When they see me holding fish, they can see that I am comfortable with kings as well as with paupers. – Imelda Marcos

Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s minds. – Thurgood Marshall

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. – H. L. Mencken

Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule -and both commonly succeed, and are right. – H. L. Mencken

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican. – H. L. Mencken

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives. – John Stuart Mill

The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. – John Stuart Mill

A recent conversation: Dubya: Look at the clock, time is racing! Cheney: That’s the second hand, George. – Dennis Miller

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him. – John Morley

The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces. – Maureen Murphy

Turn on to politics, or politics will turn on you. – Ralph Nader

Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote. – George Jean Nathan

My hope is that 10 years from now, after I’ve been across the street at work for a while, they’ll all be glad they gave me that wonderful vote. – Sandra Day O’Connor

It is difficult to discern a serious threat to religious liberty from a room of silent, thoughtful schoolchildren. – Sandra Day O’Connor

It is a measure of the framers’ fear that a passing majority might find it expedient to compromise 4th Amendment values that these values were embodied in the Constitution itself. – Sandra Day O’Connor

We hold that the reckless disregard for human life implicit in knowingly engaging in criminal activity known to carry a grave risk of death represents a highly culpable mental state that may be taken into account in making a capital sentencing judgment not inevitable, lethal result. – Sandra Day O’Connor

Political theory provides a common language with which people in this town communicate with each other. – Kirk O’Donnell

You better take advantage of the good cigars. You don’t get much else in that job. – Thomas P. O’Neill

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators. – P. J. O’Rourke

The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it. – P. J. O’Rourke

Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right? – Robert Orben

‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death. – Thomas Paine

The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river. – Ross Perot

A war for a great principle ennobles a nation. – Albert Pike

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. – Plato

Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber. – Plato

What you guys want, I’m for. – Dan Quayle

It’s time for the human race to enter the solar system. – Dan Quayle

We don’t want to go back to tomorrow, we want to go forward. – Dan Quayle

I have made good judgements in the past. I have made good judgements in the future. – Dan Quayle

The future will be better tomorrow. – Dan Quayle

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century. – Dan Quayle

Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child. – Dan Quayle

Welcome to President Bush, Mrs. Bush, and my fellow astronauts. – Dan Quayle

I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy – but that could change. – Dan Quayle

I love California, I practically grew up in Phoenix. – Dan Quayle

When I have been asked during these last weeks who caused the riots and the killing in L.A., my answer has been direct and simple: Who is to blame for the riots? The rioters are to blame. Who is to blame for the killings? The killers are to blame. – Dan Quayle

Illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it. – Dan Quayle

Murphy Brown is doing better than I am. At least she knows she still has a job next year. – Dan Quayle

We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur. – Dan Quayle

The American people would not want to know of any misquotes that Dan Quayle may or may not make. – Dan Quayle

We’re all capable of mistakes, but I do not care to enlighten you on the mistakes we may or may not have made. – Dan Quayle

I want to be Robin to Bush’s Batman. – Dan Quayle

El Salvador is a democracy so it’s not surprising that there are many voices to be heard here. Yet in my conversations with Salvadorans… I have heard a single voice. – Dan Quayle

It’s rural America. It’s where I came from. We always refer to ourselves as real America. Rural America, real America, real, real, America. – Dan Quayle

I can identify with steelworkers. I can identify with workers that have had a difficult time. – Dan Quayle

Lookit, I’ve done it their way this far and now it’s my turn. I’m my own handler. Any questions? Ask me… There’s not going to be any more handler stories because I’m the handler… I’m Doctor Spin. – Dan Quayle

Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is, and how, what a challenge it is, because in 1988 the question is whether we’re going forward to tomorrow or whether we’re going to go past to the – to the back! – Dan Quayle

I was known as the chief grave robber of my state. – Dan Quayle

We will invest in our people, quality education, job opportunity, family, neighborhood, and yes, a thing we call America. – Dan Quayle

This election is about who’s going to be the next President of the United States! – Dan Quayle

I have a very good family. I’m very fortunate to have a very good family. I believe very strongly in the family. It’s one of the things we have in our platform, is to talk about it. – Dan Quayle

I’m going to be a vice president very much like George Bush was. He proved to be a very effective vice president, perhaps the most effective we’ve had in a couple of hundred years. – Dan Quayle

The President is going to benefit from me reporting directly to him when I arrive. – Dan Quayle

When you make as many speeches and you talk as much as I do and you get away from the text, it’s always a possibility to get a few words tangled here and there. – Dan Quayle

I happen to be a Republican president – ah, the vice president. – Dan Quayle

I’ve never professed to be anything but an average student. – Dan Quayle

The other day the President said, I know you’ve had some rough times, and I want to do something that will show the nation what faith that I have in you, in your maturity and sense of responsibility. He paused, then said, would you like a puppy? – Dan Quayle

In George Bush you get experience, and with me you get – The Future! – Dan Quayle

I spend a great deal of time with the President. We have a very close, personal, loyal relationship. I’m not, as they say, a potted plant in these meetings. – Dan Quayle

When I talked to him on the phone yesterday. I called him George rather than Mr. Vice President. But, in public, it’s Mr. Vice President, because that is who he is. – Dan Quayle

My friends, no matter how rough the road may be, we can and we will, never, never surrender to what is right. – Dan Quayle

Sometimes cameras and television are good to people and sometimes they aren’t. I don’t know if its the way you say it, or how you look. – Dan Quayle

I just don’t believe in the basic concept that someone should make their whole career in public service. – Dan Quayle

I do have a political agenda. It’s to have as few regulations as possible. – Dan Quayle

You have a part-time job and that’s better than no job at all. – Dan Quayle

I deserve respect for the things I did not do. – Dan Quayle

This President is going to lead us out of this recovery. – Dan Quayle

We have to do more than just elect a new President if we truly want to change this country. – Dan Quayle

Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man. – Ronald Reagan

If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won’t. – Hyman Rickover

Political campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration man can normally muster. – James Harvey Robinson

I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts. – Will Rogers

Diplomacy is the art of saying “Nice doggie” until you can find a rock. – Will Rogers

I’m not a member of any organized political party, I’m a Democrat! – Will Rogers

There ought to be one day – just one – when there is open season on senators. – Will Rogers

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward. – Franklin D. Roosevelt

A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they’re dead. – Leo Rosten

I can’t let important policy decisions hinge on the fact that an election is coming up every 90 days. – Gerhard Schroeder

If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve. – William T. Sherman

Bad politicians are sent to Washington by good people who don’t vote. – William E. Simon

It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything. – Joseph Stalin

There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer. – Gertrude Stein

The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal – that you can gather votes like box tops – is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process. – Adlai E. Stevenson

A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip. – Caskie Stinnett

I’ve been to war, and it’s not easy to kill. It’s bloody and messy and totally horrifying, and the consequences are serious. – Oliver Stone

In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man; if you want anything done, ask a woman. – Margaret Thatcher

I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end. – Margaret Thatcher

There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle. – Alexis de Tocqueville

All the president is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway. – Harry S. Truman

He loved politicians – even Republicans. – Margaret Truman

A leader in the Democratic Party is a boss, in the Republican Party he is a leader. – Harry S. Truman

Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed. – Mao Tse-Tung

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed. – Mark Twain

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself. – Mark Twain

We have, I fear, confused power with greatness. – Stewart L. Udall

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them. – Paul Valery

The Vice-Presidency is sort of like the last cookie on the plate. Everybody insists he won’t take it, but somebody always does. – Bill Vaughan

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half. – Gore Vidal

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates. – Gore Vidal

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so. – Gore Vidal

After much prayerful consideration, I feel that I must say I have climbed my last political mountain. – George C. Wallace

