully crafted – while presented as spontaneous) human thought, can be found every and anywhere, should you search as I have. Or, as Art Linkletter once famously said: Kids say the darndest things! 

With all that said, I would like to share some of my favorite quotes made by a variety of humans over much time. I consistently enjoy and over time have always found new interpretations and potential uses for so many of these wonderful expressions of the human condition, the human mind and the human heart.

We might as well start at the top: perhaps the wittiest fellow to ever bushwhack a pretentious dinner party or upper class soiree, Oscar Wilde:

“It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco.” -Oscar Wilde

There are practical quotations:

“There’s not a problem in the world you can’t make bigger by drinking a fifth of whisky.”   – Buzz Aldrin

“If you put your foot in it, be sure it’s your best foot.”   –  Mae West

Either shockingly brilliant or phenomenally dumb quotations:

“Life’s hard. It’s even harder when you’re stupid.”  –  John Wayne

God I wish I had come up with that quotations:

“I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.”   –   Evelyn Waugh

“People don’t become better when they’re dead; you just talk about them as if they are, but it’s not true! People are still a–holes, they’re just dead a–holes! … I didn’t have a really important life, but at least it’s been funny.”   –  Lemmy Kilmister

“Never insult anyone by accident.”  –   Robert Heinlein

Perplexing quotations made by really smart people that are hard to figure out:

“Don’t make jokes about food”. –   Sir David Lean

“Life is too fleet for onomatopoeia.”  –   Mervyn Peake

Quotations that seem valid made by personal friends:

“That uncomfortable feeling when your counter culture becomes over the counter culture.”  –   Joshu Deleon

“It is in those moments when we risk something that we really enhance our capacity to learn. Which gets back to the moments that you might remember from Summer camp. They’re not the moments that were on the program. They are the part of the program you wrote yourself.”  –   Eugene Ashton-Gonzalez

“Anything worth doing in the first place is worth running into the ground.”                 –    Stuart Mangrum

“We didn’t make the rules. We have no intention of living by them.”  –  Ron English

“Once X (ecstasy – MDMA) came out, ugly people started f*****g constantly and that became Burning Man.”  –   Chris Radcliffe

“Burning Man is graduate school for Ren Faire kids”  –   Spaceman Sam Coniglio

Quotations by really smart and really pessimistic people that make you feel a little queasy because of how much you can relate:

“I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it.”  –  Dorothy Parker

 “It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense.”    –  Philip K. Dick

“Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.” – Ambrose Bierce

“Maybe this world is another planets hell.” – Aldous Huxley

Louch quotations from worldly libertines:

“I hate people who claim to be “hard-working”, anyone with brains doesn’t have to work hard all the time.”  –  John Huston

“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking.”  –   H. L. Mencken

“Everyone appreciates your honesty until you’re honest with them. Then you’re an asshole.”  –   George Carlin

Almost ridiculously positive quotations:

“Optimism is true moral courage.”  –   Ernest Shackleton

“Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.”   –   Robert Louis Stevenson

Deeply insightful quotations about of humanity:

“It was wrong to underestimate the ignorance of the ruling class.”  –   Graham Greene,  from The Confidential Agent

“Humanity, let us say, is like people packed in a automobile which is traveling downhill without lights at a terrific speed and driven by a four-year-old child. The signposts along the way are all marked “progress.” ”  –   Lord Dunsany (Sir Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett III)

“And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.”  –   George Eliot

“But he was unmoved, and cried: “If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!”  –  H. P. Lovecraft

Quotations that should get you in trouble with any significant women in your life:

“Every woman is just a different kind of problem.”  –   Chuck Palahniuk

“They (feminists) tried it the wrong way. You can’t expect anyone to take you seriously if you burn your undies and tell me I’m a pig. That’s why it failed. Too many ugly broads telling me they don’t want to sleep with me. Who wanted you anyway?”   –   Ernest Borgnine

“It takes six men to carry a man to his grave. It takes one woman to put him there.”    –   Marlon Brando as Freddy Benson Bedtime Story, 1964.

And then, of course, those quotations that are so humorously self aware they simply make you smile:

“But outside of falling on my ear, being chased by bears and surrounded by snakes, or doing forty-five foot dives off the long wharf at Santa Monica, my work has been rather uneventful.”  –   Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle

“I’ll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure.”  –   Mae West

“As for me, except for an occasional heart attack, I feel as young as I ever did.”             –  Robert Benchley. 

