—J. R. R. Tolkien
%
He heard there oft the flying sound
Of feet as light as linden-leaves,
Of music welling underground,
In hidden hollows quavering.
Now withered lay the hemlock-sheaves,
And one by one with sighing sound
Whispering fell the beechen leaves
In the wintry woodland wavering.
He sought her ever, wandering far
Where leaves of years were thickly strewn,
By light of moon and ray of star
In frosty heavens shivering.
Her mantle glinted in the moon,
As on a hill-top high and far
She danced, and at her feet was strewn
A mist of silver quivering.
When winter passed, she came again,
And her song released the sudden spring,
Like rising lark, and falling rain,
And melting water bubbling.
He saw the elven-flowers spring
About her feet, and healed again
He longed by her to dance and sing
Upon the grass untroubling.
—J. R. R. Tolkien
%
Ho! Tom Bombadil, Tom Bombadillo!
By water, wood and hill, by reed and willow,
By fire, sun and moon, harken now and hear us!
Come, Tom Bombadil, for our need is near us!
—J. R. R. Tolkien
%
Hop along my little friends, up the Withywindle!
Tom's going on ahead candles for to kindle.
Down west sinks the Sun; soon you will be groping.
When the night-shadows fall, then the door will open,
Out of the window-panes light will twinkle yellow.
Fear no alder black! Heed no hoary willow!
Fear neither root nor bough! Tom goes on before you.
Hey now! merry dol! We'll be waiting for you!
—J. R. R. Tolkien
%
I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less
than half of you half as well as you deserve.
—J. R. R. Tolkien
%
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would
be a merrier world.
—J. R. R. Tolkien
%
It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you
live near him.
—J. R. R. Tolkien
%
Never laugh at live dragons.
—Bilbo Baggins (J. R. R. Tolkien, "The Hobbit")
%
O! Wanderers in the shadowed land
despair not! For though dark they stand,
all woods there be must end at last,
and see the open sun go past:
the setting sun, the rising sun,
the day's end, or the day begun.
For east or west all woods must fail...
—J. R. R. Tolkien
%
Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
—J. R. R. Tolkien, "The Lord of the Rings"
%
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing
himself.
—Tolstoy
%
Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one
has asked them.
—Leo Tolstoy
%
I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something
else.
—Lily Tomlin
%
If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?
—Lily Tomlin
%
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
—Lily Tomlin
%
Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent,
hard-working, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get
all the publicity. But then—we elected them.
—Lily Tomlin
%
No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.
—Lily Tomlin
%
Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.
—Lily Tomlin
%
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
—Lily Tomlin
%
Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.
—Lily Tomlin
%
The trouble with the rat-race is that even if you win, you're still a
rat.
—Lily Tomlin
%
There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is
becoming an endangered synthetic.
—Lily Tomlin
%
We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.
—Lily Tomlin, as Ernestine the Operator
%
Why isn't there a special name for the tops of your feet?
—Lily Tomlin
%
It seems intuitively obvious to me, which means that it might be
wrong.
—Chris Torek
%
Mr. Jones related an incident from "some time back" when IBM Canada
Ltd. of Markham, Ont., ordered some parts from a new supplier in
Japan. The company noted in its order that acceptable quality allowed for
1.5 per cent defects (a fairly high standard in North America at the
time).
The Japanese sent the order, with a few parts packaged separately in
plastic. The accompanying letter said: "We don't know why you want 1.5 per
cent defective parts, but for your convenience, we've packed them
separately."
—Excerpted from an article in The (Toronto) Globe and Mail
%
Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies
the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen a angry
penguin charging at them in excess of 100 mph. They'd be a lot more
careful about what they say if they had.
—Linus Torvalds, announcing Linux v2.0
%
When you say "I wrote a program that crashed Windows," people just stare
at you blankly and say "Hey, I got those with the system, for
free."
—Linus Torvalds
%
Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to
distinguish what is worth reading.
—George Macaulay Trevelyan
%
The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new
questions—which time and mediocrity can solve.
—Hugh Trevor-Roper
%
The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she
served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been
found.
—Calvin Trillin
%
I've been trying for some time to develop a lifestyle that doesn't require
my presence.
—G. B. Trudeau
%
In Palm Springs, they think homelessness is caused by bad divorce
lawyers.
