Quotes - Joy (The United States) Showing 1-30 of 126

#1

“Our sense that a library is a public good and our idea of what such a place should look like derived precisely from a model created in Rome several thousand years ago.”
― Stephen Greenblatt

tags: libraries

6 likes

#2

“What now strikes as remarkable about the new moneyed class of the nineteenth century is their complete irresponsibility;they see everything in terms of individual success, with hardly any consciousness that the community exists.”
― George Orwell

tags: politics, society

3 likes

#3

“But what a way to do things-never to perform a decent action until you are kicked into it and the rest of the world has ceased to believe that your motives can possibly be honest.”
― George Orwell

tags: decency, politics

3 likes

#4

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ”
― George Orwell

tags: politics-language

2153 likes

#5

“No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.”
― Babara Tuchman

tags: hubris, leadership

4 likes

#6

“At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.”
― Rose Macauley

20 likes

#7

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

tags: atheism, philosophy

4627 likes

#8

“With your grandmother, you always have a choice...You can do things her way or you can wish you had.”
― RICHARD RUSSO'S GRANDFATHER

1 likes

#9

“If any man tells you he loves America, yet hates labor, he is a liar. If any man tells you he trusts America, yet fears labor, he is a fool.”
― Abraham Lincoln

tags: labor

47 likes

#10

“Lincoln understood the importance, as one delegate put it, of integrating “all the elements of the Republican party—including the impracticable, the Pharisees, the better-than-thou declaimers, the long-haired men and the short-haired women.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

tags: and-he-was-the-last-one

5 likes

#11

“When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.”
― Abraham Lincoln

tags: abraham-lincoln, religion

2628 likes

#12

“The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.”
― Mark Twain

tags: humor, philosophy, religion

2510 likes

#13

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

1974 likes

#14

“...and he was smiling (his happiest days were behind him the minute he met her, but he didn't know that yet...”
― Jamie Attenberg

tags: man-woman-relationship

2 likes

#15

“What's the point of having a book club if you don't get to eat brownies and drink wine?”
― Jami Attenberg, The Middlesteins

tags: book-clubs, food

15 likes

#16

“Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

tags: hard, poetry

883 likes

#17

“Ah, I know," Bridget said. "For sure, you have the sixth sense." Mrs. Glover, wrestling with the plum pudding, snorted her disapproval. She was of the opinion that five senses were too many, let alone adding on another.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

tags: curmudgeons, esp, senses

4 likes

#18

“Lovers of small numbers go benignly potty,
Believe all tales are thirteen chapters long,
Have animal doubles, carry pentagrams,
Are Millerites, Baconians, Flat-Earth-Men.

Lovers of big numbers go horribly mad,
would have the Swiss abolished, all of us
Well-purged, somatotyped, baptised, taught baseball:
They empty bars, spoil parties, run for Congress.”
― W.H. Auden, Auden: Poems

10 likes

#19

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

tags: books, library

29747 likes

#20

“Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.”
― Edmund Burke

tags: majority-v-minority

31 likes

#21

“skinny as horsehair in a glass of milk”
― James McBride, The Good Lord Bird

tags: appearance

5 likes

#22

“...as I am not fond of giving advice,having seldom seen it taken”
― Benjamin Franklin

tags: advice

2 likes

#23

“Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain...”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

tags: grief, life

1 likes

#24

“My fear of the future, she says, has not yet failed.”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, The End of Days

tags: pessimism

2 likes

#25

“Fitger behaves like more of an ass than he actually is.”
― Julie Schumacher

tags: personality-traits

0 likes

#26

“For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time, and all human history was a history of violence.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

30 likes

#27