kapilis’s most recent Quotables

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

I believe that appreciation is a holy thing, that when we look for what's best in the person we happen to be with at the moment, we're doing what God does; so in appreciating our neighbor, we're participating in something truly sacred.

Fair play to those who dare to dream!

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, through a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won't.

A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

Anybody can write the first line of a poem, but it is a very difficult task to make the second line rhyme with the first.

‘classic’. A book which people praise and don’t read.

Never let your schooling interfere with your education.

The right word might be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.