Often the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.
—Mark Twain 126

I don’t write for children. I write.
—Maurice Sendak

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
—Oscar Wilde

To be human one must have a story.
—Chinua Achebe 97

There ought to be some way of dry-cleaning and disinfecting words. Love, purity, goodness, spirit—a pile of dirty linen waiting for the laundress.
—Aldous Huxley 103

In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.
—Rachel Carson

What wit resides in the cosmos!
—Norman Mailer

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
—Arthur C. Clarke

I quote others only to better express my own self.
—Michel de Montaige

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
—Booker T. Washington

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

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I am completely at the mercy of unconscious selection.
—Kate Chopin 96

Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.
—Beatrix Potter

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate.
—Thornton Wilder

It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne

But it’s part of the business of the writer... to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the essence.
—James Baldwin 95

Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope.
—John Steinbeck

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the beginning the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
—Douglas Adams

I cannot put the whole of life into writing:;it seems to me so subsidiary to living.
—Freya Stark

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Logic is in the eye of the logician.;
—Gloria Steinem

When on person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called religion.
—Robert M. Pirsig

Chaos is the law of nature; order is the dream of man.
—Henry Adams

One of the reasons why so few of us act, instead of reacting, is that we are continually stifling our deepest impulses.
—Henry Miller

I found God in myself and I loved her. I loved her fiercely.
—Ntozake Shange 55

Man is certainly stark mad. He cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.
—Michel de Montaige

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
—Rollo May

In the end I think of music as saving grace for all humanity.
—Henry Miller

Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.
—Virginia Woolf

There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.;
—Gore Vidal

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I’m quite sure if the Internet had been around during the Roman Empire, Cleopatra and the gladiators would have received many thousand times more hits than Ovid or Catullus.
—Michael LeGault SOURCE

There is nothing that fails like success.
—G. K. Chesterton

The cover of this book are too far apart.;
—Ambrose Bierce

The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
—Saul Steinberg

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
—Mark Twain

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
—James Thurber

The rage for wanting to conclude is one of the most deadly and most fruitless manias to befall humanity. Each religion and each philosophy has pretended to have God to itself, to measure the infinite, and to know the recipe for happiness. What arrogance and what nonsense! I see, to the contrary, that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works have never concluded.
—Gustave Flaubert

I refuse to answer that question as I don’t know the answer.
—Douglas Adams

Only the shallow know themselves.
—Oscar Wilde

I’m quite sure if the Internet had been around during the Roman Empire, Cleopatra and the gladiators would have received many thousand times more hits than Ovid or Catullus.
—Michael LeGault SOURCE

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Nothing can convince me that reality is nothing more than that which we call a game.
—Hermann Hesse

Nothing will change the fact that I cannot produce the least thing without a absolute solitude.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness—to save oneself trouble.
—Agatha Christie

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
—Aldous Huxley

The best ideas are common property.
—Lucius Annaeus Seneca

So you see, imagination needs moodling—long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
—Brenda Ueland

Always listen to experts.;They’ll tell you what can’t be done and why.;Then do it.
—Robert Heinlein

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.
—Ariel Durant

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.;
—H. L. Mencken

Your intention creates your thoughts. Thoughts become your words. Words become your actions. Actions become your habits. Habits become your character. Your character becomes your destiny.
—Michael Michalko CITATION

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The only dumb idea is, quite literally, the one that is unspoken.
—Gregg Fraley 64

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
—Douglas Adams

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.
—Marcel Proust

I am a writer who came from a sheltered life.;A sheltered life can be daring as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
—Eudora Welty

What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.
—Henry Brooks Adams

A great part of art consists in imitation. For the whole conduct of life is based on this: that what we admire in others we want to do ourselves.
—Quintilian

Creativity consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know.
—Michael Michalko

To live in the world of creation—to get into it and stay in it—to frequent it and haunt it....to think intently and fruitfully, to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation—this is the only thing.
—Henry James

Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered down theism.
—Richard Dawkins 71

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It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.
—Simone de Beauvoir

It has been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of Him by the atheist, who finds creation so perfect that he can dispense with a creator.
—Marcel Proust

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
—Douglas Adams

If we are going to teach ’creation science’ as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.
—Judith Hayes, In God We Trust—But Which One?

