c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Worry is a futile thing  it's somewhat like a rocking chair  Although is keeps you occupied  it doesn't get you anywhere.
— Anonymous
Worry never climbed a hill  worry never paid a bill  Worry never dried a tear  worry never calmed a fear  Worry never darned a heel  worry never cooked a meal  It never led a horse to water  nor ever did a thing it "oughter."
— Anonymous
I am reminded of the advice of my neighbor. "Never worry about your heart 'til it stops beating."
— E. B. White
Worry is as useless as a handle on a snowball.
— Mitzi Chandler
When you worry  you go over the same ground endlessly and come out the same place you started. Thinking  on the other hand  makes progress from one place to another. ... The problem of life is to change worry into thinking  and anxiety into creative action.
— Harold B. Walker
Which of you by being anxious can add one cubit unto his stature?
— Bible
I think these difficult times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way  and that so many things that one goes around worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.
— Isak Dinesen
You always get negative reactions. If you worry about that  you would never do anything.
— Tom Monaghan
Anxiety never yet successfully bridged any chasm.
— Giovanni Ruffini
Cast away care  he that loves sorrow lengthens not a day  nor can he buy tomorrow.
— Thomas Dekker
Worry doesn't help tomorrow's troubles  but it does ruin today's happiness.
— Anonymous
You can't start worrying about what's going to happen. You get spastic enough worrying about what's happening now.
— Lauren Bacall
There are two days in the week about which and upon which I never worry. ... One of these days is Yesterday ... And the other day I do not worry about is Tomorrow.
— Robert Jones Burdette
We have to fight them daily  like fleas  those many small worries about the morrow  for they sap our energies.
— Etty Hillesum
T'ain't worthwhile to wear a day all out before it comes.
— Sarah Orne Jewett
Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow  but only saps today of its strength.
— A. J. Cronin
The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you'll grow out of it!
— Doris Day
Be  therefore  not anxious about tomorrow  for tomorrow will be anxious for the things of itself.
— Bible
If you are doing your best  you will not have time to worry about failure.
— Robert Hillyer
It is not work that kills men  it is worry. Work is healthy  you can hardly put more upon a man that he can bear. Worry is rust upon the blade.
— Henry Ward Hughes
No good work is ever done while the heart is hot and anxious and fretted.
— Olive Schreiner
A day of worry is more exhausting than a day of work.
— John Lubbock
The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.
— Robert Frost
Worry is a form of fear.
— Bertrand A. Russell
Worry is a complete cycle of inefficient thought revolving about a pivotal fear.
— Anonymous
Worry is a state of mind based on fear.
— Napoleon Hill
Worry is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged  it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.
— Arthur Somers Roche
If we would keep filling our minds with the picture of happy things ahead  many worries and anxieties  and perhaps ill health  would naturally melt away.... Always expect the best. Then if you have to hurdle a few tough problems  you will have generated the strength and courage to do so.
— George Matthew Adams
Turn resolutely to work  to recreation  or in any case to physical exercise till you are so tired you can't help going to sleep  and when you wake up you won't want to worry.
— B. C. Forbes
A great many worries can be diminished by realizing the unimportance of the matter which is causing anxiety.
— Bertrand Russell
A problem not worth praying about is not worth worrying about.
— Anonymous
We can always get along better by reason and love of truth than by worry of conscience and remorse. Harmful are these  and evil.
— Baruch Spinoza
As a cure for worrying  work is better than whiskey.
— Thomas A. Edison
Worry compounds the futility of being trapped on a dead-end street. Thinking opens new avenues.
— Cullen Hightower
Rule No. i is  don't sweat the small stuff. Rule No. 2 is  it's all small stuff.
— Robert Eliot
You'll break the worry habit the day you decide you can meet and master the worse that can happen to you.
— Arnold Glasow
Of course I realized there was a measure of danger. Obviously I faced the possibility of not returning when I first considered going. Once faced and settled there really wasn't any good reason to refer to it again.
— Amelia Earhart
The worst is not so long as we can say  "This is the worst."
— William Shakespeare
A wise man fights to win  but he is twice a fool who has no plan for possible defeat.
— Louis L'Amour
There are people who are always anticipating trouble  and in this way they manage to enjoy many sorrows that never really happen.
— Josh Billings
The expectation of an unpleasantness is more terrible than the thing itself.
— Marie Bashkirtseff
Our worst misfortunes never happen  and most miseries lie in anticipation.