I’m the lamest lame duck there could be. – George C. Wallace

Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we’ve been bombing over the years been complaining? – George C. Wallace

I met someone on the street who said wasn’t it great that we’re going to have a movie star for president, that it was so Pop, and (laughs) when you think about it like that, it is great, it’s so American. – Andy Warhol

This is an era of violent peace. – James D. Watkins

Justice, sir, is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together. – Daniel Webster

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. – E. B. White

The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy. – Theodore White

Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose. – George Will

Voters don’t decide issues, they decide who will decide issues. – George Will

The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one conservative gathering to another is a thin, tinny “arf” – the sound of a lap dog. – George Will

A conservative is a man who just sits and thinks, mostly sits. – Woodrow Wilson

There are no more liberals They’ve all been mugged. – James Q. Wilson

A free America… means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it. – Frank Lloyd Wright

The United States brags about its political system, but the President says one thing during the election, something else when he takes office, something else at midterm and something else when he leaves. – Deng Xiaoping

Page topic: Good Politics quotes: Best famous quotes about Politics

Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. – John Keats

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. – Eli Khamarov

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind. – Thomas B. Macaulay

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. – Don Marquis

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. – Marianne Moore

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content. – Alfred de Musset

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. – Novalis

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. – Plato

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. – Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own. – Salvatore Quasimodo

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out. – Richard Rosen

Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know. – Joseph Roux

A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. – Salman Rushdie

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life. – George Sand

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. – Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. – Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. – Carl Sandburg

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. – Carl Sandburg

I’ve written some poetry I don’t understand myself. – Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment. – Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. – Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. – Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them. – Charles Simic

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket. – Charles Simic

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. – Wallace Stevens

You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick… You’re back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps… so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in. – Dylan Thomas

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather. – Lionel Trilling

A poem is never finished, only abandoned. – Paul Valery

The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, “Oh, just let me enjoy the poem.” – Robert Penn Warren

The poem is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life. – Robert Penn Warren

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer… He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. – E. B. White

To have great poets, there must be great audiences. – Walt Whitman

A poet can survive everything but a misprint. – Oscar Wilde

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise. – Oscar Wilde

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. – Oscar Wilde

A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. – Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Page topic: Good Poetry quotes: Best famous quotes about Poetry

I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world. – Russell Baker

Always be a poet, even in prose. – Charles Baudelaire

God is the perfect poet. – Robert Browning

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing. – John Cage

A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof. – Rene Char

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. – Gilbert K. Chesterton

You don’t have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. – John Ciardi

The poet doesn’t invent. He listens. – Jean Cocteau

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie. – Jean Cocteau

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. – Jean Cocteau

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. – Jean Cocteau

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. – Leonard Cohen

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

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. – Rita Dove

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. – T. S. Eliot

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. – T. S. Eliot

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. – Paul Engle

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. – Gustave Flaubert

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. – E. M. Forster

Poetry is what gets lost in translation. – Robert Frost

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. – Robert Frost

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. – Robert Frost

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. – Robert Frost

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them. – Dennis Gabor

A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back into his homeland. – Kahlil Gibran

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. – Kahlil Gibran

“Therefore” is a word the poet must not know. – Andre Gide

There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either. – Robert Graves

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. – Thomas Gray

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone. – Thomas Hardy

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. – William Hazlitt

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers. – Horace

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out… Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure. – A. E. Housman

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. – Samuel Johnson

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you. – Joseph Joubert

Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. – John Keats

Page topic: Good quotes about Poetry: Some of the best great quotes about Poetry

It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace. – Andre Gide

The pursuit of peace and progress cannot end in a few years in either victory or defeat. The pursuit of peace and progress, with its trials and its errors, its successes and its setbacks, can never be relaxed and never abandoned. – Dag Hammarskjold

Yes, we love peace, but we are not willing to take wounds for it, as we are for war. – John Andrew Holmes

Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it. – Thomas Jefferson

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. – John F. Kennedy

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands. – H. L. Mencken

Fair peace becomes men; ferocious anger belongs to beasts. – Ovid

It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it. – Eleanor Roosevelt

A peace is of the nature of a conquest; for then both parties nobly are subdued, and neither party loser. – William Shakespeare

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice. – Baruch Spinoza

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. – Mother Teresa

Peace begins with a smile. – Mother Teresa

Peace hath higher tests of manhood, than battle ever knew. – John Greenleaf Whittier

Page topic: Good Peace quotes: Best famous quotes about Peace

I believe in the religion of Islam. I believe in Allah and peace. – Muhammad Ali

If they want peace, nations should avoid the pin-pricks that precede cannon shots. – Napoleon Bonaparte

One cannot subdue a man by holding back his hands. Lasting peace comes not from force. – David Borenstein

The pacifist’s task today is to find a method of helping and healing which provides a revolutionary constructive substitute for war. – Vera Brittain

I don’t know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace an interlude during war. – Georges Clemenceau

I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it. – Dwight D. Eisenhower

Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin. – Dwight D. Eisenhower

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

You don’t have to have fought in a war to love peace. – Geraldine A. Ferraro

All men love peace in their armchairs after dinner; but they disbelieve the other nations’s professions, rightly measuring its sincerity by their own. – Oscar W. Firkins

Even peace may be purchased at too high a price. – Benjamin Franklin

He that would live in peace and at ease must not speak all he knows or all he sees. – Benjamin Franklin

An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind. – Mohandas Gandhi

Page topic: Good quotes about Peace: Some of the best great quotes about Peace

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours. – William R. Inge

And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. – John F. Kennedy

Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched. – Guy de Maupassant

Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles. – George Jean Nathan

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him? – Blaise Pascal

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons. – Bertrand Russell

To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography. – George Santayana

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it. – George Bernard Shaw

You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race. – George Bernard Shaw

The proper means of increasing the love we bear our native country is to reside some time in a foreign one. – William Shenstone

Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. – Adlai E. Stevenson

It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind. – Voltaire

The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism. – Earl Warren

Page topic: Good Patriotism quotes: Best famous quotes about Patriotism

Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on his own dunghill. – Richard Aldington

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. – James A. Baldwin

The love of one’s country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border? – Pablo Casals

It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars. – Arthur C. Clarke

There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured with what is right in America. – William J. Clinton

Patriotism is easy to understand in America. It means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country. – Calvin Coolidge

A man’s country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle and patriotism is loyalty to that principle. – George William Curtis

I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world. – Eugene V. Debs

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world. – Diogenes

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism – how passionately I hate them! – Albert Einstein

Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind. – Albert Einstein

I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country. – Nathan Hale

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours. – William R. Inge

Page topic: Good quotes about Patriotism: Some of the best great quotes about Patriotism

This very moment is a seed from which the flowers of tomorrow’s happiness grow. – Margaret Lindsey

The best thing one can do when it’s raining is to let it rain. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The counterfeit and counterpart of Nature is reproduced in art. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Good heavens, of what uncostly material is our earthly happiness composed… if we only knew it. What incomes have we not had from a flower, and how unfailing are the dividends of the seasons. – James Russell Lowell

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time. – John Lubbock

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books. – John Lubbock

For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver. – Martin Luther

There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before. – Robert Lynd

The coconut trees, lithe and graceful, crowd the beach like a minuet of slender elderly virgins adopting flippant poses. – William Manchester

The Universe is one great kindergarten for man. Everything that exists has brought with it its own peculiar lesson. – Orison Swett Marden

Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes – every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves its impress upon the soul of man. – Orison Swett Marden

There are always flowers for those who want to see them. – Henri Matisse

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew. – Marshall McLuhan

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. – Margaret Mead

By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet. – Thomas Merton

Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet. – Roger Miller

There are many paths to the top of the mountain, but only one view. – Harry Millner

