Henny Youngman

A doctor gave a man six months to live. The man couldn't pay his bill, so he gave him another six months.

I've been in love with the same woman for forty-one years. If my wife finds out, she'll kill me.

I've got all the money I'll ever need, if I die by four o'clock.

If at first you don't succeed... so much for skydiving.

If my mother knew I did this for a living, she'd kill me. She thinks I'm selling dope.

A Jewish woman had two chickens. One got sick, so the woman made chicken soup out of the other one to help the sick one get well.  

A self-taught man usually has a poor teacher and a worse student.

Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who'll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness? It means you're in the wrong house, that's what it means.

How to drive a guy crazy: send him a telegram and on the top put 'page 2.'

I know a man who doesn't pay to have his trash taken out. How does he get rid of his trash? He gift wraps it, and puts in into an unlocked car.

I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up - they have no holidays.

I played a great horse yesterday! It took seven horses to beat him.

I played a lot of tough clubs in my time. Once a guy in one of those clubs wanted to bet me $10 that I was dead. I was afraid to bet.

I take my wife everywhere, but she keeps finding her way back.

Max Born

The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it, seems to me the deepest root of all that is evil in the world.

Somewhere in our doctrine is hidden a concept, unjustified by experience, which we must eliminate to open up the road.

I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy.

It is true that many scientists are not philosophically minded and have hitherto shown much skill and ingenuity but little wisdom.

There are metaphysical problems, which cannot be disposed of by declaring them meaningless.

If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success.

Intellect distinguishes between the possible and the impossible; reason distinguishes between the sensible and the senseless. Even the possible can be senseless.

There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that 'belief' must be discarded and replaced by 'the scientific method.

Soren Kierkegaard

I must find a truth that is true for me.

The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner, put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and the way he understands it.

It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.

If I have ventured wrongly, very well, life then helps me with its penalty. But if I haven't ventured at all, who helps me then?

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.

I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.

I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.

I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations - one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it - you will regret both.

Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.

Karl Marx

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.

Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

Money does not arise by convention, any more than the state does. It arises out of exchange, and arises naturally out of exchange; it is a product of the same.

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.

The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

Michelangelo

If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.

Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

Carving is easy, you just go down to the skin and stop.

Death and love are the two wings that bear the good man to heaven.

Even if you are divine, you don't disdain male consorts.

Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come.

Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.

From such a gentle thing, from such a fountain of all delight, my every pain is born.

Genius is eternal patience.

I live in sin, to kill myself I live; no longer my life my own, but sin's; my good is given to me by heaven, my evil by myself, by my free will, of which I am deprived.

If in my youth I had realized that the sustaining splendour of beauty of with which I was in love would one day flood back into my heart, there to ignite a flame that would torture me without end, how gladly would I have put out the light in my eyes.

Kenzaburo Oe

I am an anarchist who loves democracy.

I think I am doing my works to link myself, my family, with society — with the cosmos.

I don’t have faith nor do I think I will have it in the future, but I’m not an atheist. My faith is that of a secular person. You might call it “morality.”

Our credo, our theme, or our imagination is that of the peripheral human being. The man who is in the center does not have anything to write.

Human history is fraught with tragedies in which man spared no effort to destroy with millenarian joy, only to learn that no messiah appeared afterwards.

The fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world.

I cannot talk about myself otherwise than by saying "Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself".

To obliterate from the Constitution the principle of eternal peace will be nothing but an act of betrayal against the peoples of Asia and the victims of the Atom Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

William Blake

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
in the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?
Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?
Or Love in a golden bowl?

Degrade first the arts if you'd mankind degrade,
Hire idiots to paint with cold light and hot shade.

A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.

Great things are done when men and mountains meet;
This is not done by jostling in the street.

David Hilbert

We must know. We will know. (Epitaph)

One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it.

History teaches the continuity of the development of science. We know that every age has its own problems, which the following age either solves or casts aside as profitless and replaces by new ones.

Mathematics is the foundation of all exact knowledge of natural phenomena.

A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street.

Galileo was no idiot. Only an idiot could believe that science requires martyrdom - that may be necessary in religion, but in time a scientific result will establish itself.

How thoroughly it is ingrained in mathematical science that every real advance goes hand in hand with the invention of sharper tools and simpler methods which, at the same time, assist in understanding earlier theories and in casting aside some more complicated developments.

If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?

If one were to bring ten of the wisest men in the world together and ask them what was the most stupid thing in existence, they would not be able to discover anything so stupid as astrology.

Mathematical science is in my opinion an indivisible whole, an organism whose vitality is conditioned upon the connection of its parts.

The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.

Pablo Picasso

Art is not made to decorate rooms. It is an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.

Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.

Disciples be damned. It's not interesting. It's only the masters that matter. Those who create.

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

Every positive value has its price in negative terms... the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Everything you can imagine is real.

Stanley Kubrick

The greatest nations have all acted like gangsters and the smallest like prostitutes.

There's something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories.

I have always enjoyed dealing with a slightly surrealistic situation and presenting it in a realistic manner.

The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.

Any time you take a chance you better be sure the rewards are worth the risk because they can put you away just as fast for a ten dollar heist as they can for a million dollar job.

Here's to five miserable months on the wagon and the irreparable harm that it's caused me.

I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.