And then, there are the quotations of Cormac McCarthy which are in a cheerful class of their own:

“When you die it’s the same as if everybody else did too.”  –   Cormac McCarthy

“If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.”  –  Cormac McCarthy

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”  –  Cormac McCarthy

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”  –   Cormac McCarthy

“Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”  —   Cormac McCarthy

“In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will.”   –   Cormac McCarthy

“But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse”.      –  Cormac McCarthy

“If people knew the story of their lives, how many would then elect to live them?”    –  Cormac McCarthy

“If a man’s at odds to know his own mind it’s because he hasn’t got aught but his mind to know it with.”  –  Cormac McCarthy

“Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.”  –   Cormac McCarthy

“All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes”.   –  Cormac McCarthy

“There is no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”   –  Cormac McCarthy

And here we are, finally arrived at the supremely personal portion of this post. In no way, shape or form do I intend to equate my own wit or philosophical insights (debatable for sure) with most of the brilliant individual represented above. I admit that I have agonized a bit about whether or not I would share the following quotes or not. The exercise could surely be interpreted as egotistical overreach, over estimation of the value, if any, of my own insights. I might be accuse of bloviation here, or perhaps not. In my defense, I claim (and will swear to it) that most of my quotations came to me, almost revealed as it were, late at night. For the last twenty years or so I fell into a bizarre night time phenomenon. Every now and then, I would suddenly, shockingly wake up with one of these quotations in my narcoleptic consciousness. I might be grossly overrating the value of most of these slips of thought, but it seems to me, that at least a few of them are pretty good. Just in case I unconsciously captured any of these quotations from the outside world, falsely believing myself the author (subconsciously or not) I took the time to web search each one, and could not find the exact quotations anywhere online. So, whether authored by me, or passed to me from some preternatural intelligence, the following quotations have never, to my understanding, appeared elsewhere.

“It doesn’t hurt for a while, and that is why we drink.”  –  J Law

“The secret is simply this. SEE other people. Just see them for what and who they are.” –  JL

“The fewer assumptions you make about everything, at all times, the fewer friends you will lose over time.” – JL

“The truth is a brutal mistress” -JL

“The best way to not have regret is to not have time for regret.”  –  JL

“No matter how ludicrous, no matter how difficult, no matter how implausible, people will do what they know.”  –   JL

“I got everything I need, I think. Took my pills, paid my bills.”  –  JL

“Each day chasing life harder. Each day closer to death.”  –  JL

“Some people just look better with their clothes on.” – JL

“Be serious. But never take yourself too seriously.” – JL

“Women come and go, unless you are really lucky or you are REALLY unlucky.” -JL

“If you can curse something with wild passionate abandon, you know that you’re alive.”  –  JL

“Gentlemen have a sly way of noticing and observing beautiful women without being obvious, obnoxious or ungentlemanly”  –  JL

“An honest journeyman tradesmen cannot help but admire competence.” -JL

“There is a reason that you only eat cannolis when they’re fresh.”  –  JL

“Do you know what I call Mansplaining? Conversation.”   –  JL

“Men will forget what you said, but they will remember your boobs.”  –  JL

(OK – slap me up ladies, I deserve it…)

“Make yourself a life that others might wish to live.”  –  JL

“We don’t want to die. But in the meantime, while we’re not dying, we want to live.”   –  JL

“People are afraid of things that they do not understand or that they see other people do that they themselves are incapable of doing or feel as though they are incapable of doing. These same small minded and cowardly people will ban these things, legislate against them to try and stop other people from doing them.”   –  JL

“There’s a lot to be said for simply staying alive. If you were there, and now you are here, when so many that once were are now no more, the truth as you know it, will fade last.”  –  JL at 65 years

“Rumi. The Rod McKuen of the 13th Century”  –  JL

 “You always want to know more living than dead people.”  –  JL

“Anything not illegal is compulsory.” – JL

“A competent and confident man is never threatened by a strong woman.”  –  JL

“The biggest error in understanding that reasonable people make is believing other people are reasonable.”  –  JL

“If you hang out with a bunch of rule breakers, you can’t really expect them to follow the rules.”  –  JL

“The funny thing about change is how easy it is to forget it ever happened”. –  JL

“What art does is to give us eyes to see as another would”   –  JL

“The dull ache those long dead and gone leave in your heart.”  –  JL

“The gift that keeps on stabbing the giver”  –  JL

It’s all fun and games until you put your eye out. The trick is NOT putting your eye out.   –  JL

“The past is the 3rd most important thing after the future and the present. No use living there, but keeping the past vividly in mind is mandatory for a healthy present and a good future. ”   –  JL

“Neither Steve Jobs nor Bill Gates could devise a more effective “content rich” vacation for their pampered workforces than The Burning Man Festival.”  –  JL

“The black hole inside most people cannot be filled by false attempts to accumulate love from those around them. Truth is never constrained by the desire to be loved.”  –  JL

“To change, you must choose”   –  JL

“You can put lightning in a bottle, but it is no longer magic. It is just another light fixture”   –  JL

“I am sorry that your heart is so filled with hate that you can’t see the simple beauty in simply beautiful things or the wonder and beguiling nature of beautiful things of great complexity.   –  JL

“If you’re not having fun, they win.” – JL on fascism

“I no longer support the lesser of two evils. I now refuse to support evil in any way, shape or iteration. The standard excuse for supporting the lesser evil is that things won’t be as bad as if the greater evil prevails. Only in the short term, the very short term is this true.   –  JL

Over time the lesser of two evils and the greater of two evils grow closer together until the space between them is squeezed out, leaving the two evils shoulder to shoulder and against us all.”  –   JL