Environmentalists have long been fond of saying that the sun is the only safe nuclear reactor, situated as it is some ninety-three million miles away. – Stephanie Mills

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers. – Claude Monet

Fame will go by and, so long, I’ve had you, fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I experience, but that’s not where I live. – Marilyn Monroe

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. – Toni Morrison

There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation’s braggart lords. – John Muir

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul. – John Muir

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. – John Muir

How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! – John Muir

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in. – John Muir

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. – John Muir

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools. – John Muir

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. – John Muir

We all travel the milky way together, trees and men… trees are travellers, in the ordinary sense. They make journeys, not very extensive ones, it is true: but our own little comes and goes are only little more than tree-wavings – many of them not so much. – John Muir

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. – John Muir

The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls. – John Muir

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. – John Muir

Nature chose for a tool, not the earthquake or lightning to rend and split asunder, not the stormy torrent or eroding rain, but the tender snow-flowers noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries. – John Muir

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. – John Muir

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us. – Iris Murdoch

Every flower is a soul blossoming in nature. – Gerard De Nerval

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. – Anais Nin

I know why familles were created, with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed. – Anais Nin

Having family responsibilities and concerns just has to make you a more understanding person. – Sandra Day O’Connor

I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty. – Georgia O’Keeffe

Remember when atmospheric contaminants were romantically called stardust? – Lane Olinghouse

There are truths on this side of the Pyranees, which are falsehoods on the other. – Blaise Pascal

Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades. – Boris Pasternak

Flowers are without hope. Because hope is tomorrow and flowers have no tomorrow. – Antonio Porchia

In a pond koi can reach lengths of eighteen inches. Amazingly, when placed in a lake, koi can grow to three feet long. The metaphor is obvious. You are limited by how you see the world. – Vince Poscente

I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend? – Robert Redford

A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water. – Carl Reiner

Sorrows gather around great souls as storms do around mountains; but, like them, they break the storm and purify the air of the plain beneath them. – Jean Paul Richter

When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck. – James Whitcomb Riley

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night. – Rainer Maria Rilke

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather. – John Ruskin

I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite. – Bertrand Russell

In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. – Carl Sagan

And how should a beautiful, ignorant stream of water know it heads for an early release – out across the desert, running toward the Gulf, below sea level, to murmur its lullaby, and see the Imperial Valley rise out of burning sand with cotton blossoms, wheat, watermelons, roses, how should it know? – Carl Sandburg

Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split the boulder. – Carl Sandburg

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. – George Santayana

Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth. – Albert Schweitzer

Unless a tree has borne blossoms in spring, you will vainly look for fruit on it in autumn. – Walter Scott

Each is like a river that leaves behind its name and shape, the whole course of its path, to vanish into the vast sea of God. – Richard Selzer

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin. – William Shakespeare

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. – William Shakespeare

Fishes live in the sea, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones. – William Shakespeare

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does. – George Bernard Shaw

I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens. – Isaac Bashevis Singer

What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for Beauty, and never see the Dawn! – Logan P. Smith

He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature. – Socrates

Break open a cherry tree and there are no flowers, but the spring breeze brings forth myriad blossoms. – Ikkyu Sojun

Only one koan matters – you. – Ikkyu Sojun

It is one of the secrets of Nature in its mood of mockery that fine weather lays heavier weight on the mind and hearts of the depressed and the inwardly tormented than does a really bad day with dark rain sniveling continuously and sympathetically from a dirty sky. – Muriel Spark

A city where everyone seemed to live in a bungalow on a broad avenue lined with palm, pepper or eucalyptus trees, where there was never any snow. – Kevin Starr

Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom – and lakes die. – Gil Stern

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit. – Robert Louis Stevenson

There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you… In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself. – Ruth Stout

Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven. – Rabindranath Tagore

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. – Rabindranath Tagore

Life has loveliness to sell, all beautiful and splendid things, blue waves whitened on a cliff, soaring fire that sways and sings, and children’s faces looking up, holding wonder like a cup. – Sara Teasdale

Grass grows by inches but it’s killed by feet. – George Thoma

Once you have heard the lark, known the swish of feet through hill-top grass and smelt the earth made ready for the seed, you are never again going to be fully happy about the cities and towns that man carries like a crippling weight upon his back. – Gwyn Thomas

I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn. – Henry David Thoreau

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. – Henry David Thoreau

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. – Henry David Thoreau

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself. – Henry David Thoreau

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. – Henry David Thoreau

The bluebird carries the sky on his back. – Henry David Thoreau

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. – Henry David Thoreau

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines. – Henry David Thoreau

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads. – Henry David Thoreau

Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend. – Mao Tse-Tung

It’s hard for the modern generation to understand Thoreau, who lived beside a pond but didn’t own water skis or a snorkel. – Bill Vaughan

Human subtelty will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does Nature, because in her inventions, nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous. – Leonardo da Vinci

Fragments came floating into his mind like bits of wood drifting down a stream, and he fished them out and fitted them together. – Elizabeth Gray Vining

The magnificence of mountains, the serenity of nature – nothing is safe from the idiot marks of man’s passing. – Loudon Wainwright

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. – Alice Walker

Those little nimble musicians of the air, that warble forth their curious ditties, with which nature hath furnished them to the shame of art. – Izaak Walton

Maybe nature is fundamentally ugly, chaotic and complicated. But if it’s like that, then I want out. – Steven Weinberg

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative. – H. G. Wells

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books. – Walt Whitman

Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed. – Walt Whitman

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. – Walt Whitman

You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin, and even vagueness – ignorance, credulity – helps your enjoyment of these things. – Walt Whitman

The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children. – Thornton Wilder

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks. – Tennessee Williams

Spring is nature’s way of saying, “Let’s party!” – Robin Williams

Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher. – William Wordsworth

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. – Frank Lloyd Wright

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show. – Andrew Wyeth

Page topic: Good Nature quotes: Best famous quotes about Nature

I don’t believe in having bands for solo records. – Mick Jagger

Music is love in search of a word. – Sidney Lanier

Virtues are acquired through endeavor, which rests wholly upon yourself. – Sidney Lanier

If you want to be found stand where the seeker seeks. – Sidney Lanier

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music. – Gustav Mahler

Without music, life would be a mistake. – Friedrich Nietzsche

In music the passions enjoy themselves. – Friedrich Nietzsche

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn’t have to go to an osteopath, then there’s something wrong. – Simon Rattle

Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life. – Jean Paul Richter

The advice I am giving always to all my students is above all to study the music profoundly… music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees. – Andre Segovia

Everywhere in the world, music enhances a hall, with one exception: Carnegie Hall enhances the music. – Isaac Stern

Music is the shorthand of emotion. – Leo Tolstoy

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory. – Oscar Wilde

Page topic: Good Music quotes: Best famous quotes about Music

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. – Maya Angelou

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible. – W. H. Auden

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. – Berthold Auerbach

Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once. – Robert Browning

Music is well said to be the speech of angels. – Thomas Carlyle

When I speak of the gifted listener, I am thinking of the nonmusician primarily, of the listener who intends to retain his amateur status. It is the thought of just such a listener that excites the composer in me. – Aaron Copland

You are the music while the music lasts. – T. S. Eliot

You can never get silence anywhere nowadays, have you noticed? – Bryan Ferry

Secretly, I wanted to look like Jimi Hendrix, but I could never quite pull it off. – Bryan Ferry

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune. – Kin Hubbard

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. – Victor Hugo

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. – Aldous Huxley

I don’t believe in having bands for solo records. – Mick Jagger

Page topic: Good quotes about Music: Some of the best great quotes about Music