—G. B. Trudeau
%
Luck, that's when preparation and opportunity meet.
—Pierre Elliott Trudeau
%
A President cannot always be popular.
—Harry S Truman
%
I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out
what they want and then advise them to do it.
—Harry S Truman
%
I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it
was hell.
—Harry S Truman
%
If you can't convince them, confuse them.
—Harry S Truman
%
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the
credit.
—Harry S Truman
%
It's a recession when your neighbour loses his job; it's a depression when
you lose yours.
—Harry S Truman
%
Most of the problems a President has to face have their roots in the
past.
—Harry S Truman
%
When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.
—Harry S Truman
%
A little more moderation would be good. Of course, my life hasn't exactly
been one of moderation.
—Donald Trump
%
I like thinking big. If you're going to be thinking anything, you might as
well think big.
—Donald Trump
%
A rumor without a leg to stand on will get around some other way.
—John Tudor
%
Most people can't understand how others can blow their noses differently
than they do.
—Turgenev
%
When a man meets catastrophe on the road, he looks in his purse, but a
woman looks in her mirror.
—Margaret Turnbull
%
Umm...You do realize that "the Constitution of the United States" is not
what it rolls against to resist poison, right?
—Anson Turner, in a rec.games.int-fiction communist flamewar
%
Twinkies are more interesting than nature.
—Head of History Department Ellis Turner resolving a conflict
over documentaries
%
If I had any humility I would be perfect.
—Ted Turner
%
You know what has always puzzled me about postmodernism? The fascination
with vampires.
—Prof. William Turpin
%
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining,
but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
—Mark Twain
%
A classic is something that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants
to read.
—Mark Twain, "The Disappearance of Literature"
%
...A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was
waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.
—Mark Twain
%
Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was, that they
escaped teething.
—Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
%
Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple
for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The
mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the
serpent.
—Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
%
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
—Mark Twain
%
All generalizations are false, including this one.
—Mark Twain
%
All kings is mostly rapscallions.
—Mark Twain, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"
%
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"—a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
—Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
%
...all the modern inconveniences...
—Mark Twain
%
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is
sure.
—Mark Twain
%
Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their
guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.
—Mark Twain
%
Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.
—Mark Twain
%
...an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and quite often picturesque
liar.
—Mark Twain
%
As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.
—Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
%
Be careful of reading health books. You might die of a misprint.
—Mark Twain
%
Behold, the fool saith, "Put not all thine eggs in the one
basket"—which is but a manner of saying, "Scatter your money and your
attention"; but the wise man saith, "Put all your eggs in the one basket
and—watch that basket."
—Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
%
Better a broken promise than none at all.
—Mark Twain
%
By trying we can easily endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.
—Mark Twain
%
Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
—Mark Twain
%
Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary
necessities.
—Mark Twain
%
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on
society.
—Mark Twain
%
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of
fear.
—Mark Twain
%
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you
nothing. It was here first.
—Mark Twain
%
Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.
—Mark Twain
%
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good
example.
—Mark Twain
%
Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.
—Mark Twain
%
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you
please.
—Mark Twain
%
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.
—Mark Twain
%
Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and
how little we think of the other person.
—Mark Twain
%
Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must
have somebody to divide it with.
—Mark Twain
%
Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big
enough majority in any town?
—Mark Twain, "The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn"
%
Have a place for everything and keep the thing somewhere else; this is not
advice, it is merely custom.
—Mark Twain
%
He is now rising from affluence to poverty.
—Mark Twain
%
Honesty is the best policy—when there is money in it.
—Mark Twain
%
I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I
approved of it.
—Mark Twain
%
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
—Mark Twain
%
I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell—you see, I have
friends in both places.
—Mark Twain
%
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
—Mark Twain
%
I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.
—Mark Twain
%
I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week
sometimes to make it up.
—Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad"
%
I reverently believe that the maker who made us all makes everything in
New England, but the weather. I don't know who makes that, but I think it
must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerks factory who experiment and
learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted to
make weather for countries that require a good article, and will take
their custom elsewhere if they don't get it.
—Mark Twain
%
I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would
take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place
and kill him.
—Mark Twain
%
I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't
know.
—Mark Twain
%
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite
you. This is the principle difference between a dog and a man.
—Mark Twain
%
If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.