It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can know a thing and still not believe it.
—John Steinbeck 57

What ever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning clear as one can through pictures or sensations.
—George Orwell

The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism.
—Gore Vidal 58

Tradition should be a guide, not a jailer.
—W. Somerset Maugham

There is no more salient or neglected field of study than the relationship between power and violence.
—Taylor Branch 80

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Nothing is more real than nothing.
—Samuel Beckett

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog when you are just as hungry as the dog.
—Jack London 67

It is not only in finished undertakings that we ought to honor useful labour.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

Where the light is brightest the shadows are deepest.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe I’m a writer. I have a responsibility to no one.
—Victor Pelevin

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
—Oscar Wilde

Amateurs arise—make a noise.
—Alexander McCall Smith SOURCE

Religion is a byproduct of fear. For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn’t killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?
—Arthur C. Clarke

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.
—Douglas Adams

There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.
—Charles Baudelaire

Our current obsession with creativity;is the result of our continued striving for immortality;in an era when most people no longer believe in an after-life.
—Arianna Stassinopoulos

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To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try to slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand—that is art.
—James Joyce

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
—Virginia Woolf

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
—Rollo May

Life is ’trying things to see if they work.
—Ray Bradbury

We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children are smart.
—H. L. Mencken 83

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
—H. L. Mencken WORKS

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has found before....
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

Nothing has really happened until it’s been described.
—Virginia Woolf

The hand is more important than the eye...;The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
—Jacob Bronowski

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I’m not young enough to know everything.
—J. M. Barrie

To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to create life out of life.
—James Joyce

Everything has been thought of before,;but the problem is to think of it again.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Everything important has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
—Alfred North Whitehead

Visibility and invisibility, everything runs on votes. And every vote is a piece of non-violence.
—Taylor Branch 81

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man.
—John Steinbeck 56

If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
—Noam Chomsky WORKS

You lose it if you talk about it.
—Ernest Hemingway

Originality is simply a pair of fresh eyes.
—Thomas Wentworth Higginson

I will act as if what I do will make a difference.
—William James

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Write the crummy first draft.
—Anne Lamott, 63

Imagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
—W. Somerset Maugham

We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.
—Anais Nin

Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
—Mark Twain

We may observe, that, in all ages of the world, priests have been enemies to liberty.
—David Hume

We have to understand that the world;can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.
—Jacob Bronowski

The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
—H. L. Mencken

The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
—James Joyce

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
—William James

Look twice before you leap.
—Charlotte Brontë

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Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
—Oscar Wilde

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
—Arthur C. Clarke

I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.
—George Bernard Shaw

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own Vision.
—Ayn Rand

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
—W. Somerset Maugham

Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
—Joseph Conrad

How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?
—E. M. Forster

Creativity: a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
—Arthur Koestler

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.;
—A. J. Liebling

You see things; and you say “Why?&qrdquo; But I dream things that never were; and I say “Why not?”
—George Bernard Shaw

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When I play with my cat, who knows whether she isn’t amusing herself with me more than I am with her?
—Michel de Montaige

All styles are good except the tiresome type.
—Voltaire 98

To the Middle Ages we owe the two worst human inventions: romantic love and gunpowder.
—André Maurois

There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible and wrong.;
—H. L. Mencken

Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.;
—Henry David Thoreau;

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.
—Plutarch

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well and having done it well, he loves to do it better.
—Jacob Bronowski

One sees great things from the valley,;only small things from the peak.
—G. K. Chesterton

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
—Arthur C. Clarke

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Life is something that happens when you can’t get to sleep.
—Fran Lebowitz

