100 sensational quotes | The World of English

100 sensational quotes and aphorisms, a selection of 100 great maxims by famous authors, philosophers and artists through the centuries to help everyone thinking deeply while improving creativity, edited for the World of English blog by Carl William Brown, a sincere literary avenger. (Find out more about him on Amazon).

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Stupidity is the same as evil if not judge by the results.
Margaret Atwood

All great literature is one of two stories ; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
Leo Tolstoy

Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.
Spinoza

The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue; it is an intellectual crime.
Imre Lakatos

Its beautiful to be alone. To be alone does not mean to be lonely. it means the mind is not influenced and contaminated by society.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

I have great faith in fools – self-confidence my friends will call it.
Edgar Allan Poe

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T.S. Eliot

Philosophy is the art of thinking, especially when you can’t have success, when you can’t change the world, when you have to face death.
Carl William Brown

The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
Simone Weil

Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.
Aldous Huxley

Be a free thinker and don’t accept everything you hear as truth. Be critical and evaluate what you believe in.
Aristotle

You must become an outlaw if you wish to find the truth.
Nietzsche

Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason.
Voltaire

If we had had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.
Leon Trotsky

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
William Faulkner

Selfishness is the greatest curse of the human race.
William E. Gladstone

Decisions, not conditions, determine what a man is.
Viktor Frankl

William Shakespeare Aphoristic dictionary

No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot.
Mark Twain

If you want to reach a large audience, appeal to idiots.
Arthur Schopenhauer.

Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for a defense, and for a defense only! It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence.
Adam Smith

To win any battle, you must fight as if you are already dead.
Miyamoto Musashi

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to control it.
H.L. Mencken

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.
Isaac Asimov

Ignorance, like stupidity, has always been prevalent on the planet; but it becomes disturbing when it becomes a force, expressing the “zeitgeist,” and when those who profess and propagate it are not the poor, illiterate common people, but the ruling classes.
Marcello Veneziani

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
Clive James

Never knew before what eternity was made for. It is to give some of us a chance to learn German.
Mark Twain

Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.
Voltaire

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning how to dance in the rain.
Vivian Greene

Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.
J. W. von Goethe

To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.
Theodore Roosevelt

In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider.
Simone de Beauvoir

You cannot be wise and in love at the same time.
Bob Dylan

Against a stupidity that is in fashion, no wisdom compensates.
Theodor Fontane

A man’s age represents a fine cargo of experiences and memories.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.
P.G. Wodehouse

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, for it requires that we should stand ready and firm to meet onsets which are sudden and unexpected.
Marcus Aurelius,

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
Immanuel Kant

It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.
Franz Kafka

The idea of God is the last trick of the Ego to survive.
Osho

The search for God is the surest way to never meet the truth.
Krishnamurti

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched.
Aldous Huxley

The God of the masses is a comfortable lie to keep them asleep.
Gurdjieff

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy

Our prejudices are so deeply rooted that we never think of them as prejudices but call them common sense.
George Bernard Shaw

State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. It even lies coldly, and this lie crawls out of its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.” This is a lie!
Friedrich Nietzsche

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
Johann Wolfgang Göthe

Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.
Voltaire

The greatest enemy of lie is not the truth, but it is the lazy mind.
Voltaire

We have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one which we preach, but do not practice, and other which we practice, but seldom preach.
Bertrand Russell

Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear.
Edgar Allan Poe

Just as in the natural environment, overly large and voracious animals appear insipid, disgusting, and ridiculous, so in human societies, overly wealthy, selfish, and vain individuals appear miserable, deplorable, and pitiable.
Carl William Brown

Truth is not defined by authority, tradition, or numbers – but by reason and evidence.
Nicolaus Copernicus

If you want to reach a large audience, appeal to idiots.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I don’t believe there is anything in the whole earth that you can’t learn in Berlin except the German language.
Mark Twain

Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.
Stephen King

The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.
Hermann Hesse

Few men think; yet all have opinions.
George Berkeley

An intellectual is a person who has found a thing that is more interesting than sex.
Aldous Huxley

He who is everywhere, is nowhere.
Seneca

War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.
Leo Tolstoy

For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.
Arthur Schopenhauer

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.
Rabindranath Tagore

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You must continuously learn and study. Seneca also says, “Leisure without study is death – a tomb for the living person.”
Carl William Brown

Wisdom comes haphazard to no man.
Seneca

Friends often become thieves of our time.
Plato

The less talent they have, the more pride, vanity, and arrogance they have. All these fools, however, find other fools who applaud them.
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam.

If a man is stupid, we excuse him by saying that he cannot help it; but if we were to excuse a bad man on the same grounds we would be laughed at.
Arthur Schopenhauer

A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language.”
Noam Chomsky

Yes, yes-you will give him the earth-because you love him. Love him too much for safety or for happiness. But you cannot give to people what they are incapable of receiving.
Agatha Christie

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
William Shakespeare

The German language is a dozen fragments of words flung into an octagonal cylinder – take a good look at them before you begin to turn the machine, for you will never see them in their simplicity again – never never any more.
Mark Twain

The human species, the monotonous refrain of stupidity.
Carl William Brown

We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.
Thomas Merton

And he got used to getting rid of everything, so as to have nothing left to lose.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The fear of death is worse than death itself.
Plato

Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Nothing eases suffering like human touch.
Bobby Fischer

No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot.
Mark Twain

Abundance of knowledge does not teach men to be wise.
Heraclitus

A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand.
Bertrand Russell

The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.
Søren Kierkegaard

Sound is the counterpart of silence, we need both of them, at least till we live.
Carl William Brown

The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.
Marcus Aurelius

But life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.
Seneca

I’ve learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind.
Khalil Gibran

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
René Descartes

I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared.
Fyodor Dostoevsky

They say that the monkey is so intelligent that it does not speak so as not to be made to work.
René Descartes

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
Aldous Huxley

He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
George Bernard Shaw

Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.
Aristotle

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
Mark Twain

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

First rule: never trust anyone; second rule: be aware that stupidity rules the world; third rule: train yourself in order to teach to fight stupidity.
Carl William Brown

When a multitude exercises authority, it is even more cruel than tyrants.
Plato

The doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist.
Herman Hesse

Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel.
Jack London

To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.
Tacitus

The world is beautiful, but it has a defect called man.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Today’s audiences are addicted to banality.
Dario Fo

The universe is one, dynamic, holistic, and wants to know itself.
Federico Faggin

He who dares not offend cannot be honest.
Thomas Paine

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.
Cicero

The fool has one great advantage over a man of sense – he is always satisfied with himself.
Napoleon I of France

There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Hypocrites are those who apply to others the standards that they refuse to accept for themselves.
Noam Chomsky