Yoga Quotes

Quotes About Yoga From Million Quotes

Yoga is invigoration in relaxation. Freedom in routine. Confidence through self control. Energy within and energy without. - Ymber Delecto



Yoga has a sly, clever way of short circuiting the mental patterns that cause anxiety. - Baxter Bell



Concentrating on poses clears the mind, while focusing on the breath helps the body shift out of fight or flight mode. - Melanie Haiken



Before you've practiced, the theory is useless. After you've practiced, the theory is obvious. - David Williams



Anyone who practices can obtain success in yoga but not one who is lazy. Constant practice alone is the secret of success. - Hatha Yoga Pradipika



The body is your temple. Keep it pure and clean for the soul to reside in. - B.K.S Iyengar



Undisturbed calmness of mind is attained by cultivating friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and indifference toward the wicked. - The yoga sutras of Patanjali



When the breath wanders the mind also is unsteady. But when the breath is calmed the mind too will be still, and the yogi achieves long life. Therefore, one should learn to control the breath. - Hatha Yoga Pradipika



Yoga exists in the world because everything is linked. - Desikashar


 Do your practice and all is coming. - Sri K Patthabi Jois



This calm steadiness of the senses is called yoga. Then one should become watchful, becomes yoga comes and go. - Katha Upanishad



Yoga is really trying to liberate us from ... shame about our bodies. To love your body is a very important thing -- I think the health of your mind depends on your being able to love your body. - Rodney Yee



You can enter yoga, or the path of yoga, only when you are totally frustrated with your own mind as it is. If you are still hoping that you can gain something through your mind, yoga is not for you. - Osho



The Self in you is the same as the Self Universal. Whatever powers are manifested throughout the world, those powers exist in germ, in latency, in you.... If you realize the unity of the Self amid the diversities of the Not-Self, then Yoga Will not seem an impossible thing to you. - Annie Wood Besant



The meaning of our self is not to be found in its separateness from God and others, but in the ceaseless realisation of yoga, of union; not on the side of the canvas where it is blank, but on the side where the picture is being painted. - Rabindranath Tagore



This yoga should be practiced with firm determination and perseverance, without any mental reservation or doubts. - Bhagavad Gita



Yoga is possible for anybody who really wants it. Yoga is universal.... But don't approach yoga with a business mind looking for worldly gain. - Sri Krishna Pattabhi Jois



Yoga is the perfect opportunity to be curious about who you are. - Jason Crandell



In Karma yoga no effort is ever lost, and there is no harm. Even a little practice of this discipline protects one from great fear of birth and death. - Bhagavad Gita



Yoga is a science, and not a vague dreamy drifting or imagining. It is an applied science, a systematized collection of laws applied to bring about a definite end. It takes up the laws of psychology, applicable to the unfolding of the whole consciousness of man on every plane, in every world, and applies those rationally in a particular case. This rational application of the laws of unfolding consciousness acts exactly on the same principles that you see applied around you every day in other departments of science. - Annie Wood Besant



Yoga is about clearing away whatever is in us that prevents our living in the most full and whole way. With yoga, we become aware of how and where we are restricted -- in body, mind, and heart -- and how gradually to open and release these blockages. As these blockages are cleared, our energy is freed. We start to feel more harmonious, more at one with ourselves. Our lives begin to flow -- or we begin to flow more in our lives. - Cybele Tomlinson







What yoga philosophy and all the great Buddhist teachings tells us is that solidity is a creation of the ordinary mind and that there never was anything permanent to begin with that we could hold on to. Life would be much easier and substantially less painful if we lived with the knowledge of impermanence as the only constant. - Donna Farhi



Yoga does not remove us from the reality or responsibilities of everyday life but rather places our feet firmly and resolutely in the practical ground of experience. We don't transcend our lives; we return to the life we left behind in the hopes of something better. - Donna FARHI



This yoga is not possible, for the one who eats too much, or who does not eat at all; who sleeps too much, or who keeps awake. - Bhagavad Gita



The word yoga comes from Sanskrit, the language of ancient India. It means union, integration, or wholeness. It is an approach to health that promotes the harmonious collaboration of the human being's three components: body, mind, and spirit. - Stella Weller



Karma yoga is a supreme secret indeed. - Bhagavad Gita



In truth, it matters less what we do in practice than how we do it and why we do it. The same posture, the same sequence, the same meditation with a different intention takes on an entirely new meaning and will have entirely different outcomes. - Donna Farhi



If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete. - Jack Kornfield



Through practice, I've come to see that the deepest source of my misery is not wanting things to be the way they are. Not wanting myself to be the way I am. Not wanting the world to be the way it is. Not wanting others to be the way they are. Whenever I'm suffering, I find this war with reality to be at the heart of the problem. - Stephen Cope



These days, my practice is teaching me to embrace imperfection: to have compassion for all the ways things haven't turned out as I planned, in my body and in my life - for the ways things keep falling apart, and failing, and breaking down. It's less about fixing things, and more about learning to be present for exactly what is. - Anne Cushman



When I started doing asana, the yoga postures, I had a very strong feeling of many unnecessary things dropping away - especially tension and inadequacy. - Patricia Sullivan



When the breath wanders the mind also is unsteady. But when the breath is calmed the mind too will be still, and the yogi achieves long life. Therefore, one should learn to control the breath. - Hatha Yoga Pradipika



Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as bird wings. - Rumi



Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; for it becomes your destiny. - Upanishads



Beyond meditation there is the experience of now. - Ryan Parenti



Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity. - Swami Sivananda

Meditation here may think down hours to moments. Here the heart may give a useful lesson to the head and learning wiser grow without his books. - William Cowper



Thus meditating you will no longer strive to build yourself up in your prejudices, but, forgetting self, you will remember only that you are seeking the Truth. - James Allen



Plant the seed of meditation and reap the fruit of peace of mind. - Author Unknown



Meditation and concentration are the way to a life of serenity. - Author Unknown



Your mind is your instrument. Learn to be its master and not its slave. - Author Unknown



When calm your mind and your senses, you become conscious of your always present inner self. - Author Unknown



Better indeed is knowledge than mechanical practice. Better than knowledge is meditation. But better still is surrender of attachment to results, because there follows immediate peace. - Bhagavad Gita



Silence is not silent. Silence speaks. It speaks most eloquently. Silence is not still. Silence leads. It leads most perfectly. - Sri Chinmoy



Thoughts can create such a barrier that even if you are standing before a beautiful flower, you will not be able to see it. Your eyes are covered with layers of thought. - Author Unknown



To experience the beauty of the flower you have to be in a state of meditation, not in a state of mentation. You have to be silent, utterly silent, not even a flicker of thought - and the beauty explodes, reaches to you from all directions. - Author Unknown



You may think that only you are a prisoner, but other people are also prisoners. You are in a small prison, but others are in the big prison outside. When will they be released? Think that you are a yogi and that you are pursuing your sadhana in this particular place and at this particular moment. Immediately you will experience great joy. If you change your understanding, you will be free in a minute. - Baba Muktananda



Our raga/dveshas make us prisoners to the mental lenses through which we view the world. No matter what actually appears before us, our vision is always skewed, and as a result we suffer. - Leonard Perlmutter



The perennial wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita can teach us how to transform our character, conduct and consciousness to meet the challenges of everyday life. - Leonard Perlmutter



Yoga Science is not just a scholarly pursuit. It is a moment by moment and thought by thought practical guide for living. - Leonard Perlmutter