— Mark Twain
%
In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, "one
when he was a boy and one when he was a man."
—Mark Twain
%
In India, "cold weather" is merely a conventional phrase and has come into
use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between
weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make
it mushy.
—Mark Twain
%
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did
succeed in making those idiots understand their language.
—Mark Twain
%
In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind about the
moralities.
—Mark Twain
%
In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made
school boards.
—Mark Twain
%
In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24
hours.
—Mark Twain, on New England weather
%
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool
than to open it and remove all doubt.
—Mark Twain
%
It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around
neglected.
—Mark Twain
%
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three
unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and
the prudence never to practice either.
—Mark Twain
%
It is easier to stay out than get out.
—Mark Twain
%
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu
speech.
—Mark Twain
%
It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to
miss it.
—Mark Twain
%
It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of
opinion that makes horse-races.
—Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
%
Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles
everything. Some think it is the voice of God.
—Mark Twain
%
July 4. Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than in all
the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number left
in stock, that one fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country
has grown so.
—Mark Twain
%
Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can read.
—Mark Twain
%
Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker
will be sorry.
— Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
%
Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human
soul.
—Mark Twain
%
Man is the only animal that blushes—or needs to.
—Mark Twain
%
Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.
—Mark Twain
%
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of
advertising.
—Mark Twain
%
My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed
it.
—Mark Twain
%
Never put off until tomorrow that which can be done the day after
tomorrow.
—Mark Twain
%
Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if
she laid an asteroid.
—Mark Twain
%
Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
—Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
%
Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the
boat.
—Mark Twain
%
One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat
has only nine lives.
—Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
%
Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right
to use the editorial "we."
—Mark Twain
%
Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is
hollering about.
—Mark Twain
%
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be
prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be
banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. By Order
of the Author
—Mark Twain, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer"
%
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of
Congress. But I repeat myself.
—Mark Twain
%
Repartee is something we think of twenty-four hours too late.
—Mark Twain
%
(The Bible) has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some
blood-drenched history; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a
thousand lies.
—Mark Twain, "Letters from the Earth"
%
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the
difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
—Mark Twain
%
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
—Mark Twain
%
The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that
procession but carrying a banner.
—Mark Twain
%
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who
can't read them.
—Mark Twain
%
The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what
you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.
—Mark Twain
%
The Public is merely a multiplied "me."
—Mark Twain
%
The report of my death was an exaggeration.
—Mark Twain
%
The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in
Heaven.
—Mark Twain
%
The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid
prejudice.
—Mark Twain
%
There are people who think that honesty is always the best policy. This is
a superstition; there are times when the appearance of it is worth six of
it.
—Mark Twain
%
There is no distinctly American criminal class—except Congress.
—Mark Twain
%
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale
returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
—Mark Twain
%
Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the
work.
—Mark Twain
%
Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is
nothing but cabbage with a college education.
—Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
%
Truth is the most valuable thing we have—so let us economize it.
—Mark Twain
%
Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to
prayer.
—Mark Twain
%
Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
—Mark Twain
%
Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.
—Mark Twain
%
We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our
principles.
—Mark Twain
%
We consider that any man who can fiddle all through one of those Virginia
Reels without losing his grip, may be depended upon in any kind of musical
emergency.
—Mark Twain
%
When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.
—Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson"
%
When I reflect upon the number of disagreeable people who I know who have
gone to a better world, I am moved to lead a different life.
—Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
%
When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly
stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was
astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
—Mark Twain
%
When in doubt, tell the truth.
—Mark Twain
%
When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life
stands explained.
—Mark Twain
%
Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you
are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic
with his verb in his mouth.
—Mark Twain, "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"
%
Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to
reform.
—Mark Twain
%
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a
debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our
race. He brought death into the world.
—Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
%
Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is
because we are not the person involved.
—Mark Twain
%
Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to
make sense.
—Mark Twain
%
Words are only painted fire; a book is the fire itself.
—Mark Twain
%
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
—Mark Twain
%
You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
—Mark Twain
%
To be a saint does not exclude fine dresses nor a beautiful house.
—Katharine Tynan
%
All this wheeling and dealing around, why, it isn't for money, it's for
fun. Money's just the way we keep score.
—Henry Tyroon
%
I don't have any work, and I don't want to do it.
—Jennifer Tyson '01