— Honore de Balzac
Some men storm imaginary Alps all their lives  and die in the foothills cursing difficulties which do not exist.
— Edgar Watson Howe
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience.
— Diane Arbus
How much pain they have cost us  the evils which have never happened.
— Thomas Jefferson
The misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never happen.
— James Russell Lowell
What torments of grief you endured  from evils that never arrived.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We poison our lives with fear of burglary and shipwreck  and the house is never burgled  and the ship never goes down.
— Jean Anouilh
Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?
— Maurice Maeterlinck
This was a great year for preventive worrying. Seldom in recent history have so many people worried about so many things that didn't happen in the end.
— James Reston
I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life  most of which never happened.
— Winston Churchill
Some of your hurts you have cured  And the sharpest you still have survived  But what torments of grief you endured From the evil which never arrived.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles  but most of them never happened.
— Mark Twain
My life has been full of terrible misfortunes  most of which never happened.
— Michel de Montaigne
Though life is made up of mere bubbles 'Tis better than many have  For while we've a whole lot of troubles The most of them never occur.
— Nixon Waterman
If you see ten troubles coming down the road  you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.
— Calvin Coolidge
Other Definitions of Worry Anxiety is the great modern plague. But faith can cure it.
— Smiley Blanton
Worry is the only insupportable misfortune of life.
— Henry Saint John
Worry is the cross which we make for ourselves by overanxiety.
— Francois de Fenelon
Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due.
— William Ralph Inge
Worry is a morbid anticipation of events which never happen.
— Russell Green
Worry is the sin we're not afraid to commit.
— Anonymous
That man is blest Who does his best And leaves the rest  Then-do not worry.
— Charles F. Deems
Happy the man who has broken the chains which hurt the mind  and has given up worrying  once and for all.
— Ovid
If things happen all the time you are never nervous. It is when they are not happening that you are nervous.
— Gertrude Stein
Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and celebrate the journey!
— Barbara Hoffman
A request not to worry ... is perhaps the least soothing message capable of human utterance.
— Mignon G. Eberhart
It is the little things that fret and worry us  you can dodge an elephant  but not a fly.
— Josh Billings
To be rich is not the end  but only a change  of worries.
— Epicurus
A man ninety years old was asked to what he attributed his longevity. "I reckon " he said  with a twinkle in his eye  "it's because most nights I went to bed and slept when I should have sat up and worried."
— Dorothea Kent
Worry less about what other people think about you  and more about what you think about them.
— Fay Weldon
Don't hurry  don't worry. You're only here for a short visit. So be sure to stop and smell the flowers.
— Walter Hagen
Every faculty and virtue I possess can be used as an instrument with which to worry myself.
— Mark Rutherford
What worries you  masters you.
— Haddon W. Robinson
Worry is most apt to ride you ragged not when you are in action  but when the day's work is done. Your imagination can run riot then ... your mind is like a motor operating without its load.
— James L. Muresell
"Worry" is a word that I don't allow myself to use.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
It is only when men begin to worship that they begin to grow.
— Calvin Coolidge
And what greater calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of worship.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ay  call it holy ground  The soil where first they trod. They have left unstained  what there they found -  Freedom to worship God.
— Felicia D. Hemans
Yet  if he would  man cannot live all to this world. If not religious  he will be superstitious. If he worship not the true God  he will have his idols.
— Theodore Parker
This was the penn'worth of his thought.
— Nicholas Murray Butler
Nothing common can seem worthy of you.
— Cicero
Worth makes the man  and want of it the fellow  The rest is all but leather and prunello.
— Alexander Pope
Of whom the world was not worthy.
— Hebrews
But the fruit that can fall without shaking indeed is too mellow for me.
— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
In order to have great happiness  you have to have great pain and unhap-piness - otherwise how would you know when you're happy?
— Leslie Caron
There is no victory without pain.
— Lolita Lebron
Those who don't know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either.
— Golda Meir
Excellence costs a great deal.
— May Sarton
Misfortunes tell us what fortune is.
— Thomas Fuller
A man is insensible to the relish of prosperity till he has tasted adversity.
— Sa'di
Who has never tasted what is bitter does not know what is sweet.
— German proverb
Victory is sweetest when you've known defeat.
— Malcolm Forbes
No man better knows what good is than he who has endured evil.
— Anonymous
He that has never suffered extreme adversity knows not the full extent of his own depravation.
— Charles Caleb Colton
Sleep  riches and health  to be truly enjoyed  must be interrupted.
— Jean Paul Fichter
If there were no tribulation  there would be no rest  if there were no winter  there would be no summer.
— Saint John Chrysostom
I have lived long enough to be battered by the realities of life  and not too long to be downed by them.
— John Mason Brown
If your house is on fire  warm yourself by it.
— Spanish proverb
A broken heart is what makes life so wonderful five years later  when you see the guy in an elevator and he is fat and smoking a cigar and saying "long-time-no-see." If he hadn't broken your heart  you couldn't have that glorious feeling of relief!
— Phyllis Battelle
Anything other than death is a minor injury.
— Bill Muncey
The most valuable gift I ever received was the gift of insecurity my father left us. My mother's love might not have prepared me for life the way my father's departure did. He forced us out on the road  where we had to earn our bread.
— Lillian Gish
Being disabled gave me an immense advantage. People are kinder to you. It puts you on a different level than if you go into a situation whole and secure.
— Dorothea Lange
When written in Chinese  the word "crisis" is composed of two characters. One represents danger  and the other represents opportunity.
— John F. Kennedy
From a fallen tree  make kindling.
— Spanish proverb
Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains  losses and disappointments  but let us have patience  and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.
— Joseph Addison
The same wind that extinguishes a light can set a brazier on fire.
— Pierre de Beaumarchais
Other Definitions of Adversity Adversity is the touchstone of virtue.
— Anonymous
Adversity is the first path to truth.
— Lord Byron
Glee! The great storm is over!
— Emily Dickinson
Diseases can be our spiritual flat tires - disruptions in our lives that seem to be disasters at the time  but end by redirecting our lives in a meaningful way.
— Bernie S. Siegel
To say that my grief will be eternal would be ridiculous - nothing is eternal.
— Marie Bashkirtseff
Our way is not soft grass  it's a mountain path with lots of rocks. But it goes upwards  forward  toward the sun.
— Dr. Ruth Westheimer
Until you've lost your reputation  you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.
— Margaret Mitchell
Failure is  in a sense  the highway to success  inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true  and very fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterward carefully avoid.
— John Keats
Although the world is full of suffering  it is also full of the overcoming of it.
— Helen Keller
It is only after an unknown number of unrecorded labors  after a host of noble hearts have succumbed in discouragement  convinced that their cause is lost  it is only then that cause triumphs.
— Madame Guizot
When you can't remember why you're hurt  that's when you're healed. When you have to work real hard to re-create the pain  and you can't quite get there  that's when you're better.
— Jane Fonda
Sweet are the uses of adversity.
— William Shakespeare
Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender  that is strength.
— Arnold Schwarzenegger
I walk firmer and more secure up hill than down.
— Michel de Montaigne
Adversity is like the period of the rain ... cold  comfortless  unfriendly to man and to animal  yet from that season have their birth the flower  the fruit  the date  the rose and the pomegranate.
— Sir Walter Scott
If we survive danger  it steels our courage more than anything else.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
The virtue of adversity is fortitude  which in mortals is the heroical virtue.
— Francis Bacon
To turn an obstacle to one's advantage is a great step towards victory.
— French proverb
Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards  they simply unveil them to the eyes of men ... crisis shows us what we have become.
— Bishop Westcott
What deep wounds ever closed without a scar? The hearts bleed longest  and but heal to wear That which disfigures it.
— Lord Byron
A certain Samaritan... bound up his wounds  pouring in oil and wine.
— Bible
I was wounded in the house of my friends.
— Old Testament Zechariah
I keep six honest serving men. (They taught me all I know)  Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.
— Rudyard Kipling
Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.
— Nancy Banks-Smith
An original writer is not one who imitates nobody  but one whom nobody can imitate.
— Francois Rene De Chateaubriand
Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.
— Barbara G. Harris
Begin with another's to end with your own.
— Baltasar Gracian
Dr. Johnson's sayings would not appear so extraordinary were it not for his bow-wow way.
— Henry Herbert
Every other author may aspire to praise  the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach.
— Samuel Johnson
I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
— Henry Kissinger
I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.
— William Stafford
I have this feeling of wending my way or plundering through a mysterious jungle of possibilities when I am writing. This jungle has not been explored by previous writers. It never will be explored. It's endlessly varying as we progress through the experience of time. These words that occur to me come out of my relation to the language which is developing even as I am using it.
