The Laws of Wellness, a review and analysis of a great book by Greg Anderson about the importance of having a holistic approach to life, health or difficulties.

This book addresses wellness as “the only real and lasting means of health care reform.” In his book, Greg Anderson uses, “Wellness is the complete integration of body, mind, and spirit – the realization that everything we do, think, feel, and believe has an effect on our state of well-being.”
John W. Travis

One of the simplest, most sincere and effective books that deserves to be read and followed by all men of good will.
Carl William Brown

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.
Marcus Aurelius

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
World Health Organisation

Greg Anderson is the author of six books, including the international bestseller The Cancer Conqueror, and founder of the American Wellness Project. Through lectures and workshops and as a consultant to businesses and health-care organizations, he is recognized as one of America’s foremost wellness authorities.

The author is known for his work in the field of cancer recovery and wellness programs. He founded the Cancer Recovery Foundation International Group of Charities, which is dedicated to supporting individuals dealing with cancer and promoting holistic approaches to cancer care and overall well-being.

He has written six books, including the international bestseller The Cancer Conqueror, an Incredible Journey to Wellness. Through lectures and workshops and as a consultant to businesses and health-care organizations, he is recognized as one of America’s foremost wellness authorities.

Greg Anderson lived an experience that profoundly transformed him: in 1984 he was diagnosed with lung cancer and the poor prognosis gave him just a month to live. Intimately convinced that everyone is responsible for their own state of health, he undertook a healing journey that allowed him to defeat the disease.

Being convinced that well-being is identified in complete harmony between body, mind and spirit and that this state is clearly conditioned by our actions, thought, feeling and belief, Greg Anderson has identified twenty-two rules that emphasize the importance of holistic health and wellness, focusing on various aspects of one’s life, including nutrition, stress management, exercise, and emotional well-being. Greg Anderson’s work has had a positive impact on many individuals facing cancer, as well as those interested in adopting a more comprehensive approach to their health.
Carl William Brown

The 22 Non-Negotiable Laws of Wellness: Feel, Think, and Live Better Than You Ever Thought Possible by Greg Anderson

Wellness is one of the greatest and most powerful words in the English language. Unfortunately, it is also one of the least understood. But start putting this word into your vocabulary and the concepts it entails into your life. Wellness is one of the most important ideas of our time.

Wellness is the complete integration of body, mind and spirit – the realization that everything we do, think, feel, and believe has an effect on our state of well-being. Wellness is a choice, a decision we make to move toward optimal health and maximum life. Wellness is a process – awareness that there is no end point but health and happiness are always possible in the present moment, here and now.

Wellness is not a “medical fix” but a way of living – a lifestyle sensitive and responsive to all the dimensions of body, mind, and spirit; an approach to life we each design to achieve our highest potential for well-being now and forever.

Medicine deals with one dimension, the body. Old self-help ideas dealt with one dimension, typically the mind. Wellness involves an all-inclusive paradigm shift. Its practice encompasses six major life areas – the physical, emotional, social, intellectual, vocational, and spiritual spheres. Wellness is not a piecemeal approach; it involves the total you!

Traditional medicine finds a problem – a symptom – treats it. The goal is to neutralize symptoms, to return to a point of no discernible illness. This is the disease model of medicine. Preventive medicine, trumpeted by an increasing number in the medical community, is also based on the disease model. The goal is the same: no discernible illness.

Wellness strives for a new standard. No matter what our state of health, wellness calls for continuing improvement and self-renewal in all areas of life. Wellness seeks more than the absence of illness; it searches for new levels of excellence. Beyond any disease-free neutral point, wellness dedicates its efforts to our total well-being – in body, mind and spirit.

The 22 Non-Negotiable Laws of Wellness distills more than a decade of experience in the field of health enhancement and life enrichment into a set of basic laws that govern success and failure in the pursuit of total wellness. This describes the fundamental rules of the wellness pursuit.

Be challenged. Learn. Then do. There’s no substitute for the commitment to implement. I hope my own journey and those of literally tens of thousands of patients. I have learned from and shared with will help you attain greater wellness. You may find some of the laws challenging, but keep in mind that they are all true guideposts for living. I wish you well on your own journey to wellness.

The Law of Esprit: The joy you feel is life!
The single overriding objective in wellness is creating constant personal renewal where we recognize and act on the truth that each day is a miraculous gift and our job is to untie the ribbons.
That’s the Law of Esprit: living life with joy.

The Law of Personal Accountability: If it’s going to be, it’s up to me. – Robert H. Schuller
It shouts that we have the ability to choose both our behaviors and our responses! It’s more than stress management; it’s personal choice.

The Law of Unity: The part can never be well unless the whole is well. – Plato
Body, mind, and spirit work together.

The Law of Physical Activity: Use it or lose it.
The critical importance of exercise has been recognized for centuries. Modern studies confirming its positive influence are legion. The message is repeated in newspapers and magazines and on television. From grade schools to nursing homes, throughout our lives, the message is clear: we need to exercise! There’s little room to debate the powerful Law of Physical Activity.

The Law of Nutritional Frugality: A little with quiet is the only diet. – Scottish proverb
The core message of the Law of Nutritional Frugality is simple: eat a variety of unprocessed foods, in moderate amounts, during at least three meals, including breakfast, combined with a smart afternoon snack, while drinking eight glasses of pure water and taking a broad-spectrum vitamin-and-mineral supplement each day.

The Law of Minimal Medical Invasiveness: The art of medicine is generally a question of time. – Ovid
Honor and esteem the doctor who says, “We want to treat you right but do only what is absolutely necessary, and with minimum side effects. We’re going to help your body heal!” Here is a person who understands the Law of Minimal Medical Invasiveness.

The Law of Stress-Hardiness: It’s not what happens to you. It’s what you do about it. – W. Mitchell “survivor”
The law states that stress is to be not only expected but preferred. The law’s corollary states that we can and should welcome stress and that we can and should develop a positive, workable approach to stress management.

The Law of Emotional Choice: Learning to be aware of feelings… is an essential lifetime skill. – Joan Borysenko (author of Minding the Body, Mending the Mind)
There’s a hierarchy in our lives that governs our sense of satisfaction. The Law of Emotional Choice is near the top of the heap… The best way to confront fears and anxieties is to invoke the Law of Emotional Choice. Face the fear. Do something about it. Push through it. Go for it! Consistently exercising the Law of Emotional Choice builds an inner strength that is unshakable. This is self-esteem of the best and highest order.

The Law of Developmental Motivation: Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best. – Henry Van Dyke
When we are motivated by goals that have deep meaning, by dreams that need completion, by pure love that needs expressing, then we truly live life! For many, this often means a longer life. The type of motivation that drives our lives is an important part of experiencing total wellness. A deep sense of fulfillment comes only from a serious commitment to a life filled with purpose, with striving for higher ideals. Therein lies true happiness.

The Law of Human Dignity: God created man in His own image. – Genesis
This law won’t allow for such categorizing and judging. Respect is the key… The law of human dignity carries with it a mandate: to stop our pettiness and quit putting each other in little boxes that diminish the dignity and potential of all. In short, when you give me respect and I give you respect, we will both be better for it.

The Law of Win/Win: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. – The Golden Rule
We must stay longer in the communication process. We must express ourselves with greater courage. At the same time, we must listen more carefully and in greater depth. Win/win means we strive for understanding first. We seek to be understood second.

The Law of Present-Moment Living: Be here now. – Ram Dass
It is the antithesis of procrastination. We can put off unpleasant activities, but in doing so we also put off the enjoyable ones. We ration our pleasure and contentment as if the supply were limited.

The Law of Mindfulness: The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven. – John Milton
Choose where you focus, and focus on thoughts that nurture. Concentrate on what you have, not what you’ve lost. You’ll see the results in your health and your life.

The Law of Creativity: Imagination is the eye of the soul. – Joseph Joubert
It calls not for my way or your way, but for the best way. This is the picture, the idea we must find and hold on to without wavering. Then we create wellness in body, mind, and spirit, wellness of the highest level.

The Law of Lifetime Growth: We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden. – Goethe
It demands both a cultural change and a megashift in our own thinking about all life can be. This law of wellness represents a great hope for people of all ages, all states of wellness, all cultures.

The Law of Life Mission: He dies every day who lives a lingering life. – Pierrard Poullet
Conventional wisdom says, “If you have your health, you have everything.” Don’t believe it. It’s not so much that this old adage is wrong as that there is a higher truth. The Law of Life Mission holds, “If you have a purpose, you have everything.”

The Law of Purpose Through Service: Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value. – Albert Einstein
Mission comes alive only through service – the idea of caring for others. There’s magic in this law. When we serve with depth and sincerity, we get a glimpse of the essential quality of who we really can become… We must think through, personalize, and understand both intellectually and emotionally this idea of finding purpose through helping others.

The Law of Stewardship: If you want happiness for a lifetime, help the next generation. – Chinese proverb
The quest for personal wellness is an illusion without a commitment to the wellness of all and the entire universe. We do not stand alone. The people of this planet are interdependent in all things… The Law of Stewardship requires us to pass the planet on to future generations in a better condition than we found it in… In the final analysis, the Law of Stewardship requires us to manage our lives in such a way that we hold in high regard the welfare of others and leave things better than when we found them. We are all stewards. Let’s rise to meet our responsibilities.

The Law of Forgiveness: Forgiveness restores our hearts to the innocence that we knew – an innocence that allowed us the freedom to love. – Robin Casarjian (author of Forgiveness: A Bold Choice for a Peaceful Heart)
Forgiveness is one of the most beautiful words in the English language. Mark this as one of the great truths of the collective wisdom passed down through the centuries: life can be lived most abundantly as an adventure in forgiveness.

The Law of Gratitude: Affirm the good things.
The wellness path requires us to embrace a proactive expression of sincere gratitude. Try it for a week, a day, an hour. Observe the results. You will be amazed at the changes in yourself, your health, your relationships, your career – your entire life.

The Law of Personal Peace: Without inner peace, it is impossible to have world peace. – The Dalai Lama
The way of peace? Through prayerful meditation, a forgotten and misunderstood discipline. Prayerful meditation is an excellent way to develop increased awareness in all areas of life. But it is essential in attaining and sustaining personal peace.

The Law of Unconditional Loving: … and the greatest of these is love. – Saint Paul
All success, all well-being, all self-improvement has its basis in an unfathomable spirit that sustains us even when we may be least aware of it. That spirit is love.

