Aphorisms in the Book Cafe

Aphorisms are signposts!

Source: "Grammar Rules" KustannusosakeyhtiöOtava 

• What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power. 
  Henry George
• To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education.
  John Ruskin
• When you prevent me from doing anything I want to do, that is persecution; but when I prevent you from doing anything you want to do, that is law, order, and morals. 
  George Bernard Shaw
• Old men are dangerous; it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen.
  George Bernard Shaw
• Instead of this absurd divison into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic. 
  Evelyn Waugh
• Prejudice not being founded on reason cannot be removed ny argument. 
  Samuel Johnson
• The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.
  Samuel Johnson
• To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy. 
  Will and Ariel Durant
• The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education. 
  Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
  Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Golf is a good walk spoiled.
  Mark Twain
• Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
  Mark Twain
• The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
  Mark Twain
• When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
  Mark Twain
• But what is freedom? Rightly understood, a universal licence to be good. 
  Hartley Coleridge
• Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment. 
  Robert Benchley
• Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. 
  Will Rogers
• You'll never really know what I mean and I'll never really know what you mean.
  Mike Nicols
• Who knows if Shakespeare might have thought less if he had read more?
  Edward Young
• A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you. 
  Bert Leston Taylor
• People who say they sleep like a baby usually don't have one.
  Lev J. Burke
• On earth eerything is nothing great but man; in man there is nothing great but mind.
  William Hamilton
• It's possible to own too much. A man with one watch knows what time it is, a man with two watches is never quite sure.
  Lee Sagall
• Give me books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I don't know.
  John Keats
• Bad artists always admire each other's work.
  Oscar Wilde
• Only the shallow know themselves.
  Oscar Wilde
• We can destroy ourselves by cynism and disillusion as effectively as by bombs.
  Kenneth Clark
• Football isn't a matter of life and death  it's much more important than that.
  Bill Shankly
• Nothing makes your more tolerant of a neighbour's party than being there.
  Franklin P. Jones
• Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
  Charles Caleb Colton
• Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life.
  Robert Southey
• I am a part of all that I have read.
  John Kieran
• So little done, so much to do.
  Cevil Rhodes
• You know you're getting old when the candles cost more than the cake.
  Bob Hope
• I'll never make the mistake of being seventy again!
  Casey Stengel
• I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.
  Woodrow Wilson
• If I had to give young writers advice. I'd say don't listen to writers talking about writing.
  Lillian Hellman
• If you don't know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else.
  Laurence J. Peter
• Nothing is interesting if you're not interested.
  Helen MacInnes
• Some things have to believed to be seen.
  Ralph Hodgson
• Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
  Francis Bacon
• You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.
  Indira Gandhi
• A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it.
  Dean Inge
• Genius does what it must, talent does what it can.
  Edward Bulver Lytton
• We have to believe in free will. We've got no other choice.
  Isaac Bashevis Singer
• Anybody who goes to see a psychiatrist should have his head examined.
  Samuel Goldwyn