— William Stafford
I have tried lately to read Shakespeare  and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
— Charles Darwin
In Ireland  a writer is looked upon as a failed conversationalist.
— Anonymous
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it.
— W. H. Auden
Make'em laugh  make 'em cry  make 'em wait.
— Charles Reade
Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as graveyard stones.
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Memoirs: the backstairs of history.
— George Meredith
No tears and the writer  no tears and the reader.
— Robert Frost
The pen is mightier than the sword.
— Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James 1st  James 2nd  and the Old Pretender.
— Philip Guedalla
There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth the publishing  to find honest men to publish it  and to get sensible men to read it.
— C. C. Colton
This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.
— Oscar Wilde
Thought flies and words go on foot.
— Julien Green
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
— Albert Camus
What I like in a good author is not what he says  but what he whispers.
— Logan Pearsall Smith
When my journal appears  many statues must come down.
— Duke of Wellington
Writers aren't exactly people  they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.
— Georges Simenon
Writing is one of the easiest things: erasing is one of the hardest.
— Rabbi Israel Salanter
Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
— J. P. Donleavy
You cannot write in the chimney with charcoal.
— Russian proverb
The truth is  we've not really developed a fiction that can accommodate the full tumult  the zaniness and crazed quality of modern experience.
— Saul Bellow
Take care of the sense and the sounds will take of care themselves.
— Lewis Carroll
There is today an extraordinary interest with the data of modern experience per se. Our absorption in our contemporary historical state is very high right now. It's not altogether unlike a similar situation in seventeenth century Holland  where wealthy merchants wanted their portraits done with all their blemishes included. It is the height of egotism  in a sense  to think even one's blemishes are of significance. So today Americans seem to want their writers to reveal all their weaknesses  their meannesses  to celebrate their very confusions. And they want it in the most direct possible way - they want it served up neat  as it were  without the filtering and generalizing power of fiction.
— Saul Bellow
I can write better than anyone who can write faster  and I can write faster than anyone who can write better.
— A. J. Liebling
Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book  and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.
— Northrop Frye
Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names  identities  personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.
— Mel Brooks
There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
— Joan Didion
The writer must write what he has to say  not speak it.
— Ernest Hemingway
Writers should be read - but neither seen nor heard.
— Daphne du Maurier
A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
The beginning is easy  what happens next is much harder.
— Anonymous
There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi  not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.
— Robert Graves
If we try to envisage an 'average Canadian writer' we can see him living near a campus  teaching at least part-time at university level  mingling too much for his work's good with academics  doing as much writing as he can for the CBC  and always hoping for a Canada Council Fellowship.
— George Woodcock
The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose  not his individuality  but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth  so help me God. And I thought I was. I found I couldn't. Nobody can write the absolute truth.
— Henry Miller
For a dyed-in-the-wool author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written ... she is rather like a cat whose kittens have grown up. While they were a-growing she was passionately interested in them but now they seem hardly to belong to her - and probably she is involved with another batch of kittens as I am involved with other writing.
— Rumer Godden
Every author  however modest  keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
— Logan Pearsall Smith
Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.
— George Bernard Shaw
I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.
— Washington Irving
That's not writing  that's typing.
— Truman Capote
There is an accuracy that defeats itself by the overemphasis of details. I often say that one must permit oneself  and quite advisedly and deliberately  a certain margin of misstatement.
— Benjamin N. Cardozo
I suppose some editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.
— T. S. Eliot
I think with my right hand.
— Edmund Wilson
Writers are the engineers of human souls.
— Joseph Stalin
I quote others in order to better express my own self.
— Michel de Montaigne
A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed in keeping rabbits.
— Edith Sitwell
The process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing  let alone the success or failure that book may have after it is written . . . the book is merely a symbol of the writing. In writing the book  I am living. I am growing. I am tapping myself. I am changing. The process is the product.
— Theodore Isaac Rubin
Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself- it is the occurring which is difficult.
— Stephen Leacock
Writing  when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.
— Laurence Sterne
My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say  and then to say it with the utmost levity.
— George Bernard Shaw
Caesar had perished from the world of men Had not his sword been rescued by his pen.
— Henry Vaughan
Every great and original writer  in proportion as he is great and original  must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.
— William Wordsworth
Writers write to influence their readers  their preachers  their auditors  but always  at bottom  to be more themselves.