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Shopping coolest stores, best shopping stores in the world with also online websites, plus some useful quotes to better understand the human shopping philosophy.

It is truly an amazing and special feeling when you see something beautiful in a shopping mall or online shopping site and you get it for yourself. I feel really proud and happy when I can buy some stuff for me.

Shopping is no less than therapy. You might have heard people saying I have just had retail therapy. The kind of happiness, excitement, and satisfaction that comes with shopping is real and undeniable.

Shopping enables you to try new brands and products and have many new experiences. Also, consumer demand increases the competition in the market, which contributes to the growth of economic activities.

Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.
George Monbiot

Happiness is not in money but in shopping.
Marilyn Monroe

For me, shopping is a way to unwind.
Stacey Dooley

Shopping is my cardio.
Carrie Bradshaw

I always say shopping is cheaper than a psychiatrist.
Tammy Faye Bakker

I need these cashmere gloves because it’s winter… and I have hands.
Rebecca Bloomwood

I love shopping. There is a little bit of magic found in buying something new. It is instant gratification, a quick fix.
Rebecca Bloom

Christmas shopping! I can do all my Christmas shopping here! I know March is a bit early, but why not be organized? And then when Christmas arrives I won’t have to go near the horrible Christmas crowds.
Sophie Kinsella

Shopping is better than sex. If you’re not satisfied after shopping, you can make an exchange for something you really like.
Adrienne Gusoff

Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.
Dave Barry

I shop, therefore I am.
Heather Chandler

Shopping is a woman thing. It’s a contact sport like football. Women enjoy the scrimmage, the noisy crowds, the danger of being trampled to death, and the ecstasy of the purchase.
Erma Bombeck

Show your confidence. Show you’re not afraid. Go to restaurants. Go shopping.
Rudy Giuliani

Men are like shoes. Some fit better than others. And sometimes you go out shopping and there’s nothing you like.
Janet Evanovich

Buy what you don’t have yet or what you really want, which can be mixed with what you already own. Buy only because something excites you, not just for the simple act of shopping.
Karl Lagerfeld

I love shopping. There is a little bit of magic found in buying something new. It is instant gratification, a quick fix.
Rebecca Bloom

I think, they should list shopping as a cardiovascular activity. My heart never beats as fast as it does when I see a reduced by 50 percent’ sign.
Sophie Kinsella

The odds of going to the store for a loaf of bread and coming out with only a loaf of bread are three billion to one.
Erma Bombeck

Recreational shopping is the shortest distance between two points: you and broke.
Victoria Moran

Shopping is actually very similar to farming a field. You can’t keep buying the same thing, you have to have a bit of variety.
Sophie Kinsella

For some, shopping is an art; for others, it’s a sport.
Pamela Klaffke

The quickest way to know a woman is to go shopping with her.
Marcelene Cox.

Shopping is a bit of a relaxing hobby for me, which is sometimes troubling for the bank balance.
Rebecca Hall

I went window shopping today! I bought four windows.
Tommy Cooper

I like my money right where I can see it: hanging in my closet.
Carrie Bradshaw

I did a lot of shopping for her in Tokyo because the colors here are very conservative. A shopaholic would have a coat in every color and lots of accessories.
Sophie Kinsella

If a man doesn’t fit, you can’t exchange him seven days later for a gorgeous cashmere sweater.
Rebecca Bloomwood

The only consolation I had was buying things. If I bought some pretty thing it cheered me up for a while.
Iris Murdoch

Never give up on something you really want. However impossible things seem, there’s always a way.
Sophie Kinsella

One good thing about Christmas shopping is it toughens you for the January sales.
Grace Kriley

There are 17 more shopping days until Christmas. So, guys, that means 16 more days till we start shopping, right?
Conan O’Brien

Christmas is the time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it.
Richard Lamm

Style Strategy is about shopping smart, staying chic, and making it all last. It’s about showing women how to shop for value without compromising style.
Nina Garcia

From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.
Katharine Whitehorn

Xmas Trivia: Before it became a major shopping holiday, Christmas is believed to have had a ‘religious’ meaning.
Andy Borowitz

I’m a last-minute shopper. I end up at the mall or somewhere on Christmas Eve. It’s a shame.
Brad Paisley

If I have free time, I want to go to the beach, walk around a shopping mall, go grocery shopping. Live a little bit of life.
James Wan

I still believe in the Holy Trinity, except now it’s Target, Trader Joe’s, and IKEA.”
Jen Lancaster

They said I was a valued customer, now they send me hate mail.”
Sophie Kinsella

Shopping is really complicated if you are a girl.
Helen Salter

I’ve no idea when I’m going to wear it, the girl replied calmly. I only knew that I had to have it. Once I tried it on, well… She shrugged. The dress claimed me.
Isabel Wolff

Whoever said that money can’t buy happiness simply didn’t know where to go shopping.
Bo Derek

Women usually love what they buy, yet hate two-thirds of what is in their closets.
Mignon McLaughlin

If men liked shopping, they’d call it research.
Cynthia Nelms

When I shop, the world gets better, and the world is better, but then it’s not, and I need to do it again.
Sophie Kinsella

For in some ways the world was like a shopping centre, and he himself was a doubtful customer, often ineffectual, being talked into buying things he didn’t want, things indeed which nobody in their right mind would want to buy.
Margaret Mahy

The saving of money is usually the delaying of the wasting of money.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Once a culture becomes entirely advertising friendly, it seizes to be a culture at all.
Mark Crispin Miller

Always be polite to possible murderers: that was the twenty-four-hour-shopping philosophy.
Kate Griffin

Hanging onto a bad buy will not redeem the purchase.”
Terence Conran

The wise find pleasure in using a product until it is no longer usable; the foolish, in replacing an old but still usable product with a brand new one.”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana

COVID-19 may be the final nail in the coffin of the traditional store model as the isolated people of the world switch to internet shopping.
Steven Magee

Shopping: one of my favorite pastimes.
Adrienne Posey

Therapy is a good grocery store.
Adrienne Posey

When deciding what to buy, remember that some things are easy to buy – but then we have to use them. If they’re not used, they don’t enhance our lives; they just contribute to guilt and clutter.
Gretchen Rubin

In this era of oversupply and super-abundance in fashion, one doesn’t need more. Well, definitely not more of things…whereas we all could use MORE of wisdom, education and ethics of consumption.
Anastacia Plastinina

The need for social interaction … is very much a part of why women shop. All our interviewees commented at some point that social interaction was part of the shopping experience.
Stella Minahan

…I get home and there’s a box on my front porch. My serotonin surges and Jeff Bezos is a rich man because he knows how much we all just love to get a present, even if it’s a present we bought for ourselves.
Caroline Kepnes

If shopping helps them to forgive you, I think you won’t find an easier and cheaper way to be forgiven.
Sarvesh Jain

Happiness is not having what you love, it is loving what you have.
Amit Kalantri

Paying or having paid for something often makes it seem necessary; or better, more important, or more useful than it is.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I hate department stores. They’re too bright, too loud, and too crammed full of junk that nobody needs. Whenever I’m forced to spend time in one I start thinking about how consumer culture is just one long, expensive, planet-killing distraction from the fact that we’re all going to die eventually.
Karen M. McManus

Our caring about what others think about us is one of the pillars of the economy.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana

When unmoderated materialism is the world’s norm, consumer is the product, product does the consuming.”
Abhijit Naskar

During the shopping process, Amazon’s AI offers suggestions of items that it predicts you will want to buy. The AI does a reasonable job. However, it is far from perfect. In our case, the AI accurately predicts what we want to buy about 5 percent of the time. We actually purchase about one of every twenty items it recommends. Considering the millions of items on offer, that’s not bad!
Ajay Agrawal

Happiness is all too often pursued through the use of a credit card.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana

For most people who board, the experience of shopping or acquiring is so overwhelmingly rewarding that it erases all thoughts of consequences.
Randy O. Frost

Consumerism is based on the illusion that you can fill spiritual or emotional emptiness with physical products.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Just because you purchased something costly doesn’t mean you have to use it every day to feel its worth.
Sarvesh Jain

There are two ways to shop, one is to try until you find exactly what you’re looking for. Or second, find something that feels good and hope that you’ll like it along the way.
Sarvesh Jain

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Aphorisms, quotes and thoughts by Boethius, ideas and great words of wisdom from his immortal text De consolatione philosophiae, The Consolation of Philosophy.

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c. 475–524 CE) is considered one of the most important intermediaries between ancient philosophy and the Latin Middle Ages. Often called “the last of the Romans and the first of the Scholastics,” he played a crucial role in preserving Greek culture in a West that was losing knowledge of that language.

His literary contribution is dominated by his masterpiece, De consolatione philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy), written in prison while awaiting execution. In this work, he employed the prosimetrum genre (alternating prose and verse), making philosophical concepts dramatic and accessible. At the same time, he introduced the allegorical figure of the Philosophical Woman, a model that profoundly influenced medieval and Renaissance literature, inspiring authors such as Dante (in the Convivio), Chaucer, and Shakespeare.

After the Bible, his Consolation was the most widely read and translated work of the Middle Ages (by rulers such as Alfred the Great and Elizabeth I). However, Boethius was not merely a popularizer, but an independent thinker who sought to reconcile the Christian faith with Hellenic reason. For this reason, he set himself the ambitious task of translating the entire works of Plato and Aristotle into Latin to demonstrate their essential harmony. Although unfinished, his translations of Aristotle’s Organon remained the sole source of Greek logic for Europe until the twelfth century.

Furthermore, a commentary on Porphyry’s translation (Isagoge) sparked the famous medieval dispute over universals (nominalism vs. realism). In his Opuscula sacra, he applied rigorous logical tools to Christian dogmas such as the Trinity and the Incarnation, laying the foundations for Scholasticism. Finally, he systematized the disciplines of knowledge, coining the term Quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy) and writing texts that remained standard in universities for over a millennium. Suffice it to say that his treatise on music (De institutione musica) was a standard text at Oxford and Cambridge until the mid-19th century.

