I have done a little research in finding quotes for the list of articulate names, the names that I periodically drop. Some are famous, most are obscure. Several are very contradictory, but as Walt Whitman said, “ I am large, I contain multitudes.”
1. Homer- “Be still my heart; thou hast known worse than this.”
2. Xenophon- “The sweetest of all sounds is praise.”
3. Plato- “Love is a serious mental disease.”
4. Aristotle- “We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
5. Herodotus- “The worst pain a man can suffer: to have insight into much and power over nothing.”
6. Moses- “Have you forgotten God? Even if you have, He has not forgotten you.”
7. Marcus Aurelius- “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
8. Ovid- “If you want to be loved, be lovable.”
9. Josephus- “Truth is a thing that is immortal and eternal.”
10. the Bede- “All the ways of this world are as fickle and unstable as a sudden storm at sea.”
11. Thomas Mallory- “We shall now seek that which we shall not find”
12. Dante Alighieri- “All hope abandon, ye who enter here!”
13. Niccolo Machiavelli- “Politics have no relation to morals.”
14. Marco Polo- “I have not told the half of what I saw.”
15. Lao Tzu- “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”
16. Martin Luther- “Let the wife make the husband glad to come home, and let him make her sorry to see him leave.”
17. St. Francis of Assisi- “Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words.”
18. St. Augustine- “Better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.”
19. Geoffrey Chaucer- “Time and tide wait for no man.”
20. William Shakespeare- “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
21. Hugo Ball- “…blago bung, blago bung, bosso fataka..”
22. Henry Miller- “One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.”
23. Frank Herbert- “Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”
24. Ann Frank- “I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
25. Buckminster Fuller- “There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.”
26. Ivan Ilyich- “At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.”
27. Arnold Toynbee- “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”
28. Barbara Tuchman- “The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.”
29. Ayn Rand- “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
30. Alexis de Tocqueville- “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”
31. James Madison- “If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. ..”
32. George R. Stewart- “Men go and come, but earth abides.”
33. Samuel Clemens- “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”
34. Walt Whitman- “Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and shadows will fall behind you.”
35. Gregory Corso- “If you have a choice of two things and can’t decide, take both.”
36. Lawrence Ferlinghetti- “The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.”
37. Alan Watts- “rying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
38. Robert Persig- “The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.”
39. Richard Brautigan- “I’m in a constant process of thinking about things.”
40. Maya Angelou- “You will face many defeats in life, but never let yourself be defeated.”
41. Isabelle Allende- “Write what should not be forgotten.”
42. Franz Kafka- “You are free, and that is why you are lost.”
43. Nikos Kazantzakis- “A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.”
44. Sun Tzu- “Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.”
45. Paul of Tarsus- “…but we rejoice in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope…”
46. Siddhartha Gautama- “Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.”
47. Edgar Allan Poe- “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
48. Annie Dillard- “You can’t test courage cautiously.”
49. Dee Brown- “They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.”
50. Robert Heinlein- “Specialization is for insects.”
51. Kurt Vonnegut- “Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
52. Jerzy Kosinski- “As I go to sleep I remember what my father said-that one can never be sure if one will awake. The way my health is now, this is becoming more and more real.”
53. George Orwell- “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
54. Elie Wiesel- The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.”
55. Carl Sandburg- “Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.”
56. Jack Kerouac- “My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.”
57. Giorgio Vasari- “It is the custom of Venice to paint on canvas, either because it does not split and is not worm-eaten, or because pictures can be made of any size desired, or else for convenience… so that they can be sent anywhere with very little trouble and expense.”
58. Leo Tolstoy- “If you want to be happy, be.”
59. Arthur Rimbaud- “-But I’ve just noticed that my mind is asleep.”
60. Kahlil Gibran- “Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you.”
61. Voltaire- “Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.”
62. Pablo Neruda- “Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.”
63. James Clavell- “Always remember, child” her first teacher had impressed on her, “that to think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world.”
64. Steven King- “Get busy living or get busy dying.”
65. Ernest Hemingway- “In order to write about life first you must live it.”
66. Nathaniel Hawthorne- “Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.”
67. Tim Severin- “A truly awesome sight loomed up out of the dark just downwind of us – the white and serrated edge of a massive floe, twice the size of Brendan and glinting with malice.”
68. Leonard Cohen- “Yeah, my friends are gone and my hair is gray, I ache in the places where I used to play…”
69. Charles Dickens- “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
70. Ray Bradbury- “Life is trying things to see if they work.”