— Aldous Huxley
We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
In any really good subject  one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
— Edith Wharton
He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.
— Virginia Woolf
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in  shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
— Ernest Hemingway
It is a sobering thought that each of us gives his hearers and his readers a chance to look into the inner working of his mind when he speaks or writes.
— J. M. Barker
Read over your compositions  and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine  strike it out.
— Samuel Johnson
When you're a writer  you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you  and if you are at all intelligent you realize that you have lost something. But I think there has always been this dichotomy in a real writer. He wants to be terribly human  and he responds emotionally  but at the same time there's this cold observer who cannot cry.
— Brian Moore
When I am dead  I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet  but his books were read.'
— Hilaire Belloc
The best part of every author is in general to be found in his book  I assure you.
— Samuel Johnson
The obscurity of a writer is generally in proportion to his incapacity.
— Quintilian
Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing - for life itself is a writer's love until death.
— Edna Ferber
Just get it down on paper  and then we'll see what to do with it.
— Maxwell Perkins
Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man  write about a man.
— E. B. White
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words  a paragraph no unnecessary sentences  for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short  or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline  but that every word tell.
— William Strunk
Tennessee Williams said if he got rid of his demons  he would lose his angels.
— Dakin Williams
Self-expression is for babies and seals  where it can be charming. A writer's business is to affect the reader.
— Vincent McHugh
There is but one art  to omit.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it  that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied  he is content.
— Alfred North Whitehead
It is in the hard rockpile labour of seeking to win  hold  or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing comes in.
— John Mason Brown
Write something  even if it's just a suicide note.
— Anonymous
Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.
— Roland Barthes
Nature  not content with denying him the ability to think  has endowed him with the ability to write.
— A. E. Housman
Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing  but if the writer deliberately aims at truth  he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.
— Northrop Frye
When an author is yet living  we estimate his powers by his worst performance  and when he is dead  we rate them by his best.
— Samuel Johnson
The man who is asked by an author what he thinks of his work is put to the torture and is not obliged to speak the truth.
— Samuel Johnson
Style is the hallmark of a temperament stamped upon the material at hand.
— Andre Maurois
Every writer  without exception  is a masochist  a sadist  a peeping Tom  an exhibitionist  a narcissist  an injustice collector and a depressed person constantly haunted by fears of unproductivity.
— Edmund Bergler
My novels point out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.
— Joyce Carey
Less is more.
— Robert Browning
We like that a sentence should read as if its author  had he held a plough instead of a pen  could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
— Henry David Thoreau
I work every day - or at least I force myself into office or room. I may get nothing done  but you don't earn bonuses without putting in time. Nothing may come for three months  but you don't earn the fourth without it.
— Mordecai Richler
John the Baptist pretending to be Karl Marx.
— Anonymous
Every word she writes is a lie  including 'and' and 'the'.
— Mary McCarthy
When you put down the good things you ought to have done  and leave out the bad things you did do - well  that's memoirs.
— Will Rogers
Journalism allows it's readers to witness history. Fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.
— John Hersey
His (the writer's) standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention  out of his experience  should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.
— Ernest Hemingway
The most lasting reputation I have is for an almost ferocious aggressiveness  when in fact I am amiable  indulgent  affectionate  shy and rather timid at heart.
— J. B. Priestley
The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance  the farther there is to go and the more there is to say  the less time there is to say it.
— Gabrielle Roy
When the style is fully formed  if it has a sweet undersong  we call it beautiful  and the writer may do what he likes in words or syntax.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter.
— Blaise Pascal
It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Footnotes  the little dogs yapping at the heels of the text.
— William James
I like prefaces. I read them. Sometimes I do not read any further.
— Malcolm Lowry
As for style of writing  if one has anything to say  it drops from him simply and directly  as a stone falls to the ground.
— Henry David Thoreau
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
— Samuel Johnson
Proper words in proper places  make the true definition of a style.
— Jonathan Swift
They're fancy talkers about themselves  writers. If I had to give young writers advice  I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
— Lillian Hellman
The business of writing is one of the four or five most private things in the world.
— Ethel Wilson
I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.
— Mark Twain
He claimed his modest share of the general foolishness of the human race.
— Irving Howe
There are two kinds of writers - the great ones who can give you truths  and the lesser ones  who can only give you themselves.
