Dr.Jay’s Book of Familiar (and not so familiar) Quotations

Do I contradict myself?

Very well, then, I contradict myself.

I am large. I contain multitudes.

Walt Whitman

That same voice told the angels to bow to Adam,

because they were identical with Adam

Rumi

If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth

Tim O’Brien

at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which

Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in

uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason

John Keats

I’m built for comfort, I ain’t built for speed

Willie Dixon

This, they say, is what we live by—this unseizable force

Virginia Woolf

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reality has a liberal bias

Stephen Colbert

I have been in love with painting ever since I became conscious of it at the age of six. I drew some pictures I thought fairly good when I was fifty, but really nothing I did before the age of seventy was of any value at all. At seventy-three I have at last caught every aspect of nature—birds, fish, animals, insects, trees, grasses, all. When I am eighty I shall have developed still further, and I will really master the secrets of art at ninety. When I reach a hundred my work will be truly sublime, and my final goal will be attained around the age of one hundred and ten, when every line and dot I draw will be imbued with life.

Hokusai

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons

Dostoyevsky

if a concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving.

If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of him.

James Baldwin

laughter has dug more useful tunnels all by itself than all the tears on earth

Julio Cortazar

There’s a fine line between clever and stupid

David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap

Any definition is a limit

Wendell Berry

The Church says: The body is a sin. Science says: The body is a machine.

Advertising says: The body is a business. The body says: I am a fiesta.

Eduardo Galeano

Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by arts of love.

Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent than the one derived from fear of punishment

Gandhi

And, if I have been a little malicious, well, one must amuse oneself

Laclos

Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?

Lawrence Durrell

If you think you are capable of living without writing, do not write

Rilke

I believe in this and it’s been tested by research, he who fucks nuns will later join the church

Joe Strummer

The secret source of humor is not joy, but sorrow; there is no laughter in heaven

Mark Twain

It’s true that everything is done from solitude, but without all the other solitudes it would be impossible

Ariel Dorfman

To think is to be full of sorrow

Stendhal

As the Buddha said, “All human beings are quite deluded.”

The line between the staff and patients is sometimes frighteningly thin....It’s only a matter of degree.

Stephen Cope

Where some have found their paradise, others just come to harm

Joni Mitchell

God knows it’s sacrilege to waste the talent for idleness that I possess

William Faulkner

The fool doth think that he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool

Shakespeare

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought—these are the artist’s highest joy.

Thomas Mann

I offered up my innocence. I got repaid with scorn.

Bob Dylan

I will show you fear in a handfull of dust

T. S. Eliot

freedom won through non-violence will mean the inauguration of a new order in the world.

There is no hope for mankind in any other way

Gandhi

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.

If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

The Gospel of Thomas

How do you think it feels, and when do you think it stops?

Lou Reed

In abstract love for humanity one almost always loves no one but oneself

Dostoyevsky

Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies - or else? The chain reaction of evil –

hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world

Bruce Springsteen