All bad art is sincere.
—Oscar Wilde

Liberty of thinking, and of expressing our thoughts, is always fatal to priestly power, and to those pious frauds, on which it is commonly founded.
—David Hume

Every word was once a poem.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
—Oscar Wilde

Creative thinking begins with dissatisfaction. Every itch is an opportunity.
—Tim Hurson

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
—James Joyce

Show me a character without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
—Margaret Atwood 99

It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.;
—G. K. Chesterton

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In some cases, you have a feeling;as if some little imp or devil is standing behind you and dictating to you.
—Isaac Bashevis Singer

Human history is in essence a history of ideas.
—H. G. Wells I’m sorry, I didn’t have time to compose a 15-minute talk, so I’ll speak for an hour.
—Winston Churchill

Creative effort must always call for guessing; and even the best guessing cannot avoid error.
—Alex Osborn 54

To be what we are,;and to become what we are capable of becoming,;is the only end in life.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

There ain’t no answer. There ain’t going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.
—Gertrude Stein

It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.
—Tennessee Williams

I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.
—Flannery O’Connor

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.
—Margaret Anderson

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
—Douglas Adams

Doodling is the brooding of the mind.
—Saul Steinberg

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The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.
—Edward de Bono

There are no facts—only the mode of our approach to what we call facts.
—Norman Mailer

I understood that all the material of a literary work;was in my past life...
—Marcel Proust

One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius.
—Simone de Beauvoir

The principal mark of genius ins not perfection, but originality—the opening up of new frontiers.
—Arthur Koestler

The marriage between language and the human spirit;is a mystery as ineffable as the spark that fills our hearts;when we fall in love.
—Hal Zina Bennett, Write from the Heart

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
—Mark Twain

Leap before you look.
—Peter Lloyd

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
—Mark Twain

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It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
—Henry David Thoreau

There is one thing stronger than all the armies of the world: and that is an idea whose time has come.
—Victor Hugo

The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.
—Daniel J. Boorstin

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive one.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
—Marshall McLuhan

Freedom is the chief ingredient in confidence.
?Robert Louis Stevenson

Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.
—Michael Shermer SOURCE

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.
—Voltaire

Never confuse motion with action.
—Ernest Hemingway

The lightning spark of thought generated in the solitary mind awakens is likeness in another mind.
—Thomas Carlyle

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Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
—William James

Men have become the tools of their tools.;
—Henry David Thoreau;

There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.;
—Flannery O’Connor

A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are always the same age inside.
—Gertrude Stein 53

Art for art’s sake makes no more sense than gin for gin’s sake.
—W. Somerset Maugham

Obstacles are those frightful objects we see when we take our eyes off the goal.
—Hannah More

Life is ambiguous; there are many right answers—all depending on what you are looking for.
—Roger von Oech

The enemy of conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
—John Kenneth Galbraith CITATION

It’s no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase “;As pretty as an airport”; appear.
—Douglas Noel Adams

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If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.
—Voltaire

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.
—E. M. Forster

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this:;that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed;;but a thing created is loved before it exists.
—Charles Dickens

Belief is not the beginning of knowledge—it is the end.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

War is a lion on whose back you fall, never to get off.
—Credo Mutwa WORKS

And remember: being exposed to ideas different from our own rarely proves fatal.
—Randy Cohen 82

Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work
—Booker T. Washington

Blink, don’t think.
—Malcolm Gladwell 65

The power of creativity rises exponentially;with the diversity and divergence of those users.
—John Kao, Jamming

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The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.
—Thomas Carlyle

There are no exceptions to the rule that everybody likes to be an exception to the rule.
—Charles Osgood

The reason you get your best ideas in the shower is because that’s where you accept that your critic is all wet.
—Tim Hurson

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
—Arthur C. Clarke

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy—and I keep it in a jar on my desk.
—Stephen King

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.;
Ralph Waldo Emerson

For new-fangled ideas he held only the aversion of deep-rooted prejudice.
—Charles Neville Buck 59

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
—Tom Stoppard

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