— Clifton Fadiman
My own experience is that once a story has been written  one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying . . . one must ruthlessly suppress everything that is not concerned with the subject. If  in the first chapter  you say there is a gun hanging on the wall  you should make quite sure that it is going to be used further on in the story.
— Anton Chekhov
(Writing) - the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
— Mary Heaton Worse
All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.
— Saul Bellow
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
— Marshall McLuhan
It has been said that writing comes more easily if you have something to say.
— Sholem Asch
I've put my genius into my life  I've only put my talent into my works.
— Oscar Wilde
Fundamentally  all writing is about the same thing: it's about dying  about the brief flicker of time we have here  and the frustrations that it creates.
— Mordecai Richler
I am what libraries and librarians have made me  with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.
— B. K. Sandwell
Our society  like decadent Rome  has turned into an amusement society  with writers chief among the court jesters - not so much above the clatter as part of it.
— Saul Bellow
If you would be a reader  read  if a writer  write.
— Epictetus
A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language  trying to get human feelings right.
— John K. Hutchens
How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
— E. M. Forster
Please  never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization.
— Alexander Pushkin
The waste basket is a writer's best friend.
— Isaac Bashevis Singer
The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat With an indolent expression and an undulating throat - Like an unsuccessful literary man.
— Hilaire Belloc
If a man means his writing seriously  he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate.
— John Ciardi
Words and sentences are subjects of revision  paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.
— Barrett Wendell
There is nothing more dangerous to the formation of a prose style than the endeavour to make it poetic.
— J. Middleton Murry
The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.
— Robertson Davies
Now as through this world I ramble  I see lots of funny men  Some rob you with a six gun Some with a fountain pen.
— Woody Guthrie
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene  and  as if by magic  we see a new meaning in it.
— Anais Nin
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
— Virginia Woolf
Better to write for yourself and have no public  than to write for the public and have no self.
— Cyril Connolly
I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.
— Charles Baudelaire
Writing has power  but its power has no vector. Writers can stir the mind  but they can't direct it. Time changes things  God changes things  the dictators change things  but writers can't change anything.
— Isaac Bashevis Singer
A good writer is basically a story-teller  not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
— Isaac Bashevis Singer
Anybody can find out if he is a writer. If he were a writer  when he tried to write of some particular day  he would find in the effort that he could recall exactly how the light fell and how the temperature felt  and all the quality of it. Most people cannot do it. If they can do it  they may never be successful in a pecuniary sense  but that ability is at the bottom of writing  I am sure.
— Maxwell Perkins
I believe the writer... should always be the final judge. I have always held to that position and have sometimes seen books hurt thereby  but at least as often helped. The book belongs to the author.
— Maxwell Perkins
You have to throw yourself away when you write.
— Maxwell Perkins
A memorandum is written to protect the writer - not to inform his reader.
— Dean Acheson
I write for myself and strangers. The strangers  dear Readers  are an afterthought.
— Gertrude Stein
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims  one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms  like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
— George Orwell
A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
— Hugh MacLennan
You praise the firm restraint with which they write - I'm with you  there  of course: They use the snaffle and the curb all right  But where's the bloody horse?
— Roy Campbell
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution  once revealed  must seem to be inevitable.
— Raymond Chandler
On the trail of another man  the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn: any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.
— Paul Murray Kendall
The editorial job has become  unlike the ancient age when one judged what one read  a job of making judgements on outlines  ideas  reputations  previous books  scenarios  treatments  talk and promises.
— Sam Vaughan
An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better  a little better.
— T. S. Eliot
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family  friends and society are the natural enemies of a writer. He must be alone  uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
— Laurence Clark Powell
Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelette and the intolerable  so with autobiography.
— Hilaire Belloc
I think it's bad to talk about one's present work  for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
— Norman Mailer
As for my next book  I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear  pendant  gravid  asking to be cut or it will fall.
— Virginia Woolf
Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at the blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
— Gene Fowler
Your manuscript is both good and original  but the parts that are good are not original  and the parts that are original are not good.
— Samuel Johnson
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
— Walter Bagehot
Whatever we conceive well we express clearly.
— Nicolas Boileau
Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they think other folks think they think.
— Elbert Hubbard
Think much  speak little  and write less.
— Italian proverb
Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.
— G. C. Lichtenberg
A man may write himself out of reputation when nobody else can do it.
— Thomas Paine
The multitude is always in the wrong.
— Wentworth Dillon
Two wrongs do not make a right.