You are the greatest comfort for exhausted spirits. By the weight of your tenets and the delightfulness of your singing you have so refreshed me that I now think myself capable of facing the blows of Fortune. You were talking of cures that were rather sharp. The thought of them no longer makes me shudder; in fact I’m so eager to hear more, I fervently beg you for them.’
Boethius

‘I knew it,’ She replied. ‘Once you began to hang onto my words in silent attention, I was expecting you to adopt this attitude, or rather, to be more exact, I myself created it in you. The remedies still to come are, in fact, of such a kind that they taste bitter to the tongue, but grow sweet once they are absorbed. But you say you are eager to hear more. You would be more than eager to hear if you knew the destination I am trying to bring you to.’
Boethius

I asked what it was and she told me that it was true happiness. ‘Your mind dreams of it,’ she said, ‘but your sight is clouded by shadows of happiness and cannot see reality.’ I begged her to lead on and show me the nature of true happiness without delay. ‘For you,’ she said, ‘I will do so gladly.
Boethius

Nature is content with few things, and with a very little of these.
Boethius

In omni aduersitate fortunae infelicissimum est genus infortunii fuisse felicem. (In every adversity of fortune, the most terrible of misfortunes is to have been happy.)
Boezio

Music is so naturally connected to us that, even if we want to, we cannot do without it.
Boethius

No man is rich who shakes and groans convinced that he needs more.
Boethius

The fact of the matter is that ill fortune is better for men than good. When Fortune smiles, she is always false. But when she is inconstant and whimsical, she shows her true self. The first aspect of Fortune will deceive people, but the second is instructive. The first blinds while the second opens men’s eyes to how fragile the happiness of mortals really is. The man who enjoys good fortune is driven frantic, running this way and that and trying to maintain what he has. The other is steady and, if he learns from his experience, even wise. Good fortune can lead men astray, deceiving them about what to expect from life and how to think of themselves. When Fortune is unkind, she draws men back to an understanding of what the world is, and who their friends are. Surely, in your time of trouble, you must have learned who were your real friends.
Boethius

Homo est minor mundus. (Man is a miniature world.)

And no renown can render you well-known: for if you think that fame can lengthen life by mortal famousness immortalized, the day will come that takes your fame as well, and there a second death for you awaits.
Boethius

I believe that adversity benefits men more than prosperity; for the latter always deceives with the appearance of happiness, when it seems favorable, while the former is always truthful, when by its constant change it proves unstable. The former deceives, the former instructs.
Boethius

Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.
Boethius

Nullum malum impunitum, nullum bonum irremuneratum. (Let no evil be without punishment, no good without reward).
Boethius

Man is a bipedal, reasoning animal.
Boethius

Bliss is a state resulting from the sum of all goods.
Boethius

He who, groaning in fear, believes himself to be in need, never feels rich.
Boethius

If God exists, where does evil come from? And if He doesn’t, where does good come from?
Boethius

It’s in your hands to shape your own destiny; every seemingly adverse fortune, if it doesn’t serve to test or correct, serves to punish.
Boethius

Nothing is more fleeting than the outward form, which withers and changes like wildflowers at the onset of autumn.
Boethius

Who would give a law to lovers? Love is unto itself a higher law.
Boethius

Nunc fluens facit tempus, nunc stans facit aeternitatum. (The now that passes produces time, the now that remains produces eternity.)
Boethius

Indeed, the condition of human nature is just this; man towers above the rest of creation so long as he realizes his own nature, and when he forgets it, he sinks lower than the beasts. For other living things to be ignorant of themselves, is natural; but for man it is a defect.
Boethius

Balance out the good things and the bad that have happened in your life and you will have to acknowledge that you are still way ahead. You are unhappy because you have lost those things in which you took pleasure? But you can also take comfort in the likelihood that what is now making you miserable will also pass away.
Boethius

All fortune is good fortune; for it either rewards, disciplines, amends, or punishes, and so is either useful or just.
Boethius

And it is because you don’t know the end and purpose of things that you think the wicked and the criminal have power and happiness.
Boethius

Contemplate the extent and stability of the heavens, and then at last cease to admire worthless things.
Boethius

If I have fully diagnosed the cause and nature of your condition, you are wasting away in pining and longing for your former good fortune. It is the loss of this which, as your imagination works upon you, has so corrupted your mind. I know the many disguises of that monster, Fortune, and the extent to which she seduces with friendship the very people she is striving to cheat, until she overwhelms them with unbearable grief at the suddenness of her desertion
Boethius

As far as possible, join faith to reason.
Boethius

So dry your tears. Fortune has not yet turned her hatred against all your blessings. The storm has not yet broken upon you with too much violence. Your anchors are holding firm and they permit you both comfort in the present, and hope in the future.
Boethius

No man is rich who shakes and groans convinced that he needs more.
Boethius

Love binds people too, in matrimony’s sacred bonds where chaste lovers are met, and friends cement their trust and friendship. How happy is mankind, if the love that orders the stars above rules, too, in your hearts.
Boethius

Among wise men there is no place at all left for hatred. For no one except the greatest of fools would hate good men. And there is no reason at all for hating the bad. For just as weakness is a disease of the body, so wickedness is a disease of the mind. And if this is so, since we think of people who are sick in body as deserving sympathy rather than hatred, much more so do they deserve pity rather than blame who suffer an evil more severe than any physical illness.
Boethius

The greatest misery in adverse fortune is once to have been happy.
Boethius

Wretched men cringe before tyrants who have no power, the victims of their trivial hopes and fears. They do not realise that anger is hopeless, fear is pointless and desire all a delusion. He whose heart is fickle is not his own master, has thrown away his shield, deserted his post, and he forges the links of the chain that holds him.
Boethius

So it follows that those who have reason have freedom to will or not to will, although this freedom is not equal in all of them. […] human souls are more free when they persevere in the contemplation of the mind of God, less free when they descend to the corporeal, and even less free when they are entirely imprisoned in earthly flesh and blood.
Boethius

Infants and young people, as well as the elderly, are so naturally touched with a certain spontaneous feeling by musical modes that there is no age that is indifferent to the delight of sweet singing.
Boethius

Quis legem det amantibus Maior lex amor est sibi. (Who can give law to lovers? Love itself is a greater law.)

Man is so constituted that he then only excels other things when he knows himself.
Boethius

Human perversity, then, makes divisions of that which by nature is one and simple, and in attempting to obtain part of something which has no parts, succeeds in getting neither the part- which is nothing- nor the whole, which they are not interested in.
Boethius

One’s virtue is all that one truly has, because it is not imperiled by the vicissitudes of fortune.
Boethius

He is in no real danger. He merely suffers from a lethargy, a sickness that is common among the depressed. He has forgotten who he really is, but he will recover, for he used to know me, and all I have to do is cloud the mist that beclouds his vision.
Boethius

Music is part of us, and it ennobles or degrades our behavior.
Boethius

Men who give up the common goal of all things that exist, thereby cease to exist themselves. Some may perhaps think it strange that we say that wicked men, who form the majority of men, do not exist; but that is how it is. I am not trying to deny the wickedness of the wicked; what I do deny is that their existence is absolute and complete existence. Just as you might call a corpse a dead man, but couldn’t simply call it a man, so I would agree that the wicked are wicked, but could not agree that they have unqualified existence.
Boethius

Your mind is wise blocked. But the right road awaits you still. Cast out your doubts, your fears and your desires, let go of grief and of hope as well, for where these rule the mind is their subject.
Boethius

We cannot raise the question: How can there be evil if God existswithout raising the second: How can there be good if He exists not?
Boethius

And there is no reason at all for hating the bad. For just as weakness is a disease of the body, so wickedness is a disease of the mind.
Boethius

In other living creatures ignorance of self is nature; in man it is vice.
Boethius

Only he who possesses the ability to penetrate the depths of his own soul can understand music.
Boethius

For in all adversity of fortune the worst sort of misery is to have been happy.
Boethius

And so sovereign Providence has often produced a remarkable effect–evil men making other evil men good. For some, when they think they suffer injustice at the hands of the worst of men, burn with hatred for evil men, and being eager to be different from those they hate, have reformed and become virtuous. It is only the power of God to which evils may also be good, when by their proper use He elicits some good result.
Boethius

But by the same logic as men become just through the possession of justice, or wise through the possession of wisdom, so those who possess divinity necessary become divine. Each happy individual is therefore divine. While only God is so by nature, as many as you may become so by participation.
Boethius,

There is no danger: he is suffering from drowsiness, that disease which attacks so many minds which have been deceived.
Boethius

If happiness is the highest good of a rational nature, and if what can be taken from you in any way cannot be the highest (for what cannot be taken away ranks higher than what can), it is obvious that the fluidity of Fortune cannot hope to win happiness. 24
Boethius

…Whose souls, albeit in a cloudy memory, yet seek back their good, but, drunk men, know not the road home.
Boethius

Ill Fortune is of more use to men than Good Fortune.
Boethius

Thou knowest that these things which I say are true, and that I was never delighted in my own praise, for the secret of a good conscience is in some sort diminished, when by declaring what he hath done, a man receiveth the reward of fame.
Boethius

Then, when she saw me not only answering nothing, but mute and utterly incapable of speech, she gently touched my breast with her hand, and said: ‘There is no danger; these are the symptoms of lethargy, the usual sickness of deluded minds. For awhile he has forgotten himself; he will easily recover his memory, if only he first recognises me. And that he may do so, let me now wipe his eyes that are clouded with a mist of mortal things.
Boethius

No man is so completely happy that something somewhere does not clash with his condition. It is the nature of human affairs to be fraught with anxiety; they never prosper perfectly and they never remain constant.
Boethius

And even if the praise is deserved, it cannot add anything to the philosopher’s feelings: he measures happiness not by popularity, but by the true voice of his own conscience.
Boethius

For in every ill turn of fortune the most unhappy sort of unfortunate man is the one who has been happy
Boethius

Has the world become so topsy-turvy that a living creature, whom the gift of reason makes divine, believes that his glory lies solely in possession of lifeless goods?
Boethius

A musician is one who, with study and well-calculated rationality… knows how to judge the modes, rhythms, and genres of singing… and of poems.
Boethius

Whoever, serenely led by a well-ordered life, tramples proud fate underfoot and, looking good and bad fortune in the face, can keep an impassive countenance, will not be moved by the rage of the threatening sea, which tosses its topsy-turvy waves to the very bottom, nor by the unstable Vesuvius when from its torn craters it releases tongues of fire mixed with smoke, nor by the flash of the burning lightning accustomed to strike the high towers.
Boethius

Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses. (If you had remained silent, you would have remained a philosopher.)
Boethius

Really, the misfortunes which are now such a cause of grief ought to be reasons for tranquility. For now she has deserted you, and no man can ever be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune.
Boethius

All pleasures have one quality a: They drive their devotees with goads. And a swarm of bees upon the wing, They first pour out their honey loads, Then turn and strike their victim’s heart And leave behind their deep set sting.
Boethius

Would that our age could now return / To those pure ways of leading life. / But now the passion to possess / Burns fiercer than Mount Etna’s fire.
Boethius

What curbs Could check within firm bounds this headlong lust, When even those whose wealth is overflowing The thirst for gain still burns? He is never rich Who trembles and sighs, thinking himself in need.
Boethius

Verily this is the very crown of my misfortunes, that men’s opinions for the most part look not to real merit, but to the event; and only recognise foresight where Fortune has crowned the issue with her approval.
Boethius

If there is anything good about nobility it is that it enforces the necessity of avoiding degeneracy
Boethius

But who to love can give a law? Love unto love itself is law.
Boethius

It is not that a man of virtue is honored because of high office, but rather that the office is honored because of his virtue.
Boethius

Moreover, I do not approve the reasoning by which some think to solve this puzzle. For they say that it is not because God has foreseen the coming of an event that therefore it is sure to come to pass, but, conversely, because something is about to come to pass, it cannot be hidden from Divine providence; and accordingly the necessity passes to the opposite side, and it is not that what is foreseen must necessarily come to pass, but that what is about to come to pass must necessarily be foreseen. But this is just as if the matter in debate were, which is cause and which effect – whether foreknowledge of the future cause of the necessity, or the necessity of the future of the foreknowledge. But we need not be at the pains of demonstrating that, whatsoever be
Boethius

If first you rid yourself of hope and fear you have disarmed the tyrant’s wrath: but whosoever quakes in fear or hope, drifting and losing master, has cast away his shield, has left his place, and binds the chains with which he will be bound.
Boethius

In every adversity of fortune, to have been happy is the most unhappy kind of misfortune.
Boethius

Wherein the main point to be considered is this: the higher faculty of comprehension embraces the lower, while the lower cannot rise to the higher.
Boethius

Moreover, I do not approve the reasoning by which some think to solve this puzzle. For they say that it is not because God has foreseen the coming of an event that therefore it is sure to come to pass, but, conversely, because something is about to come to pass, it cannot be hidden from Divine providence; and accordingly the necessity passes to the opposite side, and it is not that what is foreseen must necessarily come to pass, but that what is about to come to pass must necessarily be foreseen. But this is just as if the matter in debate were, which is cause and which effect – whether foreknowledge of the future cause of the necessity, or the necessity of the future of the foreknowledge. But we need not be at the pains of demonstrating that, whatsoever be
Boethius

It is not that a man of virtue is honored because of high office, but rather that the office is honored because of his virtue.
Boethius

Blest is death that intervenes not In the sweet, sweet years of peace, But unto the broken-hearted, When it is called.

Let the rich man increase his hoard—it is never enough. All that gold, and all those Red Sea pearls that hang from his pudgy neck, they only weigh him down. Out in his fields, hundreds of oxen plough, but still the furrows of care are deep in his creased brow, and he worries about those riches he can’t take with him.
Boethius

For this cause I have become involved in bitter and irreconcilable feuds, and, as happens inevitably, if a man holds fast to the independence of conscience, I have had to think nothing of giving offence to the powerful in the cause of justice.
Boethius

But it is said, when a man comes to high office, that makes him worthy of honour and respect. Surely such offices don’t have the power of planting virtue in the minds of those who hold them, do theyOr of removing vicesNo: the opposite is true. More often than removing wickedness, high office brings it to light, and this is the reason why we are angry at seeing how often high office has devolved upon the most wicked of men –why Catullus calls Nonius a kind of malignant growth, in spite of the office he held.
Boethius

Fortune’s Malice. Mad Fortune sweeps along in wanton pride, Uncertain as Euripus’ surging tide; Now tramples mighty kings beneath her feet; Now sets the conquered in the victor’s seat. She heedeth not the wail of hapless woe, But mocks the griefs that from her mischief flow. Such is her sport; so proveth she her power; And great the marvel, when in one brief hour She shows her darling lifted high in bliss, Then headlong plunged in misery’s abyss.
Boethius

… there is no place whatever for hatred in the minds of the wise. Only an utter idiot would hate good men, and it is irrational to hate the wicked; for if vice is a species of mental disease comparable to illness in the body, since we regard those who are physically ill as wholly undeserving of hatred and deserving rather of pity, then men with minds oppressed by wickedness, a condition more dreadful than any sickness, should all the more be pitied rather than hounded.
Boethius

Avoid vice, therefore, and cultivate virtue; lift up your mind to the right kind of hope, and put forth humble prayers on high.
Boethius

He needs least who measures wealth according to the needs of nature, and not the excesses of ostentation.
Boethius

If dangerous hazards loom close by, Don’t choose a site to please the eye. Play safe. Above all, don’t forget To build your house on rock deep-set. Enclosed
Boethius

Quid autem de corporis uoluptatibus loquar, quarum appetentia quidem plena est anxietatis, satietas uero paenitentiae? (But what shall I say of bodily pleasures, the desire for which is indeed full of anxiety, but the satiety of which is full of penance?)
Boethius

Human souls must needs be comparatively free while they abide in the contemplation of the Divine mind, less free when they pass into bodily form, and still less, again, when they are enwrapped in earthly members. But when they are given over to vices, and fall from the possession of their proper reason, then indeed their condition is utter slavery.
Boethius

For the nature of man is such that he is better than other things only when he knows himself, and yet if he ceases to know himself he is made lower than the brutes. For it is natural for other animals not to have this self-knowledge; in man it is a fault. How far from your true state have you wandered when you think you can be at all improved by the addition of the beauties of other things!
Boethius

All that is known is grasped not conformably to its own efficacy, but rather conformably to the faculty of the knower.
Boethius

O most foolish of men! If Fortune began to be permanent, she would cease to be Fortune.
Boethius

Frequently, a kind of reward for wickedness, it causes great illness and unbearable pain for those who make it their source of enjoyment.
Boethius

The answer is this. It is impossible for the two events I mentioned just now – the rising of the sun and the man walking – not to be happening when they do happen; and yet it was necessary for one of them to happen before it did happen, but not so for the other.
Boethius

It is no wonder then if the winds storm around us on the ocean of this life, since our greatest imperative is to displease the wicked. But we should despise the wicked even if they are a great multitude, for they are governed by no leader, but are blindly pulled in all directions by frantic error.
Boethius

Jeder hat in sich etwas, das man nicht kennt, solange man es nicht erprobt hat; hat man es aber erprobt – schaudert man.
Boethius

When they tottered, their very greatness dragged them down.
Boethius

It is not the walls of your library with their glass and ivory decorations that I am looking for, but the seat of your mind.
Boethius

And the earth transcended brings us the gift of the stars.
Boethius

Oh, stupidest of mortals, if it takes to standing still, it ceases to be the wheel of Fortune.
Boethius

This is why the wise must take a part in public affairs, so the helm of state won’t fall to wicked and criminal men, who would bring ruin and destruction to the good.
Boethius

What right hast thou to talk of ill of Fortune whilst keeping all Fortune’s better gifts?
Boethius

Death passes by the wretched, Shuts his ear and slumbers deep; Will not heed the cry of anguish, Will not close the eyes that weep.
Boethius

There the Lord of kings holds His scepter, governing the reigns of the world. With sure control He drives the swift chariot, the shining judge of all things.
If the road which you have forgotten, but now search for, brings you here, you will cry out: ‘This I remember, this is my own country, here I was born and here I shall hold my place.
Boethius

Kings would to live free from worry, but they can’t. And then they boast of their power! Do you think of a man as powerful when you see him lacking something which he cannot achieveA man who goes about with a bodyguard because he is more afraid than the subjects he terrorizes, and whose claim to power depends on the will of those who serve him?
Boethius

Philosophy has never seen fit to abandon an innocent man with no companion for his journey.
Boethius

Why, it results from our admissions that of all who have attained, or are advancing in, or are aiming at virtue, the fortune is in every case good, while for those who remain in their wickedness fortune is always utterly bad.
Boethius

Why, my child, should I desert youWhy should I not share your labour and the burden you have been saddled with because of the hatred of my nameShould I be frightened by being accusedOr cower in fear as if it were something unprecedentedThis is hardly the first time wisdom has been threatened with danger by the forces of evil.
Boethius

With chaste affections man and wife In solemn wedlock it entwines. Love’s laws most trusty comrades bind. How happy is the human race, 30 If Love, by which the heavens are ruled, To rule men’s minds is set in place!
Boethius

We ought to pray to the Father of all things. To omit to do so would not be laying a proper foundation.
Boethius

Since it is through the possession of happiness that people become happy, and since happiness is in fact divinity, it is clear that it is through the possession of divinity that they become happy. But by the same logic as men become just through the possession of justice, or wise through the possession of wisdom, so those who possess divinity necessarily become divine. Each happy individual is therefore divine. While only God is so by nature, as many as you may become so by participation.
Boethius

I have not been allowed to examine the prosecution’s documents, to which the system gives enormous weight. But even if I had been given access to everything, what would there be to say that would be different from Canius’ reply to Caligula, when that emperor accused him of knowledge of a conspiracy against his person‘Had I known of it,’ Canius answered, ‘you would not.
Boethius

Avoid vice, therefore, and cultivate virtue; lift up your mind to the right kind of hope, and put forth humble prayers on high. A great necessity is laid upon you, if you will be honest with yourself, a great necessity to be good, since you live in the sight of a judge who sees all things.
Boethius

So long as they look only at their own desires and not the order of creation, they think of freedom to commit crimes and the absence of punishment as happy things.
Boethius

But as for you, ye know not how to act aright, unless it be to court the popular breeze, and win the empty applause of the multitude – nay, ye abandon the superlative worth of conscience and virtue, and ask a recompense from the poor words of others. Let me tell thee how wittily one did mock the shallowness of this sort of arrogance. A certain man assailed one who had put on the name of philosopher as a cloak to pride and vain-glory, not for the practice of real virtue, and added: “Now shall I know if thou art a philosopher if thou bearest reproaches calmly and patiently.” The other for awhile affected to be patient, and, having endured to be abused, cried out derisively: “Now, do you see that I am a philosopher?” The other, with biting sarcasm, retorted: “I should have hadst thou held thy peace.
Boethius

Foolish the friends who called me happy then: For falling shows a man stood insecure.
Boethius

Thou deemest Fortune to have changed towards thee; thou mistakest. Such ever were her ways, ever such her nature. Rather in her very mutability hath she preserved towards thee her true constancy. Such was she when she loaded thee with caresses, when she deluded thee with the allurements of a false happiness. Thou hast found out how changeful is the face of the blind goddess.
Boethius

Friends, why did ye once so lightly Vaunt me happy among men? Surely he who so hath fallen Was not firmly founded then.
Boethius

You have the chief spark of your health’s fire, for you have true knowledge of the hand that guides the universe.
Boethius

The sole cause of their tragic sufferings was their obvious and complete contempt of the pursuits of immortal men which my teaching had instilled in them. It is hardly surprising if we are driven by the blasts of storms when our chief aim on this sea of life is to displease wicked men. And though their numbers are great, we can afford to despise them because they have no one to lead them and are carried along only by ignorance which distracts them at random first one way then another. When their forces are in superior numbers, our general conducts a tactical withdrawal of his forces to a strong point, and they are left to encumber themselves with useless plunder. Safe from their furious activity or our ramparts above, we can smile at their efforts to collect all the most useless booty: our citadel cannot fall to the assaults of folly
Boethius

Thou in thy stronghold blest And undisturbed shalt rest; Live all thy days serene, And mock the heavens’ spleen.
Boethius

If you wish to consider, then, the foreknowledge or prevision by which He discovers all things, it will be more correct to think of it not as a kind foreknowledge of the future, but as the knowledge of a never-ending presence.
Boethius

Why, then, ye children of mortality, seek ye from without that happiness whose seat is only within us?
Boethius

For in other living creatures the ignorance of themselves is nature, but in men it is vice.
Boethius

Providence has furnished things with this most cogent reason for continuance: they must desire life, so long as it is naturally possible for them to continue living. Wherefore in no way mayst thou doubt but that things naturally aim at continuance of existence, and shun destruction.
Boethius

For whenever a man by proclaiming his good deeds receives the recompense of fame, he diminishes in a measure the secret reward of a good conscience.
Boethius

we had given thee such weapons as, if thou hadst not cast them away, would have made thee invincible.
Boethius

So true is it that nothing is wretched, but thinking makes it so, and conversely every lot is happy if borne with equanimity.
Boethius

These it is who kill the rich crop of reason with the barren thorns of passion, who accustom men’s minds to disease, instead of setting them free.
Boethius

For evil purposes are, perchance, due to the imperfection of human nature; that it should be possible for scoundrels to carry out their worst schemes against the innocent, while God beholdeth, is verily monstrous. For this cause, not without reason, one of thy disciples asked, “If God exists, whence comes evilYet whence comes good, if He exists not?
Boethius

those whom wickedness brings down from their human state are sunk so low that they don’t deserve to be called human. Thus it happens that if you saw a man transformed by vices, you couldn’t consider him human.
Boethius

In such a case, I agree with my servant Euripides, who said that a man without children was fortunate in his misfortune.
Boethius

One has abundant riches, but is shamed by his ignoble birth. Another is conspicuous for his nobility, but through the embarrassments of poverty would prefer to be obscure. A third, richly endowed with both, laments the loneliness of an unwedded life. Another, though happily married, is doomed to childlessness, and nurses his wealth for a stranger to inherit. Yet another, blest with children, mournfully bewails the misdeeds of son or daughter. Wherefore, it is not easy for anyone to be at perfect peace with the circumstances of his lot.
Boethius

For truly in adverse fortune the worst sting of misery is to have been happy.
Boethius

One law only standeth fast: Things created may not last.
Boethius

Then said she: ‘This world of ours – thinkest thou it is governed haphazard and fortuitously, or believest thou that there is in it any rational guidance?’ ‘Nay,’ said I, ‘in no wise may I deem that such fixed motions can be determined by random hazard, but I know that God, the Creator, presideth over His work, nor will the day ever come that shall drive me from holding fast the truth of this belief.
Boethius

Why boast ye, then, so loud of race and high ancestral line? If ye behold your being’s source, and God’s supreme design,
Boethius

that states would be happy, either if philosophers ruled them, or if it should so befall that their rulers would turn philosophers.
Boethius

All pleasure hath this property, She woundeth those who have her most. And, unto the angry bee Who hath her pleasant honey lost, She flies away with nimble wing And in our hearts doth leave her sting.
Boethius

If Plenty should pour from her full horn15 wealth abundant as sea-stirred sand, or countless as stars in the shining night sky, nothing stopping her hand— still man would complain of poverty. Even if God answered prayers with gold, heaped honors on those asking, still this gain would seem nothing.16 Their greed only opens new mouths. What could curb such lust when those with riches overflowing thirst for moreA man is never rich, trembling and sighing, believing himself in need.
Boethius

Now, whenever high office has fallen into the hands of wicked men, the disaster has been greater than flood or volcanic eruption.
Boethius

Why do the wretched feel such fearful respect for the ferocious tyrants who rage in vain? Expect nothing, fear nothing: thus you will disarm their impotent fury. But whoever trembles in fear or lust, because he lacks secure self-control, is himself the one who throws down the shield and, giving ground, knots the chains by which he will be dragged.
Boethius

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Great quotes on love. Great aphorisms, quotations and ideas on love and lover selected by famous authors with a complete free e-book of quotes to download.

Great quotes on love. I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
Martin Luther King Jr.

Heroic love is the property of those superior natures who are called insane (insano) not because they do not know, but because they over-know (soprasanno).
Giordano Bruno

Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.
Martin Luther King Jr.

The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.
Woody Allen

Miserable is that love that needs words to express itself.
Carl William Brown

At the beginning and at the end of love, the two lovers are embarrassed to find themselves alone.
Jean De La Bruyere

Oh, love isn’t there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.
Hermann Hesse

One seeks to make the loved one entirely happy, or, if that cannot be, entirely wretched.
Jean De La Bruyere

To be among people one loves, that’s sufficient; to dream, to speak to them, to be silent among them, to think of indifferent things; but among them, everything is equal.
Jean De La Bruyere

If you are really interested in this topic and you want more quotes you can also download and read this book of Quotes and aphorisms on Love Edited by Carl William Brown

We can recognize the dawn and the decline of love by the uneasiness we feel when alone together.
Jean De La Bruyere

If we are to judge of love by its consequences, it more nearly resembles hatred than friendship.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

It is with true love as it is with ghosts; everyone talks about it, but few have seen it.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Love is to the soul of him who loves, as what the soul is to the body that it animates.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Love of glory, fear of shame, greed for fortune, the desire to make life agreeable and comfortable, and the wish to depreciate others – all of these are often the causes of the bravery that is spoken so highly of by men.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Love, like fire, cannot continue to exist without continual motion; both cease to live so soon as they cease to hope or to fear.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Lovers do not wish to see the faults of their mistresses until their enchantment is at an end.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Where both deliberate, the love is slight: Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?
Christopher Marlowe

Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?
Christopher Marlowe

Now matter how many discoveries we make in the vast regions of self-love, undiscovered regions still remain there.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Self-love either increases or diminishes our measure of the good qualities of our friends, and does so in proportion to the satisfaction we feel with them; and we judge their virtue by way they act towards us.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

The more one loves a mistress, the more one is ready to hate her.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

There are few people who are not ashamed of their love affairs when the infatuation is over.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

There are more people without self-love than there are without envy.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

There are very few people who are not ashamed of having been in love when they no longer love each other.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

True love is like a ghost: everyone speaks of it, but few have seen it.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

We are nearer loving those who hate us than those who love us more than we wish.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

We can love nothing except what we base on our own selves, and when we prefer our friends to ourselves, we are just following our own taste or pleasure. Nevertheless, it is only by that preference that friendship can be true and perfect.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

We love those who admire us, but not those whom we admire.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

We often persuade ourselves to love people who are more powerful than we are; yet it is self-interest alone that produces the friendship. We do not give our hearts away for the good we wish to do to them], but for what good we expect to receive from them.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

What makes lovers never tire of one another is that they talk always about themselves.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

When we are tired of loving, we are quite content if our mistress should become faithless, since it loosens us from our responsibility of fidelity.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.
R. D. Laing

To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.
Alphonse De Lamartine

The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.
Lao-Tzu

I shall always be a priest of love.
D. H. Lawrence

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.
D. H. Lawrence

I no longer know if I wish to drown myself in love, wodka or the sea.
Franz Kafka

My God, these folks don’t know how to love — that’s why they love so easily.
D. H. Lawrence

Gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force.
Herman Hesse

Friendship, love, education, solidarity are all values that take on more value if there is even a little money.
Carl William Brown

The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.
Charles Darwin

The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one’s wildest imagination. Never, never, never could one conceive what love is, beforehand, never. Life can be great — quite god-like. It can be so. God be thanked I have proved it.
D. H. Lawrence

To love is to place our happiness in the happiness of another.
Gottfried Wilhelm Von Leibniz

The only thing we can never get enough of is love. And the only thing we never give enough of is love.
Henry Miller

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
George Moore

Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.
John Lennon

We’ve got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can’t just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it’s going to get on by itself. You’ve got to keep watering it. You’ve got to really look after it and nurture it.
John Lennon

What is love? It is the morning and the evening star.
Sinclair Lewis

Great passions, my dear, don’t exist: they’re liars fantasies. What do exist are little loves that may last for a short or a longer while.
Anna Magnani

The pain of leaving those you grow to love is only the prelude to understanding yourself and others.
Shirley MacLaine

Love means the body, the soul, the life, the entire being. We feel love as we feel the warmth of our blood, we breathe love as we breathe air, we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us.
Guy de Maupassant

The love boat has crashed against the everyday.
Vladimir Mayakovsky

Love is all you need.
Paul McCartney

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
H. L. Mencken

I have always distinctly separated love from sex, and for this reason I am also more than convinced that a man can rarely be faithful, physically speaking.
Carl William Brown

Love is the delusion that one man or woman differs from another.
H. L. Mencken

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
H. L. Mencken

To be in love is merely to be in a perpetual state of anesthesia.
H. L. Mencken

These two imparadised in one another’s arms, the happier Eden, shall enjoy their fill of bliss on bliss.
John Milton

Do not think that love in order to be genuine has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired. Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.
Mother Teresa

I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.
Mother Teresa

I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn’t touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.
Mother Teresa

If we want a love message to be heard, it has to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.
Mother Teresa

In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love
Mother Teresa

Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.
Mother Teresa

Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do… but how much love we put in that action.
Mother Teresa

Love is a fruit in season at all times, and within reach of every hand.
Mother Teresa

Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as the are not.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, of tarnishing.
Anais Nin

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
George Orwell

No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.
Cesare Pavese

When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.
Blaise Pascal

The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the human interest the old personality can take in new activities.
Cesare Pavese

At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.
Plato

Learn what you are and be such.
Pindar

Love is a serious mental disease.
Plato

Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods.
Plato

If you find someone you love in your life, then hang on to that love.
Princess Diana

I think the biggest disease the world suffers from in this day and age is the disease of people feeling unloved. I know that I can give love for a minute, for half an hour, for a day, for a month, but I can give. I am very happy to do that; I want to do that.
Princess Diana

I remember when I used to sit on hospital beds and hold people’s hands, people used to be shocked because they’d never seen this before. To me it was quite normal.
Princess Diana

I know that I can give love for a minute, for half an hour; for a day, for a month, but I can give and I’m very happy to do that and I want to do that.
Princess Diana

Everyone of us needs to show how much we care for each other and, in the process, care for ourselves.
Princess Diana

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
Friedrich Nietzsche

An orange on the table, your dress on the rug, and you in my bed, sweet present of the present, cool of night, warmth of my life.
Jacques Prevert

In a separation it is the one who is not really in loved who says the more tender things.
Marcel Proust

Every love reveals us our will to live and create, but since ours is a destiny of death, even the noblest sentiment is nothing but a stupid illusion.
Carl William Brown

People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus.
Marcel Proust

He [Freud] often said three things were impossible to fulfill completely; healing, education, governing. He limited his goals in analytic treatment to brining the patient to the point where he could work for a living and learn to love.
Theodor Reik

The man who has never made a fool of himself in love will never be wise in love.
Theodor Reik

Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.
Jules Renard

A woman who could always love would never grow old; and the love of mother and wife would often give or preserve many charms if it were not too often combined with parental and conjugal anger. There remains in the face of women who are naturally serene and peaceful, and of those rendered so by religion, an after-spring, and later an after-summer, the reflex of their most beautiful bloom.
Jean Paul Richter

For one human being to love another that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks.
Rainer Maria Rilke

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love; the more they give, the more they possess.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
Rainer Maria Rilke

I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world, that it alone can overcome hate and that right can and will triumph over might.
John D. Rockefeller

No man is defeated without until he has first been defeated within.
Eleanor Roosevelt

Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.
Eleanor Roosevelt

The value of love will always be stronger than the value of hate.. Any nation or group of nations which employs hatred eventually is torn to pieces by hatred…
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Love shall be our token; love be yours and love be mine.
Christina Rossetti

Our affections as well as our bodies are in perpetual flux.
Jean Jacques Rousseau

True love means simply taking care of our humanity
Carl William Brown

Many people when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world, where they can be sure of being admired when they are not admirable, and praised when they are not praiseworthy.
Bertrand Russell

The root of the matter… the thing I mean… is love, Christian love, or compassion. If you feel this, you have a motive for existence, a guide for action, a reason for courage, an imperative necessity for intellectual honesty.
Bertrand Russell

Love is not just looking at each other, it’s looking in the same direction.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery

I regard as a mortal sin not only the lying of the senses in matters of love, but also the illusion which the senses seek to create where love is only partial. I say, I believe, that one must love with all of one’s being, or else live, come what may, a life of complete chastity.
George Sand

There is only one happiness in life — to love and to be loved.
George Sand

The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
George Santayana

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety. Other women cloy the appetites they feed, but she makes hungry where most she satisfies.
William Shakespeare

But love is blind, and lovers cannot see What petty follies they themselves commit
William Shakespeare

For by his face straight shall you know his heart.
William Shakespeare

We have preached good and love for millennia and look at how we are reduced, maybe if we start preaching evil, things will improve.
Carl William Brown

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove.
William Shakespeare

Love bears it out even to the edge of doom.
William Shakespeare

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs. Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers eyes. Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers tears. What is it else? A madness most discreet, a choking gall and a preserving sweet.
William Shakespeare

Love is too young to know what conscience is.
William Shakespeare

Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.
William Shakespeare

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
William Shakespeare

My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep. The more I give thee, the more I have, For both are infinite
William Shakespeare

Self-love, is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting.
William Shakespeare

She’s gone. I am abused, and my relief must be to loathe her.
William Shakespeare

The course of true love never did run smooth.
William Shakespeare

They do not love that do not show their love. The course of true love never did run smooth. Love is a familiar. Love is a devil. There is no evil angel but Love.
William Shakespeare

To say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days.
William Shakespeare

We that are true lovers run into strange capers.
William Shakespeare

When Love speaks, the voice of all the gods makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.
William Shakespeare

Fond as we are of our loved ones, there comes at times during their absence an unexplained peace.
Anna Howard Shaw

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity: no really self-respecting woman would take advantage of it.
George Bernard Shaw

Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed; such a vow in both cases excludes us from all inquiry.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

All love is sweet, Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever. They who inspire us most are fortunate, As I am now: but those who feel it most Are happier still.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

True love in this differs from gold and clay, That to divide is not to take away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The hottest love has the coldest end.
Socrates

When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire, and when again under the influence of its kindred desires it is moved with violent motion towards the beauty of corporeal forms, it acquires a surname from this very violent motion, and is called love.
Socrates

One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life; that word is love.
Sophocles

Love is life’s end, but never ending. Love is life’s wealth, never spent, but ever spending. Love’s life’s reward, rewarded in rewarding.
Herbert Spencer

God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.
St. Augustine

Love is the beauty of the soul.
St. Augustine

Love, and do what you like.
St. Augustine

What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.
St. Augustine

What I needed most was to love and to be loved, eager to be caught. Happily I wrapped those painful bonds around me; and sure enough, I would be lashed with the red-hot pokers of jealousy, by suspicions and fear, by bursts of anger and quarrels.
St. Augustine

Let no one believe that he has received the divine kiss, if he knows the truth without loving it or loves it without understanding it. But blessed is that kiss whereby not only is God recognized but also the Father is loved; for there is never full knowledge without perfect love.
St. Bernard

Love seeks no cause beyond itself and no fruit; it is its own fruit, its own enjoyment. I love because I love; I love in order that I may love.
St. Bernard

Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.
Anne Germain De Stael

Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.
Anne Germain De Stael

Love is the whole history of a woman’s life, it is but an episode in a man’s.
Anne Germain De Stael

We cease loving ourselves if no one loves us.
Anne Germain De Stael

Nothing has happened today except kindness.
Gertrude Stein

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.
Oscar Wilde

He only may chastise who loves.
Rabindranath Tagore

He who wants to do good knocks at the gate; he who loves finds the gate open.
Rabindranath Tagore

Let my love like sunlight surround you, yet give you illumined freedom.
Rabindranath Tagore

We live in the world when we love it.
Rabindranath Tagore

Who is wise in love, love most, say least.
Lord Alfred Tennyson

‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Lord Alfred Tennyson

If by love we mean loving one person and hating many others at the same time, then we haven’t understood much.
Carl William Brown

Love is the only gold.
Lord Alfred Tennyson

Be gentle to all and stem with yourself.
St. Teresa of Avila

It is certainly a strange type of love that is spread among the human species, it makes you love one person, but it makes you hate many others at the same time.
Carl William Brown

It is here, my daughters, that love is to be found — not hidden away in corners but in the midst of occasions of sin. And believe me, although we may more often fail and commit small lapses, our gain will be incomparably the greater.
St. Teresa of Avila

To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose, the next best.
William M. Thackeray

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.
Henry David Thoreau

Misfortunes occur only when a man is false… Events, circumstances, etc., have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.
Henry David Thoreau

There is no remedy for love than to love more.
Henry David Thoreau

Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person.
James Thurber

Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person.
James Thurber

The feelings of love and passion are well-known to be irrational and coincidentally they are typical of man.
Carl William Brown

Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.
James Thurber

I believe that the reason of life is for each of us simply to grow in love.
Count Leo Tolstoy

We do not love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we have done them.
Count Leo Tolstoy

For it is the suffering flesh, it is suffering, it is death, that lovers perpetuate upon the earth. Love is at once the brother, son, and father of death, which is its sister, mother, and daughter. And thus it is that in the depth of love there is a depth of eternal despair, out of which springs hope and consolation.
Miguel De Unamuno

It is sad not to be loved, but it is much sadder not to be able to love.
Miguel De Unamuno

As Plato sometimes speaks of the divine love, it arises not out of indigency, as created love does, but out of fullness and redundancy; it is an overflowing fountain, and that love which descends upon created being is a free efflux from the almighty source of love; and it is well pleasing to him that those creatures which he hath made should partake of it.
Author Unknown

Know the self to be sitting in the chariot, the body to be the chariot, the intellect the charioteer, and the mind the reins.
Veda Upanishads

Love is something eternal; the aspect may change, but not the essence.
Vincent Van Gogh

The church has always preached “love of your neighbor” but I have not seen all this love all around.
Carl William Brown

The best way to know God is to love many things.
Vincent Van Gogh

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.
Vincent Van Gogh

It is not love that should be depicted as blind, but self-love.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

Love conquers all; let us surrender to Love.
Virgil

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

Self-love is the instrument of our preservation.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.
Andy Warhol

A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.
William Butler Yeats

I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious.
Walt Whitman

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
Oscar Wilde

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.
Oscar Wilde

There’s nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It’s a thing no married man knows anything about.
Oscar Wilde

When a man has once loved a woman, he will do anything for her, except continue to love her.
Oscar Wilde

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
Oscar Wilde

Yet each man kills the thing he loves. From all let this be heard: some do it with a bitter look, some with a flattering word. The coward does it with a kiss. the brave man with the sword.
Oscar Wilde

For love… has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together that you cannot separate them.
Virginia Woolf

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Quotes on the English Language, aphorisms, quotations, thoughts and ideas by great authors and writers on the English language by English-culture.com

We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.
John Locke

We all live in a small unique world, that’s why we need at least one sole common language.
Carl william Brown

The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot

Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.
Julia Penelope

English has been widely dispersed around the world, it is official language in 83 countries/regions and spoken in 105 other countries. Approximately 375 million people speak English as their first language and then we have still 508,000,000 people including second language speakers.
Carl William Brown

A strange curiosity: do you know that the English language does not even have official status in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Carl William Brown

English today is probably the third largest language by number of native speakers, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.
Carl William Brown

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.
Nelson Mandela

One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way.
Frank Smith

The limits of my language are the limits of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can; there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.
Sarah Caldwell

Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.
Chinese Proverb

Difference between English and German. English is the language of international air traffic control, sea navigation, computers and space technology, business, economics, finance and banking, marketing and advertising, of world wide scientific research, sport and games, on the contrary the German language is used to train shepherd dogs!
Carl William Brown

You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.
Geoffrey Willans

To have another language is to possess a second soul.
Charlemagne

Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There is no such thing as ”the Queen’s English.” The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!
Mark Twain

Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.
Rita Mae Brown

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

The quantity of consonants in the English language is constant. If omitted in one place, they turn up in another. When a Bostonian “pahks” his “cah,” the lost r’s migrate southwest, causing a Texan to “warsh” his car and invest in “erl wells.”
Author Unknown

English is a funny language; that explains why we park our car on the driveway and drive our car on the parkway.
Author Unknown

The reaction to any word may be, in an individual, either a mob-reaction or an individual reaction. It is up to the individual to ask himself: Is my reaction individual, or am I merely reacting from my mob-self? When it comes to the so-called obscene words, I should say that hardly one person in a million escapes mob-reaction.
D.H. Lawrence

Every Englishman is an average Englishman: it is a national characteristic.
E.M. Delafield

The English gentleman is a combination of silence, courtesy, dignity, sport, newspapers and honesty.
Karel Capek

An Englishman is content to say nothing when he has nothing to say.
Samuel Johnson

Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.
Rita Mae Brown,

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
Robert Benchley

No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut.
Sam Rayburn

Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.
Samuel Johnson

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.
Sir Winston Churchill

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
William Butler Yeats

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.
William Penn

I understand a fury in your words, But not the words.
William Shakespeare

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.
George Orwell

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
William Shakespeare

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.
William Shakespeare

The Englishman regards the free expression of emotion as undignified, vulgar, and almost brutish.
Paul Cohen Portheim

When two Eglishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.
Samuel Johnson

A foreign observer is struck by our gentleness: by the orderly behaviour of the English crowds, the lack of pushing and quarrelling, the willingness to form queues.
George Mikes

The gentleman is generous and treats all men as his equals, especially those whom he feels to be inferior in rank and wealth.
Hilaire Belloc

Even when he is living in a foreign country, the Englishman still calls the natives “these foreigners”, for he, of course, is never a foreigner, wherever he may be: he is English!
Max O’Reilly

Most Englishmen are convinced that God is an Englishman, probably educated at Eton.
E.M. Delafield

People on the Continent either tell you the truth or lie; in England they hardly ever lie, but they would never dream of telling you the truth.
George Mikes

How can what an Englishman belivies be heresy? It is a contradiction in terms.
George Bernard Shaw

The English take everything with an exquisite sense of humour. They are only offended if you tell them that they have no sense of humour.
George Mikes

The Business of America is Business.
Calvin Coolidge

Business is the very soul of an American: he pursues it as the fountain of all human felicity.
Francis J. Grund

Civilization and profits go hand in hand.
Calvin Coolidge

The truth is, we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless.
Wooddrow Wilson

What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and what’s good for general Motors is good for the country.
Charles E. Wilson

The English love for privacy is proverbial, and has not been exaggerated. A stranger who strikes up a conversation is looked upon with suspicion – unless he happens to be an American, when his ignorance of good manners is indulged.
Henry Steele Commager

We really have everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.
Oscar Wilde

The King’s English is not the King’s. It’s a joint stock company, and Americans own most of the shares.
Mark Twain

The sun never set on the British Empire because the sun sets in the West and the British Empire was in the East.
Anonymous Student

We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.
Abigail Adams

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.
Abraham Lincoln

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.
John Locke

Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.
Julia Penelope

The quantity of consonants in the English language is constant. If omitted in one place, they turn up in another. When a Bostonian “pahks” his “cah,” the lost r’s migrate southwest, causing a Texan to “warsh” his car and invest in “erl wells.”
Author Unknown

English is a funny language; that explains why we park our car on the driveway and drive our car on the parkway.
Author Unknown

The reaction to any word may be, in an individual, either a mob-reaction or an individual reaction. It is up to the individual to ask himself: Is my reaction individual, or am I merely reacting from my mob-self? When it comes to the so-called obscene words, I should say that hardly one person in a million escapes mob-reaction.
D.H. Lawrence

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

One man’s frankness is another man’s vulgarity.
Kevin Smith

I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
Jane Wagner

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
Quentin Crisp

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
Carl Sandburg, New York Times, 13 February 1959

It’s a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.
Franklin P. Jones

In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.
Mark Twain

At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer.
Marshall Lumsden

What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same.
Antonio Porchia

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.
Abigail Adams

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.
Robert Louis Stevenson

A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.
Wendell L. Willkie

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.
Edward R. Murrow

If you can speak three languages you’re trilingual. If you can speak two languages you’re bilingual. If you can speak only one language you’re an American.
Author Unknown

Sometimes it’s just a short swim from the shipwreck of your life to the island paradise of your dreams – assuming you don’t drown in the metaphor.
Robert Brault

I like the word “indolence.” It makes my laziness seem classy.
Bern Williams

Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
Samuel Johnson

Words signify man’s refusal to accept the world as it is.
Walter Kaufmann

The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
Derek Walcott

Language is the dress of thought. ~Samuel Johnson

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.
Aldous Huxley

The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.
Lewis Thomas

Any noun can be verbed
Variation of a saying by Alan J. Perlis

In English every word can be verbed.
Alan J. Perlis

Verbing weirds language.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
William James

Almost all words do have color and nothing is more pleasant than to utter a pink word and see someone’s eyes light up and know it is a pink word for him or her too.
Gladys Taber

There’s always something that you can’t pin down with words. Words fall flat all the time – look at the word dust around you.
Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com

Be not the slave of Words.
Thomas Carlyle

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.
Aeschylus

Language is the source of misunderstandings.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in a few words.
Aprocrypha

High thoughts must have high language.
Aristophanes

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.
Cato the Elder

Use soft words and hard arguments.
English Proverb

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
George Orwell

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
Herman Melville

For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.
Ingrid Bengis

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Deeds, not words shall speak me.
John Fletcher

Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.
John Maynard Keynes

The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.
Lewis Thomas

Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
Lily Tomlin

We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.
Oscar Wilde

Words have a longer life than deeds.
Pindar

Words, too, have genuine substance – mass and weight and specific gravity.
Tim O’Brien, Tomcat in Love

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
George Orwell

Language is the means of getting an idea from my brain into yours without surgery.
Mark Amidon

Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool.
Martin H. Fischer

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.
Alfred North Whitehead

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
George Orwell

He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kunst and Alterthum

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.
Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Note-Books

I would never use a long word where a short one would answer the purpose. I know there are professors in this country who ‘ligate’ arteries. Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Our language is funny – a fat chance and slim chance are the same thing.
J. Gustav White

Words want to be free!
Author Unknown

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it.
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book II, chapter 4

Oaths are but words, and words but wind.
Samuel Butler

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.
Annie Dillard

Whenever ideas fail, men invent words.
Martin H. Fischer

For I am a bear of very little brain and long words bother me.
Winnie the Pooh (A.A. Milne)

Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when what we want is to move the stars to pity.
Gustave Flaubert

Words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.
Winston Churchill

Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities.
Alfred North Whitehead

Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English.
Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

Swearing was invented as a compromise between running away and fighting.
Peter Finley Dunne, Mr. Dooley’s Opinions, 1900

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

The existing phrasebooks are inadequate. They are well enough as far as they go, but when you fall down and skin your leg they don’t tell you what to say.
Mark Twain

Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise – that which is common to you, me, and everybody.
Thomas Earnest Hulme

Let’s not become so worried about not offending anybody that we lose the ability to distinguish between respect and paranoia.
Larry King

The PC (political correctness) movement exists not in order to improve the well-being of those whose oppression it purports to combat. Rather, its purpose is to wrap its proponents in a kind of verbal comfort-blanket.
Erik Kowal

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.
Samuel Butler

A different language is a different vision of life.
Federico Fellini

If a language is corruptible, then a constitution written in that language is corruptible.
Robert Brault

What is the longest word in the English language? SMILES: there is a mile between the first and last letters!”

“Children, don’t speak so coarsely,” said Mr. Webster, who had a vague notion that some supervision should be exercised over his daughters’ speech, and that a line should be drawn, but never knew quite when to draw it. He had allowed his daughters to use his library without restraint, and nothing is more fatal to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library.
Robertson Davies

When a German dives into a sentence, you won’t see him again until he emerges at the other end with the verb between his teeth.
Mark Twain

Conversation is the slowest form of human communication.
Author Unknown

Learn a new language and get a new soul.
Czech Proverb

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
George Orwell

The word “good” has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
G.K. Chesterton

Quotes by authors

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Entertainment

Short news about Italy, with an explanatory video on all 20 Italian Regions Stereotypes, from the book Italy in brief by Carl William Brown, a collection of quotes, news and thoughts about Italy 

The name Italy comes from the word Italia, meaning “calf land,” perhaps because the bull was a symbol of the Southern Italian tribes.
Historical News

The capital of Italy is Rome (also known as the Eternal City) and is almost 3,000 years old. It has been the capital since 1871 and is home to the Dome of St. Peter’s, the Sistine Chapel, the Coliseum, and the famous Trevi Fountain.
Historical News

By the year 2000 B.C., Italic tribes (Oscans, Umbrians, Latins) had established themselves in Italy. They were followed by the Etruscans in 800 B.C. and the Greeks, who established colonies known as Magna Graeca in southern Italy (present-day Apulia). Rome was founded in 753 B.C., and soon thereafter the Romans began conquering the peninsula.
Historical News

At its height in A.D. 117, the Roman Empire stretched from Portugal in the West to Syria in the east, and from Britain in the North to the North African deserts across the Mediterranean. It covered 2.3 million miles (two-thirds the size of the U.S.) and had a population of 120 million people. During the Middle Ages, Rome had perhaps no more than 13,000 residents.
Historical News

When McDonald’s opened in 1986 in Rome, food purists outside the restaurant gave away free spaghetti to remind people of their culinary heritage.
Italians created parmesan, provolone, mozzarella, and many other cheeses. Parmesan cheese originated in the area around
Historical News

Vatican City is the only nation in the world that can lock its own gates at night. It has its own phone company, radio, T.V. stations, money, and stamps. It even has its own army, the historic Swiss Guard.
Historical News

Parma, Italy. Italians also created many other cheeses, including gorgonzola, mozzarella, provolone, and ricotta. No one knows when the pizza was invented, but the people of Naples made it popular.
Historical News

The European Union law states that we have the free movement of companies, they have freedom of establishment. This is in fact the entire point of the whole Single Market program. One company, based anywhere inside the EU, can then sell to all 27 other countries in the EU without needing to have a permanent establishment in each of those 27. And believe me the EU isn’t going to allow someone to over turn that very basic foundation of the entire project. It’s just not going to happen. So I am perfectly free to buy any goods that are legally sold throughout Europe, provided that they can be delivered, even though they are not legal in Italy, even because in Italy only stupidity is legal.
Carl William Brown

Italian is a Romance language descended from Vulgar Latin, just like Spanish, French, Portuguese and Romanian, the dialect spoken by the people living during the last years of the Roman Empire. Before the Romans came, people spoke their own languages, and the mixture of these original tongues with Latin produced many of the languages and dialects that are still in use today. Italian has more Latin words than any other Romance languages, and its grammatical system remains similar to Latin. Latin is still the official language of the Vatican City in Rome. In the 1930s and 40s, Italian fascist Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) tried to eliminate foreign words from Italian. In soccer, “goal” became “meta” and Donald Duck became “Paperino.” Mickey Mouse became “Topolino” and Goofy became “Pippo.” While the ban was not permanent, the Italian names remain common.
Historical News

The world’s first operas were composed in Italy at the end of the sixteenth century. Opera reached the height of popularity in the nineteenth century, when the works of Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868), Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924), and Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) became hugely popular. The late
tenor Luciano Pavarotti (1935-2007) is a national celebrity, and

Claudio Monteverdi (c. 1567-1643) is regarded as the father of the modern opera.
Historical News

Venice, Italy, is one of the world’s most beautiful and unusual cities. It was founded over 1,400 years ago on a collection of muddy islands in a wide and shallow lagoon. It has been sinking into the mud for centuries and is plagued by floods.
Italy was one of the founders of the EU and is a member of the Group of Eight (G8), a forum for eight of the world’s most powerful nations.
Historical News

In Italy there are about 60 million people and we know how high is the percentage of morons on national soil. However, in China there are about 1.4 billion people and in India almost 1.3 billion. Therefore I wonder then, if more or less all the world is a small village, with how many morons should we have to come to terms on the territory of this stupid planet. It’s the same the world over, or the world is the same wherever you go!
Carl William Brown

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was an Italian-born scientist. When he argued that the Earth revolved around the Sun, the Catholic Church imprisoned Galileo in his own house. The Church issued a formal apology in 1992.
Historical News

A part of northern Italy called Val Camonica contains about 350,000 petroglyphs that were created nearly 10,000 years ago. Brescia is a famous town at 75 km from there, it is very popular for Beretta arms industry, the oldest in the world, the Garda Lake and also because Carl William Brown was born there.
Historical News

Before the Romans came, people spoke their own languages, and the mixture of these original tongues with Latin produced many of the languages and dialects that are still in use today. If you know one of the Romance languages, you can often understand bits of another. Just as members of the same family can look similar but have totally different characters. You find the same contradictions in the dialects (regional or local language differences) in Italy and in other countries. If you visit Italy, you’ll hear various accents and dialects as you travel the country. Despite the number of dialects, you may be surprised to discover that everybody understands your Italian and you understand theirs. (Italians don’t normally speak in their dialect with foreigners.)
Linguistic News

About 70% of our English words come from Latin. This alone make Latin the most important language to influence English. For example, the word, promise, comes from “pro-mitto,” meaning to send before. Here are some more examples: word = verbum; canine = canis; college =collegium. I think you get the picture. Also Latin has influenced our grammar. For example, the distinction between “I” and “me” is based on cases. I equals nominative case in Latin and me equals dative, ablative and accusative cases. Even little things like the improper use of split infinitives come from Latin, since in Latin infinitives cannot be split. For example, to love is amare (one word) in Latin. So, in short, Latin continues to play a huge role.
Linguistic News

Italian is the official language of Italy and it is spoken by about 70 million people, primarily in this country. It’s the official language of San Marino as well, and one of the official languages of Switzerland, spoken mainly in Ticino and Grigioni cantons.
Linguistic News

The Italian Flag or il Tricolore is a green, white and red tricolor flag with equal panels representing the territories of the Republic of Italy. Adopted as the national flag on 1 January 1948, official colour designation under the Pantone Textile policy was established in 2003, then ratified into law in 2006.
Historical News

When I was growing up, my parents told me, “Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving.” I tell my daughters, “Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job.”
Thomas Friedman

Who goes to Rome a beast returns a beast.
Italian Proverb

Italy hasn’t had a government since Mussolini.
Richard Nixon

How did Italy manage to end up with no Caribbean islands at all? Christopher Columbus took the trouble to discover the

Caribbean personally before the end of the fifteenth century. Try to get a decent plate of spaghetti there now.
Calvin Trillin

Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.
Bertrand Russell

In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Orson Welles

If Spain goes under, Italy will come under even more scrutiny.
Mario Monti

In the Church of San Giovanni (One of the finest Renaissance churches in Italy) you can see Tintoretto’s masterpiece, “Madonna with Four Saints”. In the Church of San Giacomo you can see Botticelli’s masterpiece, “Two Saints with the Madonna”. In the Church of San Bartolomeo do not miss Tiepolo’s huge canvas, “Madonna with Twenty Three Saints”. In the chapel of San Marco, the focus of attention is Perugino’s small painting, “Madonna with just One Saint”.
George Mikes

Italy is a geographical expression.
Prince Metternich

Certainly, in Italy, nobody takes light for granted.
Barbara Steele

A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority.
Samuel Johnson

Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood.
Erica Jong

Internet penetration in Italy is quite low and the Berlusconi media machine controls most of what people see.
Joichi Ito

I would like to thank my parents in Vergaio, a little village in Italy. They gave me the biggest gift: poverty.
Roberto Benigni

Gli italiani sono irrimediabilmente fatti per la dittatura.
Ennio Flaiano

The ideological mix-up is a natural, exasperating and, at the same time, endearing feature in this country of fierce individualists. There are seventy-five political parties in Italy – although not all are represented in parliament. Most of these parties are very small but even the smallest can boast of a sharp and unbridgeable ideological split. There is a party which has only one single member. He is schizophrenic.
George Mikes

In Italy there are about 60 million people and we know how high is the percentage of morons on national soil. However, in China there are about 1.4 billion people and in India almost 1.3 billion. Therefore I wonder then, if more or less all the world is a small village, with how many morons should we have to come to terms on the territory of this stupid planet.
Carl William Brown

You have to remember that Italy is second to none, in fact, if Germany has more than 3,500 brothels, Italy has the Vatican!
Carl William Brown

Appeal to all scholars of stupidity in the world. Come to Italy, this country has the highest rate of morons of the universe, especially among political, bureaucratic, judicial, religious, intellectual, artistic, and mass media members, so it is the best place to develop your own field research.
Carl William Brown

To be a true philosopher you must study stupidity a lot, that’s why, as Doctor Samuel Johnson used to say, a man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority.
Carl William Brown

Italy is one of the world leading country of bureaucracy and stupidity.
Carl William Brown

The ideological mix-up is a natural, exasperating and, at the same time, endearing feature in this country of fierce individualists. There are seventy-five political parties in Italy – although not all are represented in parliament. Most of these parties are very small but even the smallest can boast of a sharp and unbridgeable ideological split. There is a party which has only one single member. He is schizophrenic.
George Mikes

Since Italy is the land of bureaucratic and political nonsense, it tries to make up for the lost chances through a complex system of confused laws and logical stupidity.
Carl William Brown

The increased presence of Muslims in Italy and in Europe is directly proportional to our loss of freedom.
Oriana Fallaci

Italy is doomed to disappear, it is too stupid to survive!
Carl William Brown

The most hypocritical, bootlicking, obsequious, slavelike, submissive, unfree journalists in Europe, this is Italy.
Carl William Brown

The Italians may be clever and quick-witted but they are not intellectuals. They lack wanderlust, indeed, most of them lack intellectual curiosity in every shape and form.
George Mikes

In Italy there are a lot of illegal things, since the law is illegal too.
Carl William Brown

Prices in Italy are only slightly lower than in France, which means that Italy is a very expensive country for everyone, natives, visitors and tourists.
George Mikes

Repetita iuvant. Italy, a land of great saints, poets, sailors, artists, statesmen, businessmen, lawyers, intellectuals, professors, journalists, whores, gangsters, religious parasites and dickheads.
Carl William Brown

The main characteristic of English conversation is that no one ever speaks; of Italian that everyone speaks at the same time. One iron law reigns supreme in Italian conversation: the survival of the loudest.
George Mikes

In Italy we have not a Common law legal system, we have a stupid one instead!
Carl William Brown

Hotel bills are scrupulously honest all over Italy… The only case which puzzled me occured in Naples. I wondered whether they were justified in adding 230 lire for heating to my bill in early June.
George Mikes

The Cathedral of this ancient and beautiful city of ……….* is of particular interest. It is the third largest Cathedral in Italy. It is a magnificent Gothic building (not pure Gothic but pure enough for the vast majority of tourists). The Italians, in their outlandish way, like to refer to the Cathedral as Il Duomo. * Fill in the name of the city with pencil. Rub it afterwards.
George Mikes

In Italy there are many illegal things, but stupidity is the most legal of all.
Carl William Brown

Italians intellectuals are few and far between. This is not a derogatory statement; nor is it a praise… Italy can boast of a number of intellectuals – brilliant and witty. But their number is small – much smaller than in France, England or Germany. The Italians, as a nation, do not read much. Observe a rush hour crowd in London or New York on the one hand and in Rome on the other. In London and New York one person in ten will be without a paper; in Rome one in ten will have a paper. The Italians will watch the women in the bus or tram, the crowd in the street or the passing shop-windows but they do not read.
George Mikes

The stupidest and most corrupted, dangerous, useless, incompetent, unfit and inefficient politicians in Europe: this is Italy.
Carl William Brown

On Amazon with Kindle Unlimited you can read the new edition of this book, that is Aphorismi et sententiae de italia et italis: Aforismi, citazioni, battute, invettive e riflessioni sull’Italia e gli Italiani (with English Quotes) by Carl William Brown

You can also download the first edition of the book with a lot of quotes about Italy by various authors from this link. Enjoy our beautiful country! 

All 20 Italian Regions Stereotypes Explained

Read also:

https://www.english-culture.com/christmas-in-italy/

https://www.english-culture.com/aphorisms-on-italy/

https://www.english-culture.com/quotations-on-italy/

Quotes by authors

Quotes by arguments

Thoughts and reflections

Essays with quotes

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