Enormous possibilities for health and creativity are held captive by your likes and dislikes. Inspecting your desires and attachments to food and making choices intuitively with discrimination will make your spiritual practice and every other relationship more rewarding. - Leonard Perlmutter

Yoga Science teaches us to 'include all and exclude none.' If the outer guru, in the form of a person or experience, reflects the Truth and light of the inner guru, the advice is to be heeded and served in thought, word and deed. If a suggestion from the outer guru is not in harmony with the inner guru as reflected by the purified discrimination of buddhi, the advice is to be honored and lovingly rejected with gratitude---for your teacher has just taught you what not to do. - Leonard Perlmutter



Meditation is not what you think it is. It's a method of accessing unerring wisdom from the superconscious mind so you can experience a happy, healthy and creatively rewarding life. - Leonard Perlmutter



Fear less, hope more; eat less, chew more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; hate less, love more; and all good things are yours. - Swedish Proverb



A lot of exercise is mindless; you can have music or the radio on and not be aware. But if you're aware in anything you do - and it doesn't have to be yoga - it changes you. Being present changes you.- Mariel Hemingway



Yoga is a way to freedom. By its constant practice, we can free ourselves from fear, anguish and loneliness. - Indra Devi



Yoga is almost like music in a way; there's no end to it. - Sting



When this body has been so magnificently and artistically created by God, it is only fitting that we should maintain it in good health and harmony by the most excellent and artistic science of Yoga. - Geeta Iyengar



Yoga teaches us to cure what need not be endured and endure what cannot be cured. - B.K.S. Iyengar



The yoga mat is a good place to turn when talk therapy and antidepressants aren’t enough. - Amy Weintraub



The yogi will tell you that you feel and look as young as your spine is elastic. - Richard Hittleman



Yoga is the fountain of youth. You’re only as young as your spine is flexible. - Bob Harper



You cannot do yoga. Yoga is your natural state. What you can do are yoga exercises, which may reveal to you where you are resisting your natural state. - Sharon Gannon



Yoga is possible for anybody who really wants it. Yoga is universal.... But don’t approach yoga with a business mind looking for worldly gain. - K. Pattabhi Jois



By embracing your mother wound as your yoga, you transform what has been a hindrance in your life into a teacher of the heart. - Phillip Moffitt



Yoga is 99% practice and 1% theory. - K. Pattabhi Jois







I would like for people to realize that yoga is not about touching your toes. - Gary Kraftsow



I like the physical part, but I’m also drawn to the spiritual. For me, yoga is not just a workout—it’s about working on yourself. - Mary Glover, “Health Profile: Yoga leaves aches and pains behind,” Arizona Republic, 2004 April 6



In our uniquely human capacity of connect movement with breath and spiritual meaning, yoga is born. - Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa



A photographer gets people to pose for him. A yoga instructor gets people to pose for themselves. - Terri Guillemets



Yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on the telephone, is a spiritual fake. - Carl Jung



Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape. - Author Unknown



Vogue and Self are putting out the message of yoginis as buff and perfect. If you start doing yoga for those reasons, fine. Most people get beyond that and see that it’s much, much more. - Patricia Walden



When asked what gift he wanted for his birthday, the yogi replied: “I wish no gifts, only presence.” - Author Unknown



While doing yoga we are more ourselves, and more than ourselves. - Valerie Jeremijenko



The aim of yoga is to eliminate the control that material nature exerts over the human spirit, to rediscover through introspective practice what the poet T.S. Eliot called “the still point of the turning world.” - Barbara Stoler Miller



Without proper breathing, the yoga postures are nothing more than calisthenics. - Rachel Schaeffer



If I’m losing balance in a pose, I stretch higher and God reaches down to steady me. It works every time, and not just in yoga. - Terri Guillemets



Yoga, an ancient but perfect science, deals with the evolution of humanity. This evolution includes all aspects of one’s being, from bodily health to self-realization. Yoga means union—the union of body with consciousness and consciousness with the soul. Yoga cultivates the ways of maintaining a balanced attitude in day-to-day life and endows skill in the performance of one’s actions. - B.K.S. Iyengar



Yoga is not about self-improvement, it’s about self-acceptance. - Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa



Anyone who practices can obtain success in yoga but not one who is lazy. Constant practice alone is the secret of success. - Svatmarama







Yoga is the practice of quieting the mind. - Patanjali



Yoga accepts. Yoga gives. - Terri Guillemets



Asanas attune the body to meditation, just as a guitar is tuned before a performance. - Author Unknown



Yoga is the study of balance, and balance is the aim of all living creatures: it is our home. - Rolf Gates



Yoga is the perfect opportunity to be curious about who you are. - Jason Crandell



Yoga is difficult for the one whose mind is not subdued. - Bhagavad Gita



Yoga is essentially a practice for your soul, working through the medium of your body. - Tara Fraser



In truth, yoga doesn't "take time" — it gives time. - Ganga White, Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice



In this fast-paced, constantly moving world, practicing yoga allows me time to stop and just be aware of where I am and how I feel. It is a time to be one with my body, and let go of all the distractions and worries of the outside world. Holding an asana like Warrior One, with my legs stretched in a lunge and and my arms reaching up, I feel grounded and free at the same time. I can sense my body acting as a conduit between the earth and the sky, and feel my breath flowing with this sacred energy. - Jonathan Urla



Concentrating on poses clears the mind, while focusing on the breath helps the body shift out of fight-or-flight mode. - Melanie Haiken



The practice of Yoga brings us face to face with the extraordinary complexity of our own being. - Sri Aurobindo



That’s exactly how it is in yoga. The places where you have the most resistance are actually the places that are going to be the areas of the greatest liberation. - Rodney Yee



The ultimate essence of yoga is the contact and the union between the individual consciousness and the divine consciousness. - Raphael, Essence and Purpose of Yoga: The Initiatory Pathways to the Transcendent



Practicing yoga during the day is a matter of keeping your eyes on the road and one ear turned toward the infinite. - Erich Schiffmann







The autonomic nervous system is divided into the sympathetic system, which is often identified with the fight-or-flight response, and the parasympathetic, which is identified with what’s been called the relaxation response. When you do yoga — the deep breathing, the stretching, the movements that release muscle tension, the relaxed focus on being present in your body — you initiate a process that turns the fight-or-flight system off and the relaxation response on. That has a dramatic effect on the body. The heartbeat slows, respiration decreases, blood pressure decreases. The body seizes this chance to turn on the healing mechanisms. - Richard Faulds



When you inhale, you are taking the strength from God. When you exhale, it represents the service you are giving to the world. - B.K.S. Iyengar



Inhale, and God approaches you. Hold the inhalation, and God remains with you. Exhale, and you approach God. Hold the exhalation, and surrender to God. - Tirumalai Krishnamacharya



For those wounded by civilization, yoga is the most healing salve. - Terri Guillemets



What we’re trying to do in yoga is to create a union, and so to deepen a yoga pose is to actually increase the union of the pose, not necessarily put your leg around your head. - Rodney Yee



It doesn’t matter how deep into a posture you go, what matters is who you are when you get there. - Max Strom



Yoga is not about touching your toes, it is what you learn on the way down. - Jigar Gor



Sun salutations can energize and warm you, even on the darkest, coldest winter day. - Carol Krucoff



I was in yoga the other day. I was in full lotus position. My chakras were all aligned. My mind is cleared of all clatter and I’m looking out of my third eye and everything that I’m supposed to be doing. It’s amazing what comes up, when you sit in that silence. “Mama keeps whites bright like the sunlight, Mama’s got the magic of Clorox 2.” - Ellen DeGeneres



You don’t have to be flexible to do yoga, you just have to be willing to shake the dust off and see what happens. - David Good



Warrior pose battles inner weakness and wins focus. You see that there is no war within you. You’re on your own side, and you are your own strength. - Terri Guillemets



Mountain pose teaches us, literally, how to stand on our own two feet.... teaching us to root ourselves into the earth.... Our bodies become a connection between heaven and earth. - Carol Krucoff



Mountain pose is an affirmation. You can conquer anything with your natural boldness and resolute strength. Only you can reach the peak of your success. - Terri Guillemets



All unimportant matters drop off you in ragdoll pose. Very few things are genuinely important. The Truth sways before you. - Terri Guillemets



Tree pose grows confidence. It roots me to this world. - Terri Guillemets







Chair pose is a defiance of spirit, showing how high you can reach even when you’re forced down. - Terri Guillemets



Corpse pose restores life. Dead parts of your being fall away, the ghosts are released. - Terri Guillemets



We are aware of yoga only as a technique to gain physical strength, flexibility, or increased health. And indeed these are potent side effects of the practice. But that is what they are: side effects. To focus on these largely insignificant manifestations is to miss the point entirely. - John McAfee



The asanas are useful maps to explore yourself, but they are not the territory. - Donna Farhi



Hatha yoga is spirituality of the body; it is the most perfect union of corporeal and incorporeal. - Terri Guillemets



Yoga takes us to the present moment, the only place where life exists. - Ellen Brenneman



The harmonizing of opposing forces is a key aspect of yoga — hot energy is united with cool energy, strong with soft, and masculine with feminine. - Tara Fraser



It was obvious to me that for optimal fitness, yoga and Pilates belonged together.... Yogilates was born from my desire to create an accessible and effective regimen that contained the best of both techniques and would be ideal for everyone. - Jonathan Urla



What kind of Yoga do you want to practice, the Yoga of getting or the Yoga of giving?... One enslaves, the other liberates. - Nisargadatta Maharaj, "Conversations with Nisargadatta Maharaj: Conversation #70," Yoga Journal, December 1981



Yoga is invigoration in relaxation. Freedom in routine. Confidence through self control. Energy within and energy without. - Terri Guillemets



Basketball is an endurance sport, and you have to learn to control your breath; that’s the essence of yoga, too. So, I consciously began using yoga techniques in my practice and playing. I think yoga helped reduce the number and severity of injuries I suffered. As preventative medicine, it’s unequaled. - Kareem Abdul-Jabbar



I tried yoga once but took off for the mall halfway through class, as I had a sudden craving for a soft pretzel and world peace. - Terri Guillemets



My yoga instructor pissed me off, so I offered him my special "moon salutation." Then I slammed my chakra shut right in his face. - Terri Guillemets



The last time I opened my chakra so I could feel my peace, I got thrown right out of the pub. - Terri Guillemets

Writing Quotes

Quotes About Writing From Million Quotes

 

So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it. - Harold Acton

 

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. - Anaïs Nin

 

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. - Ray Bradbury

 

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. - E.L. Doctorow

 

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. - Charles Peguy

 

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. - Sylvia Plath

 

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. - Richard Wright

 

I try to leave out the parts that people skip. - Elmore Leonard

 

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. - Toni Morrison

 

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. - Logan Pearsall Smith

 

The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium. - Norbet Platt

 

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. - Vita Sackville-West

 

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. - Sharon O'Brien

 

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. - James Michener

 

The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say. - Mark Twain

 

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. - William Wordsworth

 

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. - Vladimir Nabakov

 

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. - Anton Chekhov

 

Easy reading is damn hard writing. - Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies. - Terri Guillemets

 

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. - Orson Scott Card

 

A metaphor is like a simile. - Author Unknown

 

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. - Mark Twain

 

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it. - Jules Renard

 

Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. - Author Unknown

 



 

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer. - Karl Kraus

 

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. - Samuel McChord Crothers

 

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can. - Samuel Lover

 

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. - James Michener

 

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork. - Peter De Vries

 

Words — so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. - Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote. - Mignon McLaughlin

 

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind. - Catherine Drinker Bowen

 

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make. - Truman Capote

 

A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right. - John K. Hutchens

 

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. - Author Unknown

 

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. - Hannah Arendt

 

It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order. - Ann Beattie

 

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle. - John Cheever

 

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous. - Henry Brooks Adams

 



 

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. - Gene Fowler

 

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable. - Francis Bacon

 

The expression "to write something down" suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it. - William Gass

 

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. - Flannery O'Connor

 

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page. - Joan Baez

 

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence. - Samuel Butler

 

Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains — God composes, why shouldn't we? - Terri Guillemets

 

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may. - Walter Savage Landor

 

Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies.
- Denise Levertov

 

When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man. - Blaise Pascal

 

Every writer I know has trouble writing. - Joseph Heller

 

Writer's block is a disease for which there is no cure, only respite. - Terri Guillemets

 

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one. - Baltasar Gracián

 

When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing. - Enrique Jardiel Poncela

 

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces. - Harold Ross

 



 

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so you can give that to people, then you are a writer. - Ernest Hemingway

 

Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. - Sholem Asch

 

The ablest writer is only a gardener first, and then a cook: his tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his strongest and most nutritive thoughts; and when they are ripe, to dress them, wholesomely, and yet so that they may have a relish. - Augustus William Hare

 

An author plants the alphabet — and harvests flowers, nourishment, and weeds. - Terri Guillemets

 

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. - Lord Byron

 

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it. - Anaïs Nin

 

I'd rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer. - Jack Smith

 

Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words. - Norman Mailer

 

An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts. - Juvenal, Satires

 

Writing is a struggle against silence. - Carlos Fuentes

 

Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it. - Jack London

 

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation. - Elias Canetti

 

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories. - Paul Gallico

 

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper. - Isaac Bashevis Singer

 



 

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window. - Burton Rascoe

 

It's not a good idea to try to put your wife into a novel. Not your latest wife, anyway. - Norman Mailer

 

The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. - Agatha Christie

 

Every word born of an inner necessity — writing must never be anything else. - Etty Hillesum

 

A writer's mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head. - Ethel Wilson

 

Publication – is the auction of the Mind of Man. - Emily Dickinson

 

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation. - Jorge Luis Borges

 

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves. - Don Marquis

 

There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters. - Miguel de Cervantes

 

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake. - E.L. Doctorow

 

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure. - Henry David Thoreau

 

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke. - Arthur Polotnik

 

An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff. - Adlai Stevenson, quoted in Ronald D. Fuchs, You Said a Mouthful

 

With many readers, brilliancy of style passes for affluence of thought; they mistake buttercups in the grass for immeasurable gold mines under ground. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 



 

Most editors are failed writers — but so are most writers. - T.S. Eliot

 

Human language may be polite and powerless in itself, uplifted with difficulty into expression by the high thoughts it utters, or it may in itself become so saturated with warm life and delicious association that every sentence shall palpitate and thrill with the mere fascination of the syllables.... There may be phrases which shall be palaces to dwell in, treasure-houses to explore; a single word may be a window from which one may perceive all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. Oftentimes a word shall speak what accumulated volumes have labored in vain to utter: there may be years of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a sentence. - Thomas Wentworth Higginson

 

What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told. - André Gide

 

Between the two windows stood the writing-table, covered with heaps of newspapers, stacks of letters, mountains of ledgers, bound in canvas or leather, and tipped with brass at the corners; a chaos for every eye and every hand but the master's. - Franz von Dingelstedt

 

Some authors write with a grave ink, of a dramatic pen dipped into their dark souls. - Terri Guillemets

 

Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free. - Samuel Johnson

 

I confess I seldom commune with my conscience when I write. - Anton Chekhov

 

A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident. - W. Somerset Maugham

 

They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works. - Robert Burton

 

The road to hell is paved with adverbs. - Stephen King

 

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin. - Karl Kraus

 

As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out. - Mark Twain

 

We write to remember our nows later. - Terri Guillemets

 

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

 

Caress your phrase tenderly: it will end by smiling at you. - Anatole France

 



 

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

 

An author, behind his words, is naked. - Terri Guillemets

 

My prose style at this time was a stomach-twisting blend of the Bible, Carl Sandburg, H.L. Mencken, Jeffrey Farnol, Christopher Morley, Samuel Pepys, and Franklin Pierce Adams imitating Samuel Pepys. I was quite apt to throw in a "bless the mark" at any spot, and to begin a sentence with "Lord" comma. - E.B. White

 

When I don't make any progress, it is because I have bumped into the wall of language. Then I draw back with a bloody head. And would like to go on. - Karl Kraus, translated from German by Harry Zohn

 

The wastebasket is a writer's best friend. - Isaac Bashevis Singer

 

A well-disposed research librarian is a writer's best friend, as essential as ink. - Barbara Rogan, Suspicion

 

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all. - Lord Byron

 

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes. - Theodore Dreiser

 

There is a zone to writing. It takes some effort, some hours of struggle to reach, but once you're there, the words flow as if from a spigot. Thoughts fill up the page. Your fingers function independently of your body and brain as you tap out the poetry. It's the groove that baseball hitters speak of. The hot hand that basketball players relish. It is that sweet moment in a race car when everything slows down despite the speedometer reading 175 miles per hour. Everything doable in life has a zone like this. Find it and get into it. - Joe Kita

 

It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else. - Havelock Ellis

 

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason. They made no such demand upon those who wrote them. - Charles Caleb Colton

 

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. - Saul Bellow

 

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! - Henry David Thoreau

 

The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible. - Washington Irving

 



 

As is invariably noted at the beginning of positively all literary biographies, the little boy was a glutton for books.... For his first writing exercise he painstakingly reproduced: "Obey your sovereign, honor him and submit to his laws," and the compressed ball of his index finger thus remained ink-stained forever. Now the thirties are over and the forties have begun. - Vladimir Nabokov

 

It is impossible to discourage the real writers — they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write. - Sinclair Lewis

 

Being an author is being in charge of your own personal insane asylum. - Terri Guillemets

 

The author writes as a race-horse runs, for the sake of it. He feels like it, and kindles just because he enjoys burning. - The Living Way

 

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen? - Friedrich Nietzsche

 

A good author dances on typewriter keys. - Terri Guillemets

 

It is indeed certain, that whoever attempts any common topick, will find unexpected coincidences of his thoughts with those of other writers; nor can the nicest judgment always distinguish accidental similitude from artful imitation. - Samuel Johnson

 

Writing is both mask and unveiling. - E.B. White

 

So Friar Jerome began his Book.
From break of dawn till curfew-chime
He bent above the lengthening page,
Like some rapt poet o'er his rhyme.
- T.B. Aldrich

 

A notepad by the bedside accounts for half the earnings of my livelihood. If it weren't for bedtime, half my novels would still be stuck at dock. - Terri Guillemets

 

The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink. - T.S. Eliot

 

Dialogue is not just quotation. It is grimaces, pauses, adjustments of blouse buttons, doodles on a napkin, and crossings of legs. - Jerome Stern

 

Let’s hope the institution of marriage survives its detractors, for without it there would be no more adultery and without adultery two thirds of our novelists would stand in line for unemployment checks. - Peter S. Prescott

 

The author, as a rule, dearly loves every line of his work, from the first stroke down to the dotlet on the i, and certainly has a right to it. - Gustav Boehm

 

It’s not plagiarism — I’m recycling words, as any good environmentally conscious writer would do. - Uniek Swain

 



 

I really would like to stop working forever—never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now—and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends.... Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence. - Allen Ginsberg

 

If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. - Henry Rollins

 

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself. - Franz Kafka

 

Kafka became a model for me, a continuing inspiration. Not only did he exhibit an irrepressible originality—who else would think of things like this!—he seemed to say that only in one's most personal language can the crucial tales of a writer be told. Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. Only if you do that can you hope to make the reader feel a particle of what you, the writer, have known and feel compelled to share. - Anne Rice

 

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. - Gustave Flaubert

 

If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don't remove it — I might be writing in my dreams. - Terri Guillemets

 

There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook

 

One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one's own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one's pen. - Leo Tolstoy

 

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book. - Samuel Johnson

 

Authors are magpies, echoing each other's words and seizing avidly on anything that glitters. - Bergen Evans

 

I lied about my weight on my poetic license. - Terri Guillemets

 

What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach. - Logan Pearsall Smith

 

No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published. - Russell Lynes

 

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order. - Jean Luc Godard

 

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life. - James Norman Hall

 



 

Whatever an author puts between the two covers of his book is public property; whatever of himself he does not put there is his private property, as much as if he had never written a word. - Gail Hamilton

 

Words were the only net to catch a mood, the only sure weapon against oblivion. - Jan Struther

 

It's the professional deformation of many writers, and has ruined not a few. (I remember Kingsley Amis, himself no slouch, saying that he could tell on what page of the novel Paul Scott had reached for the bottle and thrown caution to the winds.) - Christopher Hitchens

 

Love letters and poems aren't the least bit difficult to write, if you write directly from your heart into the ink and don't channel through your brain first. - Terri Guillemets

 

Some books come to you.... They are bonuses, gifts. You do not have to kill some little part of your flesh to dredge them up. This is a fatal shade mystical, but it is almost as if you are serving as agent for a book which wants to get itself written. So the author never knows what to think of such books when he is done. His real fondness — since writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing — is more for those books he delivered out of his own flesh, torn and deadened by the process, but able at least to use all art and craft, all accumulated lore. - Norman Mailer

 

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought? - Joan Didion

 

I'm a singer-songwriter.... If I'm not doing it, I'm like a flower without water. When I'm doing it, I'm a sunflower six feet tall.... Writing songs is like free therapy. Instead of paying a guy 125 bucks an hour to pull stuff out of me, I pull it out of myself and put it on paper. And then I own it, but it doesn't own me. - Rob from Tucson

 

Journal: fitting your heart and soul into ruled lines. - Terri Guillemets

 

Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially. - A. Bronson Alcott

 

The artist's only responsibility is his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.... If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies. - William Faulkner

 

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. - Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

 

The reason why many people are so fond of using superlatives, is, they are so positive that the poor positive is not half positive enough for them. - Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare

 

A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. - Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

A great writer creates his precursors. - Jorge Luis Borges

 

The only cure for writer's block is insomnia. - Terri Guillemets

 



 

Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. - Colette

 

Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted. - Jules Renard

 

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. - Ray Bradbury

 

Being an author is having angels whisper in your ear — and devils, too. - Terri Guillemets

 

Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all. - Franklin P. Adams

 

You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world. - G.K. Chesterton

 

I start with the idea of constructing a treehouse and end with a skyscraper made of wood. - Norman Mailer

 

It is possible to regard Norman Mailer as one of the prices we pay for widespread literacy. - Richard Gilman

 

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. - André Gide, Journals

 

Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death — fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant. - Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic

 

The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax. - Alfred Kazin

 

A typical Mailer bon mot: an impeccable thought and an elegant formulation, preceded by seven words of needless mush. - Jim Lewis

 

Our passions shape our books; repose writes them in the intervals. - Proust

 

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. - Samuel Johnson

 

I am tempted to call this section Economics, for it concerns the loss and gain (economically, psychically, physically) of living as a writer. Let's settle, however, for a term that may be closer to the everyday reality: Lit Biz. Spend your working life as a writer and depend on it—your income, your spirit, and your liver are all on close terms with Lit Biz. - Norman Mailer

 



 

Why write: It's the only place in my head that's quiet enough to breathe and loud enough to break things.... Waking up at 2am to vomit up poetry and then going back to sleep.... A writer is the closest thing to a human thunderstorm. - Author Unknown

 

The universe will do the writing for you, if you just listen close enough. - Terri Guillemets

 

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads. - William Styron

 

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft. - Jessamyn West

 

I write with great difficulty.... Don't like to write, but like having written. Hate the effort of driving pen from line to line, work only three hours a day, but work every day. - Frank Norris

 

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. - George Orwell

 

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. - Hart Crane

 

He that uses many words for the explaining any subject doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink. - John Ray

 

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. - G.K. Chesterton

 

The idea could even be advanced that style comes to young authors about the time they recognize that life is out there ready to kill them, kill them quickly or slowly, but something out there is not fooling. It would explain why authors who were ill in their childhood almost always arrive early in their career as developed stylists: Proust, Capote, and Alberto Moravia give three examples. Gide offers another. This notion would certainly account for the early and complete development of Hemingway's style. He had the unmistakable sensation of being wounded so near to death that he felt his soul slide out of him, then slip back. The average young author is not that ill in childhood or that harshly used by early life. - Norman Mailer

 

Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence. - Fay Weldon

 

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. - Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such. - Samuel Butler

 

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous. - Robert Benchley

 

No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman. - Van Wyck Brooks

 



 

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof [$h¡t] detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it. - Ernest Hemingway

 

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new. - Samuel Johnson

 

The best style is the style you don't notice. - Somerset Maugham

 

There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen and writes. - William Makepeace Thackeray

 

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. - John Updike

 

I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM. - Tiffany Madison

 

When I state myself, as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person. - Emily Dickinson

 

Authorship is exhibitionism, and readers a species of voyeur. - Terri Guillemets

 

Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible. - Leo Tolstoy

 

The majority of writers ought to translate themselves; there are but few thoughts that are born translated, that is, clothed with the power best fitted alike to express and transmit them. What we have in the first instance written for ourselves, should be written a second time for others. - Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847), Literature. First Section: Literature in General. Chapter III.—Literary Precepts. II. Literary Precepts— 3. Literary Precepts and Miscellaneous Observations—Rage for Reading, Outlines of Philosophy and Literature, edited by ‎Jean Frédéric Astié

 

Booze, pot, too much sex, failure in one's private life, too much attrition, too much recognition, too little recognition. Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice. - Norman Mailer

 

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

I would always be that same maddening, monstrous mixture of pedantry, egoism, politeness, selfishness, kindliness, sneakiness, larkiness, sociability, loneliness, ambition, ordered calm and hidden intensity. I would cover my life with words. I would spray the whole bloody world with words. - Stephen Fry

 

Don't expect the typewriter to ever completely disappear... - Hal Fair

 

A catless writer is almost inconceivable; even Ernest Hemingway, manly follower of the hunting trophy and the bullfight, lived waist-deep in cats. It's a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys. - Barbara Holland

 



 

As a playwright, Williams had the minor defects of his major virtues. He sometimes ran a purple ribbon through his typewriter and gushed where he should have dammed. - T.E. Kalem

 

Children... what they are in the world for I don't know, for they are of no practical value as far as I can see. If I could beget a typewriter — but no, our fertile days are over. - Mark Twain

 

The book's idea or theme or meaning has been stirring about in your consciousness for months and probably years. When the idea first hits you you feel enormously stimulated and heightened. Then you wish you could get away from it, but now nothing but death can separate you from it. It's no use.... Now everything else in your life takes second place or fades out of your consciousness altogether. Clothes are unimportant, letters go unanswered for days or even weeks, parties you regard with a lackluster eye, travel is a lure to be avoided like death, for it is ruin to the sustained rhythm of your work day. Teeth go unfilled, bodily ills run unchecked, your idea of bliss is to wake up on Monday morning knowing that you haven't a single engagement for the entire week. You are cradled in a white paper cocoon tied up with typewriter ribbon. Awake and asleep the novel is with you, haunting you, dogging your footsteps. Strange formless bits of material float out from the ether about you and attach themselves to the main body of your story as though they had hung suspended in air for years, waiting. - Edna Ferber

 

We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true. - Robert Wilensky

 

I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of William Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon. - Bill Hoest

 

I heard that if you locked William Shakespeare in a room with a typewriter for long enough he'd eventually write all the songs by the Monkees. - Author Unknown

 

How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter? - Woody Allen

 

Sometimes when I look at a thing I've written I get the feeling that I must have gone out of the room and left the typewriter running. - Gene Fowler

 

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane. - Graham Greene

 

The biggest obstacle to professional writing today is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon. Any school that can teach me how to do this can triple my earning capacity overnight (making it three dollars). Anybody can write, but it takes a man with snake-charmer's blood to change a ribbon. - Robert Benchley

 

Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction. - Dylan Thomas

 

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. - Isaac Asimov

 

An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners' names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought. - Mignon McLaughlin

 

I've had secrets come out of my typewriter in invisible ink. - Terri Guillemets

 

They'll find ink in my veins and blood on my typewriter keys. - Terri Guillemets

Worrying Quotes

Quotes About Worrying From Million Quotes

 

Do your best and don't worry. - Alain Whyte and Steven Morrissey


Worry is a misuse of imagination. - Dan Zadra


If I had my life to live over, I would perhaps have more actual troubles but I'd have fewer imaginary ones. - Don Herold


Drag your thoughts away from your troubles... by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it. - Mark Twain


Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday. - Author Unknown


If things go wrong, don't go with them. - Roger Babson


Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy. - Leo Buscaglia


If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep. - Dale Carnegie


I've developed a new philosophy... I only dread one day at a time. - Charlie Brown (Charles Schulz)


Troubles are a lot like people — they grow bigger if you nurse them. - Author Unknown


If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today. - E. Joseph Cossman


Nerves and butterflies are fine — they're a physical sign that you're mentally ready and eager. You have to get the butterflies to fly in formation, that's the trick. - Steve Bull


I keep the telephone of my mind open to peace, harmony, health, love and abundance. Then, whenever doubt, anxiety or fear try to call me, they keep getting a busy signal — and soon they'll forget my number. - Edith Armstrong


Nerves provide me with energy. They work for me. It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that I get worried. - Mike Nichols


I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. - Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things"


People gather bundles of sticks to build bridges they never cross. - Author Unknown


You can't wring your hands and roll up your sleeves at the same time. - Pat Schroeder


The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one. - Elbert Hubbard, The Note Book, 1927


Worry is like a rocking chair—it gives you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere! - Author Unknown


People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them. - George Bernard Shaw, "Family Affection," Parents and Children, 1914


Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination. - Christian Nevell Bovee


Somehow our devils are never quite what we expect when we meet them face to face. - Nelson DeMille


For peace of mind, resign as general manager of the universe. - Author Unknown


We experience moments absolutely free from worry. These brief respites are called panic. - Cullen Hightower


If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you'll die a lot of times. - Dean Smith


It only seems as if you are doing something when you're worrying. - Lucy Maud Montgomery


A hundredload of worry will not pay an ounce of debt. - George Herbert


As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey. - Thomas A. Edison


Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow. - Swedish Proverb


Never bear more than one kind of trouble at a time. Some people bear three — all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have. - Edward Everett Hale




That the birds of worry and care fly over you head, this you cannot change, but that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent. - Chinese Proverb


We can easily manage if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed to it. But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday's burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it. - John Newton


Worry ducks when purpose flies overhead. - Terri Guillemets


It iz the little bits ov things that fret and worry us; we kan dodge an elefunt but we kan't a fli. - Josh Billings


Worry, doubt, fear and despair are the enemies which slowly bring us down to the ground and turn us to dust before we die. - Attributed to Douglas MacArthur


Worry is an addiction that interferes with compassion. - Deng Ming-Dao


You can never worry your way to enlightenment. - Terri Guillemets


When you suffer an attack of nerves you're being attacked by the nervous system. What chance has a man got against a system? - Russell Hoban


[A]ny concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden. - Corrie Ten Boom, Clippings from My Notebook


I am reminded of the advice of my neighbor. "Never worry about your heart till it stops beating." - E.B. White


There are two days in the week about which and upon which I never worry... Yesterday and Tomorrow. - Robert Jones Burdette


A day of worry is more exhausting than a day of work. - John Lubbock


Worry trades the joy of now for the unlikely catastrophes of later. - Tim Fargo


As a rule, what is out of sight disturbs men's minds more seriously than what they see. - Julius Caesar


Don't shoulder the burdens of others!...
Each man has his own special troubles,
His worries and problems and woes;
Give aid when you can to each mortal,
But try not to feel all his blows!
For you, too, have burdens to carry;
And, if you just wear yourself out
In agony over all others,
How can you, your own troubles, rout?
- Gertrude Buckingham, "Good Advice"


If worrying were an Olympic sport, you'd get the gold for sure. - Stephenie Geist





Worry is rust upon the blade. - Henry Ward Hughes


Anxiety is a deep conscious breath away from dissolving. - Mike Dolan, @HawaiianLife


Heavy thoughts bring on physical maladies; when the soul is oppressed so is the body. - Martin Luther


I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow. It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us. - Dorothy Day


Worry is a complete cycle of inefficient thought revolving about a pivot of fear. - Author Unknown


Loneliness, insomnia, and change: the fear of these is even worse than the reality. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


If I must have an ill, may it be real,
That I may meet it eye to eye and fight,
And wheresoever it may strength reveal
Get after it with all my main and might.
The woe that but impends and wears the mind
With worry deep and most vexatious care,
Is harder fighting than the realler kind,
For when you come to strike—it isn't there!
- John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922), "Unreal Troubles" (March Fifteenth), The Cheery Way: A Bit of Verse For Every Day, 1920


It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down. - George MacDonald


Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are! - Charles Dickens


Stop telling men not to worry; all thinking men do; and such only are the ones who do the world's work. - Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)


Some patients I see are actually draining into their bodies the diseased thoughts of their minds. - Zacharty Bercovitz


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 highly recommend worrying. It is much more effective than dieting. - William Powell


Try not to worry, as it's sticky and hard to scrub off. - Terri Guillemets


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


When one has too great a dread of what is impending, one feels some relief when the trouble has come. - Joseph Joubert


Some men storm imaginary Alps all their lives, and die in the foothills cursing difficulties which do not exist. - Edgar Watson Howe


Worry is a prayer for what you don't want. - Cultivate Greatness Blog, August 2008


Worry is a prayer for chaos. - Gabrielle Bernstein, Add More -ing To Your Life, 2011


Don't chain your worries to your body. The burden soon becomes heavy and your health will give too much of itself to pick up the extra load. - Terri Guillemets


When I really worry about something, I don't just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something. Only, I don't go. I'm too worried to go. I don't want to interrupt my worrying to go. - J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye


[R]est thee now,
And may some kind God smooth thy wrinkled brow.
- William Morris, The Life and Death of Jason: A Poem, 1867


Anxiety 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


We have to fight them daily, like fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies. - Etty Hillesum


Worry is just curdled energy! - Henie Reisinger


There are people who are always anticipating trouble, and in this way they manage to enjoy many sorrows that never really happen to them. - Josh Billings


Only man clogs his happiness with care, destroying what is with thoughts of what may be. - John Dryden


Love looks forward, hate looks back, anxiety has eyes all over its head. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960





Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due. - William Ralph Inge


Worry bankrupts the spirit. - Terri Guillemets


There are more things, Lucilius, that frighten us than injure us, and we suffer more in imagination than in reality. - Seneca


We are more disturbed by a calamity which threatens us than by one which has befallen us. - John Lancaster Spalding


We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth's creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives. - Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail, 1979





Grief has limits, whereas apprehension has none. For we grieve only for what we know has happened, but we fear all that possibly may happen. - Pliny the Younger


Blessed is the person who is too busy to worry in the daytime and too sleepy to worry at night. - Author Unknown


Do not be afraid of tomorrow; for God is already there. - Author Unknown


Real difficulties can be overcome, it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable. - Theodore N. Vail


No man ever sank under the burden of the day. It is when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear. - George MacDonald


Rule number one is, don't sweat the small stuff. Rule number two is, it's all small stuff. - Robert Eliot


They need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. - Jack Kerouac


He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears. - Michel de Montaigne


No human thing is of serious importance. - Plato, The Republic


Fear can keep us up all night long, but faith makes one fine pillow. - Philip Gulley


Don't fight with the pillow, but lay down your head
And kick every worriment out of the bed.
- Edmund Vance Cooke


Every evening I turn my worries over to God. He's going to be up all night anyway. - Mary C. Crowley

Women Quotes

Quotes About Women From Million Quotes

 

There is no such thing as an ugly woman. - Vincent Van Gogh





If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base. - Dave Barry


Women cannot complain about men anymore until they start getting better taste in them. - Bill Maher


[W]omen are meant to be loved, not to be understood. - Oscar Wilde, "The Sphinx without a Secret," 1891


A woman can say more in a sigh than a man can say in a sermon. - Arnold Haultain


Women are always beautiful. - Ville Valo


No man who respects his mother or loves his sister, can speak disparagingly of any woman; however low she may seem to have sunk, she is still a woman. I want every man to remember this. Every woman is, or, at some time, has been a sister or daughter.... - Victoria Claflin Woodhull Martin, Tried As By Fire; or, The True and the False, Socially.