— English proverb
Truth forever on the scaffold  wrong forever on the throne.
— James Russell Lowell
The remedy for wrongs is to forget them.
— Syrus
Blessed are the young  for they shall inherit the national debt.
— Herbert Hoover
When a man of 40 falls in love with a girl of 20  it isn't her youth he is seeking but his own.
— Lenore Coffee
Whom the gods love  die young  no matter how long they live.
— Elbert Hubbard
Young folk  silly folk  old folk  cold folk.
— Old saying
In early youth  as we contemplate our coming life  we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised  sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
Much may be made of a Scotchman if he be caught young.
— Samuel Johnson
Young men think old men fools and old men know young men to be so.
— Anonymous
It takes a long time to become young.
— Pablo Picasso
The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded upon a fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts  and we grow happier as we grow older.
— William Lyon Phelps
It is essential that we enable young people to see themselves as participants in one of the most exciting eras in history  and to have a sense of purpose in relation to it.
— Nelson Rockefeller
This is a youth-oriented society  and the joke is on them because youth is a disease from which we all recover.
— Anonymous
Oh  to be only half as wonderful as my child thought I was when he was small  and only half as stupid as my teenager now thinks I am.
— Rebecca Richards
When I was younger  I could remember anything  whether it had happened or not.
— Mark Twain
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
— Alfred North Whitehead
Only the young die good.
— Oliver Herford
I am constantly amazed when I talk to young people to learn how much they know about sex and how little about soap.
— Billie Burke
The joy of the young is to disobey - but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.
— Jean Cocteau
To keep clear of concealment  to keep clear of the need of concealment  to do nothing that he might not do out on the middle of Boston Common at noonday -I cannot say how more and more that seems to me to be the glory of a young man's life. It is an awful hour when the first necessity of hiding anything comes. The whole life is different thenceforth. When there are questions to be feared and eyes to be avoided and subjects that must not be touched  then the bloom of life is gone. Put off that day as long as possible. Put if off forever if you can.
— Phillips Brooks
Youth has become a class.
— Roger Vadim
The 'teenager' seems to have replaced the Communist as the appropriate target for public controversy and foreboding.
— Edgar Z. Friedenberg
Everyone believes in his youth that the world really began with him  and that all merely exists for his sake.
— Goethe
It is not possible for civilization to flow backward while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong  but it will advance its allotted length.
— Helen Keller
You never see the old austerity That was the essence of civility  Young people hereabouts  unbridled  now Just want.
— Moliere
One boy's a boy  two boys are half a boy  three boys are no boy at all.
— Charles A. Lindbergh
Trouble is  kids feel they have to shock their elders and each generation grows up into something harder to shock.
— Cal Craig
I do beseech you to direct your efforts more to preparing youth for the path and less to preparing the path for the youth.
— Ben Lindsey
Every generation is a secret society and has incommunicable enthusiasms  tastes  and interests which are a mystery both to its predecessors and to posterity.
— John Jay Chapman
The interests of childhood and youth are the interests of mankind.
— Edmund Storer James
The youth gets together this material to build a bridge to the moon  or perchance  a palace or temple on earth  and at length  the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.
— Henry David Thoreau
Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations  he's only trying on one face after another till he finds his own.
— Logan Pearsall Smith
If one could recover the uncompromising spirit of one's youth  one's greatest indignation would be for what one has become.
— Andre Gide
It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own  it simply erases your own experience in history.
— Renata Adler
It's all that the young can do for the old  to shock them and keep them up to date.
— George Bernard Shaw
What though youth gave love and roses Age still leaves us friends and wine.
— Thomas More
In the lexicon of youth  which fate reserves For a bright manhood  there is no such word As fail.
— Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
Ah! happy years! once more who would not be a boy!
— Lord Byron
As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him  so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body  but can never be so in mind.
— Cicero
I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more - the feeling that I could last forever  outlast the sea  the earth  and all men.
— Joseph Conrad
Reckless youth makes rueful age.
— Benjamin Franklin
Youth will be served.
— English proverb
Forty is the old age of youth  fifty is the youth of old age.
— French proverb
Yes  you may depend upon it he has the ability! He is the younger generation that stands ready to knock at my door - to make an end of Halvard Solness.
— Henrik Ibsen
Youth! youth! how buoyant are thy hopes  they turn  Like marigolds  toward the sunny side.
