A collection of sayings, some humorous, others adolescent,
and a few containing a wisp of truth:
A chubby "systems" guy
"I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love
or I had smallpox."
Woody Allen
"My parrot is smarter than my graduate student."
Anonymous Professor [not original source]
"Lord make me chaste -- but not yet."
Augustine of Hippo
"There, there it is again -- the invisible hand of the marketplace
giving us the finger."
Charles Barsotti
"I didn't lose a war and nobody died."
Boris Becker
"When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long
and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones
which open for us."
Alexander Graham Bell
"Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage."
Ambrose Bierce
"No man can ever be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune."
Anicius Boethius
"There is no Steve Jobs figure in American liberalism insisting that
the designers keep government simple, elegant and user-friendly."
David Brooks
"I have seen the builder of the house."
Buddha
"Speak to the Sakyans, Ananda ... My back is aching and I need to
stretch myself."
Attributed to Buddha
"Forecasts usually tell us more of the forecaster than of the future."
Warren Buffett
"The best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray."
Robert Burns
"My philosophy is no pain, no pain."
George Carlin
"Just as the presence of a thief prevents negligence with our possessions,
so the reminder of the hindrances should prevent negligence in our
concentration."
Ajahn Chah
"Someone said that when a man is smitten with a beautiful woman,
he should remember that somebody somewhere is tired of her."
Steve Chapman
"The best lesson life has taught me is that the idiots in many cases
are right."
Winston Churchill
"Look, I only have one eye. Do you want me to keep it on the
speedometer or on the road?"
Moshe Dayan
"Bene qui latuit, bene vixit."
Descartes
"He's an egghead who surrounds himself with eggheads,
even when they have helped wreck the economy he's trying to save."
Maureen Dowd
"Want and clinging, continual;
local, changing are mind states,
empty as entropy.
Face the thrower of the stick,
all suffering has reaction as its cause."
Editorial Professor [a montage]
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity,
and I'm not sure about the former."
Albert Einstein
"If you don't program yourself, life will program you."
Fortune Cookie
"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable.
It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone
can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses,
you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you,
then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person,
wanders into your stupid life.... You give them a piece of you.
They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss
you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore.
Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves
you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should
be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into
your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination.
Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real
gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love."
Neil Gaiman
"Let your wounds be on your chests, not on your backs."
Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi
"The gut is not an organ from which you wish to receive frequent
progress reports."
Michael Gershon
"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life
is serious."
Brendan Gill
"We do not have the power to choose the result, but we can choose
our actions."
S. N. Goenka
"The truth of suffering must be explored to its end."
Siddhata Gotama
"For me, and I think we saw this at the Masters, he looks like he's
playing 'golf-swing' and not golf."
Butch Harmon
"When an expectation is not met, the fault lies entirely with the expecter."
Imprudent Professor
"If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if
spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels."
Attributed to Jesus
"University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are
so small."
Henry Kissinger
"Politicians are the same the world over. They all promise to build a
bridge, even where there is no river."
Nikita Khrushchev
"It offers a solution to a problem that we do not have."
Machteld Ligtvoet
"I want Him to say, 'You see, Jim, you were wrong. I exist.
But you may come in anyway.'"
James Lipton
"Let go of this sense that you are at the center of the universe and
that the world is something set up for you."
Katherine MacLean
"In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything,
and two minus one equals nothing."
Mignon McLaughlin
"Be like a lion, who, rather than chasing after the stick, turns to
face the thrower."
Milarepa
"Cogito ergo cogito."
Minimalist Professor
"So when a person's intellect overcomes his sensuality, he is better
than the angels, but when his sensuality overcomes his intellect, he is
worse than the beasts."
Muhammad
"There is pleasure when a sore is scratched,
but to be without sores is more pleasurable still.
Just so, there are pleasures in worldly desires,
but to be without desires is more pleasurable still."
Nagarjuna
meditation v. wisdom
"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're
talking about."
John von Neumann
"One should never know too precisely whom one has married."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"Tonight I feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor's fifth husband. I know what to
do but how do I make it interesting?"
David Niven
"This isn't right, this isn't even wrong."
Wolfgang Pauli
"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being
governed by those who are dumber."
Plato
"It often happens that I wake at night and begin to think about a
serious problem and decide I must tell the Pope about it. Then I wake
up completely and remember that I am the Pope."
Pope John XXIII
"Sip it, savor it, cup it, photostat it, underline it in red,
put it in the album, hang it on the wall: George Bush is the next
president of the United States."
Dan Rather
"Democrats are weasels, Republicans can't count, and
Independents are nuts. What's a guy to do?"
Rational Professor
"We're running around like idiots until we find a good
woman who can tell us what to do."
Rob Reiner
"You fight until hell freezes over. Then you fight on the ice."
Richard Russell
"Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat."
Jean-Paul Sartre
"The optimist believes that we live in the best of all possible
worlds, whereas the pessimist, it is said, fears this is true."
Amartya Sen [original source?]
"Where is there enough leather to cover the surface of the earth?
But just by having leather on the soles of one's feet is the
same as covering the whole earth."
Shantideva
"The main rule of marriage seems to be that you can't have sex
with other women."
Joel Stein
"My music is best understood by children and animals."
Igor Stravinsky
"I have seen the builder of the house but am still smitten by her beauty."
Suffering Professor
"The sun will set without thy assistance."
The Talmud
"If smoking cigars is not permitted in heaven, I won't go."
Mark Twain
"I have a fever, the touch of your cool hand soothes me,
whilst it does not cure me, I yearn for it, for when the fever returns."
Unwell Professor
"Some theorists believe that sleep does nothing but keep us
out of trouble for a few hours."
Frank Vertosick
"We spent several decades not producing many civil engineers and
producing a huge number of financial engineers. And the result is
shitty bridges and a shitty financial system."
Paul Volcker
"Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an
absurd one."
Voltaire
"For instance, noses were made to support spectacles, hence
we wear spectacles. So those who say that everything is well
are speaking foolishly; they should say that everything is
best."
Voltaire
"Like Pascal, they were interested in people's quiet struggle with
the apparent meaninglessness of life and the use of diversion to escape
from boredom."
Wikipedia
"Bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men
should be happier than others."
Oscar Wilde
"Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable."
Wizard of Oz
"No farmer ever plowed a field by turning it over in his mind."
George Woodbury
"Alternative energy is not a free ride, just a different ride."
Ozzie Zehner
