Quotable Quotes

by Editors of Reader's Digest

  Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.

  —TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

  in The New York Times

  Time is a versatile performer. It flies, marches on, heals all wounds, runs out and will tell.

  —FRANKLIN P. JONES

  Time goes, you say? Ah, no! Alas, Time stays, we go.

  —AUSTIN DOBSON

  Time marks us while we are marking time.

  —THEODORE ROETHKE

  Straw for the Fire

  Time wastes our bodies and our wits, but we waste time, so we are quits.

  —Verse and Worse

  In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes: so with present time.

  —LEONARDO DA VINCI

  You don’t get to choose how you’re going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you’re going to live. Now.

  —JOAN BAEZ

  The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is, rather, born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life.

  —ERIC HOFFER

  Yesterday is a canceled check; tomorrow is a promissory note; today is ready cash—use it.

  —KAY LYONS

  How you spend your time is more important than how you spend your money. Money mistakes can be corrected, but time is gone forever.

  —DAVID B. NORRIS

  Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.

  —JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE

  Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.

  —WILL ROGERS

  Today’s greatest labor-saving device is tomorrow.

  —TOM WILSON

  Mañana is often the busiest day of the week.

  —SPANISH PROVERB

  One of these days is none of these days.

  —HENRI TUBACH

  By the streets of “by and by” one arrives at the house of “never.”

  —SPANISH PROVERB

  Don’t put off for tomorrow what you can do today, because if you enjoy it today you can do it again tomorrow.

  —JAMES A. MICHENER

  Nothing adds to a person’s leisure time like doing things when they are supposed to be done.

  —O. A. BATTISTA

  For disappearing acts, it’s hard to beat what happens to the eight hours supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work.

  —DOUG LARSON

  When we don’t waste time, we always have enough.

  —JEAN DRAPEAU

  As if we could kill time without injuring eternity!

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o’clock has the whole afternoon ruined for him already.

  —LIN YUTANG

  The Importance of Living

  The surest way to be late is to have plenty of time.

  —LEO KENNEDY

  Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are.

  —MARY JEAN IRION

  Butterflies count not months but moments, and yet have time enough.

  —RABINDRANATH TAGORE

  Time, for all its smuggling in of new problems, conspicuously cancels others.

  —CLARA WINSTON

  in The Massachusetts Review

  Time has a wonderful way of weeding out the trivial.

  —RICHARD BEN SAPIR

  Quest

  I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read and all the friends I want to see.

  —JOHN BURROUGHS

  Yesterday is experience. Tomorrow is hope. Today is getting from one to the other as best we can.

  —JOHN M. HENRY

  You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.

  —JAMES M. BARRIE

  We are tomorrow’s past.

  —MARY WEBB

  Precious Bane

  The present is the point at which time touches eternity.

  —C. S. LEWIS

  Screwtape Letters

  Life is uncharted territory. It reveals its story one moment at a time.

  —LEO BUSCAGLIA

  in Executive Health Report

  I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  There is no distance on this earth as far away as yesterday.

  —ROBERT NATHAN

  So Love Returns

  The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

  —JESSAMYN WEST

  He who believes that the past cannot be changed has not yet written his memoirs.

  —TORVALD GAHLIN

  There is a time to let things happen and a time to make things happen.

  —HUGH PRATHER

  Notes on Love and Courage

  Every man regards his own life as the New Year’s Eve of time.

  —JEAN PAUL RICHTER

  The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.

  —DEAN ACHESON

  I love best to have each thing in its season, doing without it at all other times.

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  Life is not dated merely by years. Events are sometimes the best calendars.

  —BENJAMIN DISRAELI

  Time has no divisions to mark its passage; there is never a thunderstorm to announce the beginning of a new year. It is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

  —THOMAS MANN

  Life is not a “brief candle.” It is a splendid torch that I want to make burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

  —BERNARD SHAW

  ALL THE ART OF LIVING . . .

  All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.

  —HAVELOCK ELLIS

  God asks no man whether he will accept life. That is not the choice. One must take it. The only choice is how.

  —HENRY WARD BEECHER

  If we live good lives, the times are also good. As we are, such are the times.

  —ST. AUGUSTINE

  We are here to add what we can to, not to get what we can from, life.

  —SIR WILLIAM OSLER

  Presence is more than just being there.

  —MALCOLM S. FORBES

  The Further Sayings of Chairman Malcolm

  There are three things that if a man does not know, he cannot live long in this world: what is too much for him, what is too little for him and what is just right for him.

  —SWAHILI PROVERB

  You only live once. But if you work it right, once is enough.

  —FRED ALLEN

  Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.

  —LIN YUTANG

  There is more to life than increasing its speed.

  —MOHANDAS K. GANDHI

  Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  I believe the art of living consists not so much in complicating simple things as in simplifying things that are not.

  —FRANÇOIS HERTEL

  Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough.

  —CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER

 
Seize from every moment its unique novelty, and do not prepare your joys.