Next to the wound, what women make best is the bandage. - Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly


I also inherited something else, a trait that's increasingly rare nowadays and one that I've grown proud of. [My father] taught me, in his own stumbling, unorthodox, wordless way, to respect women—that they are more than one-night stands and objects of amusement. In every instance, there's a soul beneath that supple, scented skin, and you should never stroke one without first touching the other. - Joe Kita, "Sex, Women, and Love," Wisdom of Our Fathers, 1999


Women like silent men. They think they're listening. - Marcel Achard


Sure God created man before woman. But then you always make a rough draft before the final masterpiece. - Author Unknown


Some men know that a light touch of the tongue, running from a woman's toes to her ears, lingering in the softest way possible in various places in between, given often enough and sincerely enough, would add immeasurably to world peace. - Marianne Williamson, "A Woman's Worth"


A male gynecologist is like an auto mechanic who has never owned a car. - Carrie Snow


You start out happy that you have no hips or boobs. All of a sudden you get them, and it feels sloppy. Then just when you start liking them, they start drooping. - Cindy Crawford


You say I am discontented, proud and ambitious; that's true, and I'm glad of it. I am discontented, because I can't help feeling that there is a better sort of life than this dull one made up of everlasting work, with no object but money. I can't starve my soul for the sake of my body, and I mean to get out of the treadmill if I can. I'm proud, as you call it, because I hate dependence where there isn't any love to make it bearable.... I'm willing to work, but I want work that I can put my heart into, and feel that it does me good, no matter how hard it is. I only ask for a chance to be a useful, happy woman, and I don't think that is a bad ambition. Even if I only do what my dear mother did, earn my living honestly and happily, and leave a beautiful example behind me, to help one other woman as hers helps me, I shall be satisfied. - Louisa May Alcott, "Christie," Work: A Story of Experience, 1873


The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think. - Author Unknown


Every girl should use what Mother Nature gave her before Father Time takes it away. - Laurence J. Peter


Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult. - Charlotte Whitton


The two women exchanged the kind of glance women use when no knife is handy. - Ellery Queen


Curve: The loveliest distance between two points. - Mae West


Can you imagine a world without men? No crime and lots of happy fat women. - Nicole Hollander


Women get the last word in every argument. Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument. - Author Unknown


A pessimist is a man who thinks all women are bad. An optimist is a man who hopes they are. - Chauncey Mitchell Depew




The rarest thing in the world is a woman who is pleased with photographs of herself. - Elizabeth Metcalf


There is a special place in hell for women who do not help other women. - Madeleine K. Albright


A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction. - Oscar Wilde


There's something luxurious about having a girl light your cigarette. In fact, I got married once on account of that. - Harold Robbins


When a man talks dirty to a woman, it's sexual harassment. When a woman talks dirty to a man, it's $3.95 a minute. - Author Unknown


Men get laid, but women get screwed. - Quentin Crisp


The most popular image of the female despite the exigencies of the clothing trade is all boobs and buttocks, a hallucinating sequence of parabolae and bulges. - Germaine Greer


Whether they give or refuse, it delights women just the same to have been asked. - Ovid


However, I'm not denyin' the women are foolish: God Almighty made 'em to match the men. - George Eliot, Adam Bede (Mrs. Poyser)


Women are like elephants to me. I like to look at them, but I wouldn't want to own one. - W.C. Fields





Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent. - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche


I expect Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man. - George Meredith


Men who don't like girls with brains don't like girls. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Women keep a special corner of their hearts for sins they have never committed. - Cornelia Otis Skinner


Lovely female shapes are terrible complicators of the difficulties and dangers of this earthly life, especially for their owners. - George du Maurier


Every woman is wrong until she cries, and then she is right — instantly. - Sam Slick (Thomas Chandler Haliburton)


The essence of life is the smile of round female bottoms, under the shadow of cosmic boredom. - Guy de Maupassant


I have an idea that the phrase "weaker sex" was coined by some woman to disarm some man she was preparing to overwhelm. - Ogden Nash


When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking. - Gail Sheehy


The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams. - Simone de Beauvoir


Be to her virtues very kind,
Be to her faults a little blind.
- Matthew Prior


They may talk of a comet, or a burning mountain, or some such bagatelle; but to me a modest woman, dressed out in all her finery, is the most tremendous object of the whole creation. - Oliver Goldsmith


A highbrow is a man who has found something more interesting than women. - Edgar Wallace


It upsets women to be, or not to be, stared at hungrily. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


You see, dear, it is not true that woman was made from man's rib; she was really made from his funny bone. - J.M. Barrie, What Every Woman Knows


If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning. - Aristotle Onassis


Men will always delight in a woman whose voice is lined with velvet. - Brendan Francis


Men really prefer reasonably attractive women; they go after the sensational ones to impress other men. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


I married beneath me — all women do. - Nancy Astor, speech, Oldham, England, 1951


Women dress alike all over the world: they dress to be annoying to other women. - Elsa Schiaparelli


Women are never stronger than when they arm themselves with their weakness. - Marie de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand


If President Nixon's secretary, Rosemary Woods, had been Moses' secretary, there would only be eight commandments. - Art Buchwald, 1974


Woman begins by resisting a man's advances and ends by blocking his retreat. - Oscar Wilde


I'd much rather be a woman than a man. Women can cry, they can wear cute clothes, and they're the first to be rescued off sinking ships. - Gilda Radner


She wore a short skirt and a tight sweater and her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak. - Woody Allen, Getting Even, 1973


It is only rarely that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman. - Alexandre Dumas, fils


When a woman comes to her glass, she does not employ her time in making herself look more advantageously what she really is, but endeavours to be as much another creature as she possibly can. Whether this happens because they stay so long and attend their work so diligently that they forget the faces and persons which they first sat down with, or whatever it is, they seldom rise from the toilet the same woman they appeared when they began to dress. - Joseph Addison


All women are basically in competition with each other for a handful of eligible men. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


A woman should soften but not weaken a man. - Sigmund Freud


Women are in league with each other, a secret conspiracy of hearts and pheromones. - Camille Paglia


When I glimpse the backs of women's knees I seem to hear the first movement of Beethoven's "Pastoral Symphony." - Author Unknown


A woman wears her tears like jewelry. - Author Unknown


If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody. - J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye


No woman wants to see herself too clearly. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


I prefer the word homemaker, because housewife always implies that there may be a wife someplace else. - Bella Abzug


The basic Female body comes with the following accessories: garter belt, panti-girdle, crinoline, camisole, bustle, brassiere, stomacher, chemise, virgin zone, spike heels, nose ring, veil, kid gloves, fishnet stockings, fichu, bandeau, Merry Widow, weepers, chokers, barrettes, bangles, beads, lorgnette, feather boa, basic black, compact, Lycra stretch one-piece with modesty panel, designer peignoir, flannel nightie, lace teddy, bed, head. - Margaret Atwood


Women go to beauty parlors for the unmussed look men hate. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Women polish the silver and water the plants and wait to be really needed. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


You have to have the kind of body that doesn't need a girdle in order to get to pose in one. - Carolyn Kenmore


A woman's hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them. - George Eliot


[A] woman's three best comforters,—kind words, a baby, and a cup of tea. - Louisa May Alcott, "Through the Mist," Work: A Story of Experience, 1873


There are women who do not like to cause suffering to many men at a time, and who prefer to concentrate on one man: These are the faithful women. - Alfred Capus





Physically, a man is a man for a much longer time than a woman is a woman. - Honoré de Balzac, The Physiology of Marriage


The girls that are always easy on the eyes are never easy on the heart. - Author Unknown


If a woman must make a fool of herself, the least a man can do is to let her be one in her own way. - When Ladies Meet, 1941 movie written by Rachel Crothers, John Meehan, Leon Gordon, S.K. Lauren, and Anita Loos, spoken by the character Bridgie Drake


Men enjoy being thought of as hunters, but are generally too lazy to hunt. Women, on the other hand, love to hunt, but would rather nobody knew it. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


I've reached the age where competence is a turn-on. - Billy Joel


Being a lady is an attitude. - Chuck Woolery, Love Connection


A man gives many question marks, however, a woman is a whole mystery. - Diana Stürm


Chastity in feeling and imagination, in word and action, is the principal virtue that either of choice or unconsciously reigns in the bosom of woman. It is tender and delicate, like an exotic plant, and cannot endure exposure.... The family is her sphere of action, there she arranges and orders what man gathers, and with propriety and taste embellishes the house, and renders it attractive. She desires whatever increases domestic comfort, as furniture and dress, order and cleanliness, full chests and drawers. - Frederick A. Rauch, Psychology; or, A View of the Human Soul: Including Anthropology, Being the Substance of a Course of Lectures, Delivered to the Junior Class Marshall College, Penn., 1840


In passing, also, I would like to say that the first time Adam had a chance he laid the blame on woman. - Nancy Astor, My Two Countries


God did it on purpose so that we may love you men instead of laughing at you. - Mrs Patrick Campbell, in reply to a male acquaintance who asked why women seem to have no sense of humor


Men at most differ as Heaven and Earth, but women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell. - Alfred Lord Tennyson


A woman asks little of love: only that she be able to feel like a heroine. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


The chief excitement in a woman's life is spotting women who are fatter than she is. - Helen Rowland


I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason. - Stanley Baldwin


I live! Red life boils in my veins, earth yields beneath my feet, in the glow of love I embrace trees and statues, and they live in my embrace. Every woman is to me the gift of a world. I revel in the melody of her countenance, and with a single glance of my eye I can enjoy more than others with their every limb through all their lives. - Heinrich Heine, "Ideas: Book Le Grand," 1826, translated from German by Charles Godfrey Leland, Pictures of Travel, 1855


And verily, a woman need know but one man well, in order to understand all men; whereas a man may know all women and understand not one of them. - Helen Rowland


I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out. - George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss


Men look at themselves in mirrors. Women look for themselves. - Elissa Melamed


If your husband expects you to laugh, do so; if he expects you to cry, don't; if you don't know what he expects, what are you doing married? - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Women do not find it difficult nowadays to behave like men, but they often find it extremely difficult to behave like gentlemen. - Compton Mackenzie, Literature in My Time, 1933


One is not born a woman, one becomes one. - Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949


Let us leave the beautiful women to men with no imagination. - Marcel Proust, Albertine disparue, 1925


Women deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of twenty-eight and forty. - James Thurber, Time, 1960 August 15th


Dramatic art in her opinion is knowing how to fill a sweater. - Bette Davis, about Jayne Mansfield


The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge


After about twenty years of marriage, I'm finally starting to scratch the surface of that one. And I think the answer lies somewhere between conversation and chocolate. - Mel Gibson, about what women want


Women who make men talk better than they are accustomed to are always popular. - E.V. Lucas


I'm not against half naked girls — not as often as I'd like to be. - Benny Hill


A man is as good as he has to be, and a woman is as bad as she dares. - Elbert Hubbard


You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment. - Dave Barry


The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them. - Robert Graves


What men desire is a virgin who is a whore. - Edward Dahlbert


Women are afraid of mice and of murder, and of very little in between. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


A woman should be an illusion. - Ian Fleming


There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature. - Stephen Stills


It is because of men that women dislike one another. - Jean de La Bruyère, Characters, 1688


Look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man and work like a dog. - Caroline K. Simon


If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt. - Thomas Carlyle


Take time as it comes, the wind as it blows, woman as she is. - Alfred de Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century/La Confession d'un enfant du siècle, 1836, Desgenais to Octave, translated from French by Kendall Warren


Women who feel naked without their lipstick are well over thirty. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Women are like dogs really. They love like dogs, a little insistently. And they like to fetch and carry and come back wistfully after hard words, and learn rather easily to carry a basket. - Mary Roberts Rinehart


It's simple. Women only nag when they feel unappreciated. - Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin


It's the good girls who keep the diaries; the bad girls never have the time. - Tallulah Bankhead


Women are beautiful, and yummy. - A.C. Van Cherub, c.1987


[H]er figure might be described by a poet as just set in the luxurious mould of womanhood. - "Diary of a Surgeon," in The Library of Fiction, or Family Story-Teller; consisting of Original Tales, Essays, and Sketches of Character, Vol. I, 1836


Women are most fascinating between the ages of thirty-five and forty, after they have won a few races and know how to pace themselves. Since few women ever pass forty, maximum fascination can continue indefinitely. - Christian Dior, Collier's, 1955 June 10th


A husband only worries about a particular Other Man; a wife distrusts her whole species. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful. - Karl Kraus


A man chases a woman until she catches him. - American Proverb


Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem. - G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions, "The Glory of Grey"


Beauty is the first present Nature gives to women, and the first it takes away. - Méré


There's just something about letting a girl have her way with you. - A.C. Van Cherub, c.1987





Brains are an asset, if you hide them. - Mae West


Breasts and bosoms I have known
Of varied shapes and sizes
From poignant disappointments
To jubilant surprises.
- Waldo Pierce


With men, as with women, the main struggle is between vanity and comfort; but with men, comfort often wins. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Men will never know the agony of childbirth, menstrual cramps, or removing glitter nail polish. - Author unknown


Once a woman has given you her heart, you can never get rid of the rest of her. - John Vanbrugh, The Relapse, 1696


A man never knows how to say goodbye; a woman never knows when to say it. - Helen Rowland


Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate? - Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, 1970


A woman can look both moral and exciting... if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle. - Edna Ferber


Women have very little idea of how much men hate them. - Germaine Greer


Do you not know I am a woman? when I think, I must speak. - William Shakespeare, As You Like It


Being a woman is of special interest only to aspiring male transsexuals. To actual women, it is simply a good excuse not to play football. - Fran Lebowitz


You're booty-blinded. You know what that is? It's like being snow-blinded only it ain't no snow, it's a cute little piece of ass. - From the movie I Spy (Fine, Friedkin, Wibberley, Scherick, Ronn)


Women are never landlocked: they're always mere minutes away from the briny deep of tears. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


To get to a woman's heart, a man must first use his own. - Mike Dobbertin, quoted in A 5th Portion of Chicken Soup for the Soul


Woman's virtue is man's greatest invention. - Cornelia Otis Skinner, attributed


Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little. - Samuel Johnson


Women speak two languages — one of which is verbal. - William Shakespeare


Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more. - James Thurber


My eleven-year-old daughter mopes around the house all day waiting for her breasts to grow. - Bill Cosby


In the first place, I hate women because they always know where things are. At first blush, you might think that a perverse and merely churlish reason for hating women, but it is not. Naturally, every man enjoys having a woman around the house who knows where his shirt-studs and his brief-case are, and things like that, but he detests having a woman around who knows where everything is, even things that are of no importance at all, such as, say, the snapshots her husband took three years ago at Elbow Beach. The husband has never known where these snapshots were since the day they were developed and printed; he hopes, in a vague way, if he thinks about them at all, that after three years they have been thrown out. But his wife knows where they are, and so do his mother, his grandmother, his great-grandmother, his daughter, and the maid. They could put their fingers on them in a moment, with that quiet air of superior knowledge which makes a man feel that he is out of touch with all the things that count in life. - James Thurber, "The Case Against Women"


Who loves not women, wine, and song, remains a fool his whole life long. - German Proverb


Good-looking girls break hearts, and goodhearted girls mend them. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Fighting is essentially a masculine idea; a woman's weapon is her tongue. - Hermione Gingold


The people I'm furious with are the women's liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming women are brighter than men. That's true, but it should be kept quiet or it ruins the whole racket. - Anita Loos, New York Times, 1974 February 10th


Women always worry about the things that men forget; men always worry about the things women remember. - Author Unknown


No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not. - H.L. Mencken


We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the superiority of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in similar things! Each has what the other has not; each completes the other; they are in nothing alike; and the happiness and perfection of both depend on each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give. - John Ruskin