— Jean Ingelow
All the world's a mass of folly  Youth is gay  age melancholy: Youth is spending  age is thrifty  Mad at twenty  cold at fifty  Man is nought but folly's slave  From the cradle to the grave.
— W. H. Ireland
Youth comes but once in a lifetime.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams With its illusions  aspirations  dreams! Book of Beginnings  Story without End  Each maid a heroine  and each man a friend!
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
We think our fathers fools  so wise we grow  Our wiser sons  no doubt  will think us so.
— Alexander Pope
If youth but knew  and age were able  Then poverty would be a fable.
— Proverbs
Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.
— Friedrich von Schiller
Ah sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth  and none  or almost none  for the disenchantments of age.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
Crabbed age and youth cannot live together  Youth is full of pleasure  age is full of care  Youth like summer morn  age like winter weather  Youth like summer brave  age like winter bare. Youth is full sport  age's breath is short  Youth is nimble  age is lame  Youth is hot and bold  age is weak and cold  Youth is wild  age is tame. Age  I do abhor thee  youth  I do adore thee.
— William Shakespeare
Live as long as you may  the first twenty years are the longest half of your life.
— Robert Southey
She bid me take love easy  as the leaves grow on the tree  But I  being young and foolish  with her would not agree.
— William Butler Yeats
Zeal is very blind  or badly regulated  when it encroaches upon the rights of others.
— Pasquier Quesnel
Blind zeal can only do harm.
— Magnus Gottfried Lichtwer
My zeal hath consumed me.
— Bible
To be furious in religion is to be irreligiously religious.
— William Penn
Here too, as in the Commune almost a century earlier, the struggle was articulated around the hope that 'the antithesis between the everyday and the Festival--whether of labour or of leisure--will no longer be a basis for society.
— Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader
The new towns of the 1950s and '60s were nothing less than the spatial translation of alienation and control and in these cities power increasingly could relinquish the old forms of advertising in favor of 'the simple organization of the spectacle of objects of consumption, which will only have consumable value illusory to the extent to which they will first of all have been objects of spectacle' -- to the extent, that is, they have first appeared on the television screen, which henceforth had to be seen as an urbanistic tool in its own right.
— Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader
One of my greatest obsessions is the lights of a city. Through my eyes there is nothing so delicious and rich and lovely.
— K.B. Ezzell, Elysium
As filthy as any night was, a New York City morning is always clean. The eyes get washed.Flowers in white deli buckets are replenished. The population bathes, in marble mausoleums of Upper East Side showers, or in Greenwich Village tubs, or in the sink of a Chinatown one-bedroom crammed with fifteen people. Some bar opens and the first song on the jukebox is Johnny Thunders, while bums pick up cigarette butts to see what’s left to smoke. The smell of espresso and hot croissants. The weather vane squeaks in the sun. Pigeons are reborn out of the mouths of blue windows.
— Jardine Libaire, White Fur
A bus drives past and I’m nauseated by a whiff of exhaust. Then rotting fish. The rancid stench of sewage. Is it garbage day? I’m trapped in the pungent fog, in the dreary suburban-style shops, the rat race of city life. The city, even on the west coast, has the power to beat us down, to suck us of passion, to crush our dreams.
— Shannon  Mullen, See What Flowers
This is a little parable about cities and genres; how, while some of them lose their imaginative centrality, others take their place.
— Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City
In the streets of Cecilia, an illustrious city, I met once a goatherd, driving a tinkling flock along the walls."Man blessed by heaven," he asked me, stopping, "can you tell me the name of the city in which we are?""May the gods accompany you!" I cried. "How can you fail to recognise the illustrious city of Cecilia?""Bear with me," that man answered. "I am a wandering herdsman. Sometimes my goats and I have to pass through cities; but we are unable to distinguish them. Ask me the names of the grazing lands: I know them all, the Meadow between the Cliffs, the Green Slope, the Shadowed Grass. Cities have no name for me: they are places without leaves, separating one pasture from another, and where the goats are frightened at street corners and scatter. The dog and I run to keep the flock together.""I am the opposite of you," I said. "I recognise only cities and cannot distinguish what is outside them. In uninhabited places each stone and each clump of grass mingles, in my eyes, with every stone and clump.
— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
She could hear her hair growing. It sounded like something crumbling. A burnt thing crumbling. Coal. Toast. Moths crisped on a light bulb. She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, travelling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died. Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them.
— Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness