langston hughes poems

One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition. ~Alvin Toffler



He who has made a thousand things and he who has made none, both feel the same desire: to make something. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin



I don't like a guy with flowers. It means he's done something he shouldn't. The bigger the bouquet, the younger she was. ~Coupling, "Nine and a Half Minutes," original airdate 10 May 2004, written by Steven Moffat, spoken by the character Sally I don't like a man to be too efficient. He's likely to be not human enough. ~Felix Frankfurter



W (double U) has, of all the letters in our alphabet, the only cumbrous name, the names of the others being monosyllabic. This advantage of the Roman alphabet over the Grecian is the more valued after audibly spelling out some simple Greek word, like "epixoriambikos." Still, it is now thought by the learned that other agencies than the difference of the two alphabets may have been concerned in the decline of "the glory that was Greece" and the rise of "the grandeur that was Rome." There can be no doubt, however, that by simplifying the name of W (calling it "wow," for example) our civilization could be, if not promoted, at least better endured. ~Ambrose Bierce



We mourn the transitory things and fret under the yoke of the immutable ones. ~Paul Eldridge



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



I go up and down the scale so often that if they ever perform an autopsy on me they'll find me like a strip of bacon - a streak of lean and a streak of fat. ~Texas Guinan



Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made man is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one... that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. ~Mark Twain



All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person's point of view. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson



The important thing today is not what we say of Lincoln but what Lincoln would say of us if he were here in this hour and could note the drift and tendency in American life and American politics. ~Stephen Samuel Wise



You are worried about seeing him spend his early years in doing nothing. What! Is it nothing to be happy? Nothing to skip, play, and run around all day long? Never in his life will he be so busy again. ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau



Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless. ~Honore de Balzac



He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors. ~Rudyard Kipling



Children find everything in nothing; men find nothing in everything. ~Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone Scelto



Firefighting is all about ass - busting ours to save yours. ~Author Unknown



It isn't so much that hard times are coming; the change observed is mostly soft times going. ~Groucho Marx



We're finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age. If the projections are right, it's going to be a big one: the ecological collapse of the planet. ~Jeremy Rifkin, World Press Review, 30 December 1989



Physick, for the most part, is nothing else but the Substitute of Exercise or Temperance. ~Joseph Addison



We would frequently be ashamed of our good deeds if people saw all of the motives that produced them. ~La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1665 We would often be ashamed of our finest actions if the world understood all the motives which produced them. ~Duc de La Rochefoucauld



No news is good news. No journalists is even better. ~Nicolas Bentley