Mental Nougat

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Be courageous. I have seen many depressions in business. Always America has emerged from these stronger and more prosperous. Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith! Go forward!

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.


I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing. 


If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.

There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.

There's a way to do it better - find it.

What you are will show in what you do.  

Our schools are not teaching students to think. It is astonishing how many young people have difficulty in putting their brains definitely and systematically to work...

If parents pass enthusiasm along to their children, they will leave them an estate of incalculable value....

...that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live comprise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. ~ "The Joke"

...no man is completely lost, however great his mistakes. ~"The Joke"

...to understand her, to know her, to love her not only for what she was to me but for everything in her that did not immediately concern me, for what she was in and to herself. ~ "The Joke"

How goodness heightens beauty!
 

Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass.... ~"The Joke"

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish. 

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

Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.

It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.

Is there no way out of the mind?

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

Just don't take any class where you have to read Beowulf.

I've never been an intellectual but I have this look.

Tradition is the illusion of permanence.

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

Millions of books written on every conceivable subject by all these great minds and in the end, none of them knows anything more about the big questions of life than I do ... I read Socrates. This guy knocked off little Greek boys. What the Hell's he got to teach me? And Nietzsche, with his theory of eternal recurrence. He said that the life we lived we're gonna live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again. It's not worth it. And Freud, another great pessimist. I was in analysis for years and nothing happened. My poor analyst got so frustrated, the guy finally put in a salad bar. Maybe the poets are right. Maybe love is the only answer.

Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go its pretty damn good.

Eighty percent of success is showing up.

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.

My luck is getting worse and worse. Last night, for instance, I was mugged by a quaker.

I took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But, then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love, to be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy, therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness — I hope you're getting this down.

I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.

His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.

I think that people should mate for life, like pigeons or Catholics.

I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

Good things happen to those who hustle. 

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow. 

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls. 

Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages.

Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.

Here's to alcohol, the cause of, and solution to, all life's problems.

Marge, are we Jewish?

Don't worry. Being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep... in a giant blender.

This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

All of your scholarship, all your study of Shakespeare and Wordsworth would be vain if at the same time you did not build your character and attain mastery over your thoughts and your actions.

In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth.

When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it--always.

You must be the change you want to see in the world.

Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

If you don't ask, you don't get.

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.

 Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends leave footprints in your heart. To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart. Anger is only one letter short of danger. If someone betrays you once, it is his fault; if he betrays you twice, it is your fault. Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. He who loses money, loses much; he who loses a friend, loses much more; he who loses faith, loses all. Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art. Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't life long enough to make them all yourself. Friends, you and me ... you brought another friend ... and then there were three ... we started our group ... our circle of friends ... and like that circle ... there is no beginning or end ... yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That is why they call it a present.

 Do not, under any circumstance, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth. ~ Reading Lolita in Tehran

Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before. 

The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.

The way to find out about happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you are really happy — not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self-analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what is called following your bliss.

Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.

When we talk about settling the world's problems, we're barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It's a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

Any life career that you choose in following your bliss should be chosen with that sense — that nobody can frighten me off from this thing. And no matter what happens, this is the validation of my life and action.

A one sentence definition of mythology? "Mythology" is what we call someone else's religion.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! LIVE THE LIFE YOU'VE IMAGINED.

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?