  —ANDRÉ GIDE

  Nourritures Terrestres

  Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.

  —W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

  If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.

  —LIN YUTANG

  He does not seem to me to be a free man who does not sometimes do nothing.

  —CICERO

  How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

  —ANNIE DILLARD

  The Writing Life

  A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward, to reset oneself by an inner compass.

  —MAY SARTON

  At Seventy (A Journal)

  The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.

  —SYDNEY J. HARRIS

  A vacation is having nothing to do and all day to do it in.

  —ROBERT ORBEN

  The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a star.

  —ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN

  A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness.

  —ELSA SCHIAPARELLI

  There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

  —BERNARD SHAW

  We never repent of having eaten too little.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON

  One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.

  —LUCIANO PAVAROTTI WITH WILLIAM WRIGHT

  Pavarotti, My Own Story

  There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed.

  —MOHANDAS K. GANDHI

  Whatever will satisfy hunger is good food.

  —CHINESE PROVERB

  ’Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.

  —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

  Never eat more than you can lift.

  —Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life, as told to Henry Beard

  There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.

  —ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.

  —EDUARDO GALEANO

  The Book of Embraces

  Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars.

  —HENRY VAN DYKE

  The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.

  —MARCUS AURELIUS

  Part of the art of living is knowing how to compare yourself with the right people. Dissatisfaction is often the result of unsuitable comparison.

  —DR. HEINRICH SOBOTKA

  Madame

  Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.

  —ROBERT BRAULT

  in National Enquirer

  Yes, there is a nirvana; it is in leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.

  —KAHLIL GIBRAN

  When things start going your way, it’s usually because you stopped going the wrong way down a one-way street.

  —Los Angeles Times Syndicate

  One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words.

  —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

  IDEALS ARE LIKE THE STARS . . .

  Ideals are like the stars. We never reach them but, like the mariners on the sea, we chart our course by them.

  —CARL SCHURZ

  The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been kindness, beauty and truth.

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  Ideas and Opinions

  When you teach your son, you teach your son’s son.

  —THE TALMUD

  The true idealist pursues what his heart says is right in a way that his head says will work.

  —RICHARD M. NIXON

  If things were really as we wanted them to be, people would still complain that they were no longer what they used to be.

  —PIERRE DAC

  I am an idealist. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.

  —CARL SANDBURG

  SOME THINGS HAVE TO BE BELIEVED . . .

  Some things have to be believed to be seen.

  —RALPH HODGSON

  The Skylark and Other Poems

  One person with a belief is a social power equal to 99 who have only interests.

  —JOHN STUART MILL

  To believe with certainty, we must begin with doubting.

  —STANISLAUS I

  Faith is building on what you know is here, so you can reach what you know is there.

  —CULLEN HIGHTOWER

  Strike from mankind the principle of faith and men would have no more history than a flock of sheep.

  —MARK BELTAIRE

  Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.

  —CARL SAGAN

  The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

  If we were logical, the future would be bleak indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope, and we can work.

  —JACQUES COUSTEAU

  We couldn’t conceive of a miracle if none had ever happened.

  —LIBBIE FUDIM

  In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.

  —BLAISE PASCAL

  All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  Faith is knowing there is an ocean because you have seen a brook.

  —WILLIAM ARTHUR WARD

  Faith is like radar that sees through the fog—the reality of things at a distance that the human eye cannot see.

  —CORRIE TEN BOOM

  Tramp for the Lord

  Faith is the bird that sings when the dawn is still dark.

  —RABINDRANATH TAGORE

  What I admire in Columbus is not his having discovered a world but his having gone to search for it on the faith of an opinion.

  —A. ROBERT TURGOT

  If the stars should appear just one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore!

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  Many of us look at the Ten Commandments as an exam paper: eight only to be attempted.

  —MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE

  Reality Ireland

  The finest fruit of serious learning should be the ability to speak the word God without reserve or embarrassment.

  —NATHAN M. PUSEY

  Our rabbi once said, “God always answers our prayers, it’s just that sometimes the answer is no.”

  —BARBARA FEINSTEIN

  If you are not as close to God as you used to be, who moved?

  —St. Mathias’ Church Bulletin

  Sorrow looks back, worry looks around, faith looks up.

  —Quoted in Guideposts Magazine

  It is good enough to t
alk of God while we are sitting here after a nice breakfast and looking forward to a nicer luncheon, but how am I to talk of God to the millions who have to go without two meals a day? To them God can only appear as bread and butter.

  —MOHANDAS K. GANDHI

  Real religion is a way of life, not a white cloak to be wrapped around us on the Sabbath and then cast aside into the six-day closet of unconcern.

  —William Arthur Ward

  Think It Over

  HOPE IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS . . .

  Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  Hope smiles on the threshold of the year to come, whispering that it will be happier.

  —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  He who has health has hope, and he who has hope has everything.

  —ARAB PROVERB

  The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope.