John Quotes

Walking is easy ... but it requires faith to find the right path.

I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.

It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

The muttered hint, "Remember, you have a stroke here," freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.

The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is - its irresistible charm - a fire.

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.

The one certainty in tiger tracks is: follow them long enough and you will eventually arrive at a tiger, unless the tiger arrives at you first.

The poor we shall always have with us, but why the hungry?

Yes, and I also like jumping out of tall buildings.

Thinking is to me the greatest fatigue in the world.

As if a woman of education bought things because she wanted 'em.

The want of a thing is perplexing enough, but the possession of it, is intolerable.

Let our weakness be what it will, mankind will still be weaker; and whilst there is a world, 'tis woman that will govern it.

Tho marriage be a lottery in which there are a wondrous many blanks, yet there is one inestimable lot in which the only heaven on earth is written.

Repentance for past crimes is just and easy; but sin-no-more's a task too hard for mortals

We gentlemen, whose chariot's roll only upon the four aces, are apt to have a wheel out of order.

We're gaily yet, we're gaily yet, And we're not very fow, but we're gaily yet; Then set ye awhile, and tipple a bit, For we's not very fow, but we're gaily yet.

No command of art, No toil, can help you hear; Earth's minstrelsy falls clear But on the listening heart.

Holding occasion by the hand, Not over nice 'twixt weed and flower, Waiving what none can understand, I make mine hour.

You haven't seen me in my own ads. You don't see my logo all over my clothes. From the beginning, I wanted the clothes to stand on their own.

There were two saints in the desert, who had sewed thorns into all their clothes; and we seek for nothing but comfort!

No one has the right to change Paris, the protesters say, and argue that the city is the patrimony of all mankind.

We get richer and richer in filthier and filthier communities until we reach a final state of affluent misery - crocus on a garbage heap.

I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.

An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.

Storybook happiness involves every form of pleasant thumb-twiddling; true happiness involves the full use of one's powers and talents.

Surgery is always second best. If you can so something else, it’s better. Surgery is limited. It is operating on someone who has no place else to go.

We have the deepest and most liquid capital markets in the world.

Well, I make a practice of not commenting on the role of the relative exchange value of our currency.

We must start with the reality that corporations cannot guarantee anyone a lifetime job any more than corporations have a guarantee of immortality.

We're focused on doing the things that make the economy perform well, and as you do that, reduce deficits, for one, very important; secondly, keep growth rates high, very important.

We have to keep our eye on inflation, but so far inflation remains reasonably in check on the global stage.

I think we'll build a consensus for action on Social Security reform which will reduce that long-term unfunded obligation and put the system on a sustainable basis.

Higher energy prices act like a tax.

So ensuring the integrity of the data and integrity and validity of the connection is a very important element in any company's strategy that is moving towards a Web service paradigm.

Over the near term there is clearly the opportunity to work with Microsoft to do to a better job of creating a more secure Windows experience for users around the world.

Don't get small units caught in between the forces of history.

I have nothing to say. And I am saying it. That's poetry.