Favorite aphorisms, adages, sayings and quotes – (mostly learned, a few made up) – collected over many years …

aphorism: a terse saying embodying a universal truth or astute observation.

adage: a traditional saying expressing a common experience or observation.

saying: something said, especially a proverb or apothegm.

apothegm: a short, pithy instructive saying; a terse remark or aphorism.

quotation: something that is quoted.

quote: to repeat (a passage, phrase, etc.) from a book, speech, or the like.

 

 

   Always take the high road.

   Do it now, it won’t get easier later.

   Think logically, it’s almost always the best way.

   Patience.

   You have to ask for what you want. No one can read your mind.

   Don’t worry about things you can’t control.

   You get what you give.

   … as we age, the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier … much heavier. (Bruce Springsteen)

   We are each responsible for our own happiness. (Pamela Kirst, Ph.D.)

   No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. (Eleanor Roosevelt)

   Do more than expected, it’s always easier to cut back than to add.

   There is almost always another explanation for everything.

   There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics. (Benjamin Disraeli)

   La théorie c’est bon, mais ça n’empêche pas d’exister [the theory is good, but that doesn’t mean it’s true]. (Charcot)

   Thinking is better than knowing, but seeing is better still. (Goethe)

   If you’re going to tell a lie, take notes.

   Going to medical school doesn’t qualify you to judge people, you need law school for that.

   Hoof-beats usually mean horses, not zebras; common things occur commonly.

   A meal without wine is like a day without sunshine. (Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, 19th C gastronome)

   When a man tires of London, he tires of life. (Samuel Johnson)

   There’s no such thing as ‘free.’ (Fannie Podberesky, my grandmother)

   You pay cheap, you get cheap. (Fannie Podberesky)

   When they say it’s not the money, it’s the money. (Fannie Podberesky)

   Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them. (Julius Irving)

   Life is not about winning. Life is about doing your best when your best is needed. (John Wooden)

   It’s better to walk alone than with a crowd going in the wrong direction. (Diane Grant)

   Linus: I guess it’s wrong to always be worrying about tomorrow. Maybe we should only think about today.
Charlie Brown: No, that’s giving up. I’m still hoping that yesterday will get better. (Charles Schulz)

   A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives. (Jackie Robinson)

   No one who is insensitive to poetry and song can have a respect for learning, and no one who has no respect for learning can have real respect for justice, and no one who does not respect justice can, in fact, manifest a true love for his country. (Eugene McCarthy)

   Liberty without learning is always in peril; learning without liberty is always in vain. (John F. Kennedy)

 

For pathologists:

   When you go to the movies, the room isn’t light blue, it’s black. When you take a photograph of a specimen, use a black background.

   It’s the specimen that counts, not the background.

   Cancer criminal, not obey laws. (Sadao Otani, M.D., my teacher)

   The best diagnostic tool (for a pathologist) is a microscope connected to the brain. (Hans Popper, M.D., Ph.D., my teacher)

   You can train dogs and cats, you can even train surgeons and gynecologists, but you have to teach pathologists. (Paul Klemperer, M.D.)

 

   Life is messy. (Pamela Kirst, Ph.D.)

   When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seemed invincible, but in the end, they always fall – think of it, always. (Mahatma Gandhi)

   … in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart… (Anne Frank)

   … the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated. (Eliza Doolittle/George Bernard Shaw)

   There is but one thing of real value: to cultivate truth and justice, and to live without anger in the midst of lying and unjust men. (Marcus Aurelius)

   Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. (Blaise Pascal)

   I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my church. (Thomas Paine)

   The atheist staring from the attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God. (Martin Buber)

   Waving his arm around, when asked if he goes to a temple or church: A hospital is my temple. (Nathan B. Friedman, M.D.)

   All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent. (Thomas Jefferson)

   Tzedek, tzedek tirdof [justice, justice shall you pursue]. (Deuteronomy)

   The world is a dangerous place. Not because of the people who are evil: but because of the people who don’t do anything about it. (Angela Clemente)

   A teacher affects eternity, he (she) can never tell where his influence stops. (slightly modified from Henry Adams)

   To open the mind and the heart of youth, to induce tolerance, fairness and understanding, that is the primary goal of education. (Felix Friedberg, Ph.D., biochemist, my teacher)

   Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. (William Butler Yeats)

   When you learn, teach. When you get, give. (Maya Angelou)

   It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. (Harry Truman)

   Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. (Albert Einstein)

   When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. (Sherlock Holmes/Arthur Conan Doyle)

   The tension between standing apart and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer. That is where we begin. (Nadine Gordimer)

   Writing is not an act of creation, it is an act of choice. (Barry Kemp)

   Amateurs look for inspiration. I just get up and go to work. (Chuck Close)

   There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real. (James Salter)

   Becoming a writer is not a ‘career decision’ like becoming a doctor or a policemen. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you are not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days. (Paul Auster)

   I don’t judge people based on race, creed, color or gender. I judge people based on spelling, grammar, punctuation and sentence structure.

   I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure. (Clarence Darrow)

   All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is left to us. (Gandalf/Tolkien)

   You retire, you die. (Hans Popper, M.D., Ph.D., my teacher – who, productive to the end, had dozens of scientific papers published in the year after he died at age 85)

   Do not squander time, that is the stuff life is made of. (on the wall at Tara/Gone with the Wind/Margaret Mitchell)

   Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense: the creative act. (Kenneth Rexroth)

   There are so many songs in me that won’t be sung. (Charles Aznavour)

 

 

Favorite poems:

 

In Broken Images

He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.
He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.
Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance.
Assuming their relevance he assumes the fact.
When the fact fails him he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me I approve my senses.
He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.
He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.

Robert Graves

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees. All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea. I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known,–– cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honor’d of them all––
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
to whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,––
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me,–
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads,–– you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,–
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

After every war

After every war
Someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
Straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
To the side of the road,
So the corpse-filled wagons
Can pass.

Wislawa Szymborska