Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.
It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man’s character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured. But I fear - I fear greatly - the storm will not pass. It will rage and it will roar, even more loudly, even more widely.
America is ungovernable. He who serves a revolution ploughs the sea.
Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.
The effort we make in trying to get white people to let us alone or invest in us is looking pretty futile…. I am a reluctant separatist
I sometimes give myself admirable advice, but I am incapable of taking it.
It is idle to play the lyre for an ass.
There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.
If you chase something too desperately, it eludes you.
If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.
Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.
When the remedy you have offered only increases the disease, then leave him who will not be cured, and tell your story to someone who seeks the truth.
I tell people diets don't work. And I don't care what they say. I have tried them all.
If you have an impossible dream, a dream that cannot be fulfilled, the friendly thing for me to do is to put a stop to you wasting your life at it.
It's no use crying over spilt summits.
I should be very willing to redress men wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes, had not Cervantes, in that all too true tale of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail.
He might as well plant an oak in a flowerpot, and expect it to thrive, as imagine he can restore her to vigour in the soil of his shallow cares!
Getting angry over something that won't change is like seeing what happens if you hit your hand with a hammer over and over again, and being surprised each time when it hurts. So you might as well stop doing it.
When our time's up, it's up. All the money in the world won't buy you one more day.
It is easy to prescribe improvement for others; it is easy to organize something, to institutionalize this or that, to pass laws, multiply bureaucratic agencies, form pressure groups, start revolutions, change forms of government, tinker at political theory. The fact that these expedients have been tried unsuccessfully in every conceivable combination for 6,000 years has not noticeably impaired a credulous unintelligent willingness to keep on trying them again and again.
You cannot save everyone. Some people are going to destroy themselves no matter how much you try to help them.
They tell us sometimes that if we had only kept quiet, all these desirable things would have come about of themselves. I am reminded of the Greek clown who, having seen an archer bring down a flying bird, remarked, sagely: 'You might have saved your arrow, for the bird would anyway have been killed by the fall.'
You can't make everybody love you. It's an exercise in futility, and it's probably not even a good idea to try.
There's folks 'ud hold a sieve under the pump and expect to carry away the water.
