Easy Quotes
As quoted in Crosstown Traffic (1989) by Charles Shaar Murray
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More Easy Quotes
The path of those who preach love, and not hatred, is not easy. They often have to wear a crown of thorns.
nelson mandela
The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.
Allan Bloom— 1987 The Closing of the American Mind, preface.
The second office of the government is honorable and easy, the first is but a splendid misery.
thomas jefferson— Letter to Elbridge Gerry (13 May 1797).
Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people living for today...
John Lennon— "Imagine" (1971)
In societies with fewer opportunities for amusement, it was also easier to tell a mere wish from a real desire. If, in order to hear some music, a man has to wait for six months and then walk twenty miles, it is easy to tell whether the words, "I should like to hear some music," mean what they appear to mean, or merely, "At this moment I should like to forget myself." When all he has to do is press a switch, it is more difficult. He may easily come to believe that wishes can come true.
wystan hugh auden— Interlude: West's Disease", p. 245
It is not easy to remain motivated in the face of widespread apathy and self-indulgence.
ratu joni madraiwiwi— Speech to the Lautoka Rotary Club (Centenary Dinner), 12 March 2005
It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied.
wolfgang amadeus mozart— Spoken in Prague, 1787, to conductor Kucharz, who led the rehearsals for Don Giovanni, from Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words by Friedrich Kerst, trans. Henry Edward Krehbiel (1906)
To sit home, read one's favorite paper, and scoff at the misdeeds of the men who do things is easy, but it is markedly ineffective. It is what evil men count upon the good men's doing.
theodore roosevelt— The Higher Life of American Cities in The Outlook (p. 1083 - 1085) from 21 December 1895
Beauty is as summer fruits, which are easy to corrupt, and cannot last.
Francis Bacon— 1625 Essays, no.43,'Of Beauty'.
And seeing the snail, which everywhere doth roam, Carrying his own house still, still is at home, Follow (for he is easy paced) this snail, Be thine own palace, or the world's thy gaol.
john donne— 1597-8 'To Sir Henry Wotton'.
The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run, we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
— 1923 A Tract on Monetary Reform.
It is no more easy to make a good picture than it is to find a diamond or a pearl. It means trouble and you risk your life for it.
vincent van gogh— 1888 From a letter to his brotherTheo, early Oct.
Presumption should never make us neglect that which appears easy to us, nor despair make us lose courage at the sight of difficulties.
benjamin banneker— This appeared in Banneker's Almanac in 1794, and is commonly attributed to him, but originates earlier in "Reflections on different Subjects of Morality, by Stanislaw Leszczynski, King of Poland, Duke of Lorrain and Bar" in The Universal Magazine (1765), p. 119
It is not easy to conceive the difficulties we have had.
henry knox— Knox to George Washington on the difficulties of taking Cannon to Boston.-McCullough pg 83
The atrocities for which [members of the Derg regime] are now collectively indicted can tempt the unwary into nostalgia for Haile Selassie. It is easy to forget that the emperor used to authorise public hangings, that his opponents were routinely tortured, that courtiers who fell from grace were not only jailed but frequently held in chains as well, and that concepts of justice, liberty and democracy were effectively outlawed from public debate.
selassie, haile i, of ethiopia— Jonathan Dimbleby in Feeding on Ethiopia's Famine in The Independent, 8 December 1998
“These people have successfully incorporated a belief in your martial prowess into their religion; how can you deny them?” “Believe me, it would be easy.”
iain banks— Chapter Twelve (p. 390)
The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers.
bill gates— p. 265 in hardcover edition, corrected in paperback
Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
vincent van gogh— As quoted in The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Vol. 2 (1958) New York Graphic Society, p. 12
The Frenchman, easy, debonair, and brisk, Give him his lass, his fiddle, and his frisk, Is always happy, reign whoever may, And laughs the sense of mis'ry far away.
william cowper— William Cowper, Table Talk, line 237.
The road to Hades is easy to travel; at any rate men pass away with their eyes shut.
— As quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, iv. 49.
And the foregoing of possessions for which others barter the last possibility of freedom will become easy.
— Voltairine de Cleyre, in Peter Glassgold Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman's Mother Earth, Counterpoint Press, 1 November 2012, p.208
It's not easy being green.
Kermit the Frog— "Bein' Green" in Sesame Street (1970)
To be energetic and firm where principle demands it, and tolerant in all else, is not easy. It is not easy to abhor wickedness, and oppose it with every energy, and at the same time to have the meekness and gentleness of Christ, becoming all things to all men for the truth's sake. The energy of patience, the most godlike of all, is not easy.
mark hopkins— P. 187. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
Through algebra you easily arrive at equations, but always to pass therefrom to the elegant constructions and demonstrations which usually result by means of the method of porisms is not so easy, nor is one's ingenuity and power of invention so greatly exercised and refined in this analysis.
isaac newton— The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton (edited by Whiteside), Volume 7; Volumes 1691-1695 / pg. 261.
The Plagiarism of orators is the art, or an ingenious and easy mode, which some adroitly employ to change, or disguise, all sorts of speeches of their own composition, or that of other authors, for their pleasure, or their utility; in such a manner that it becomes impossible even for the author himself to recognise his own work, his own genius, and his own style, so skilfully shall the whole be disguised.
isaac d'israeli— Curiosities of Literature, Professors of Plagiarism and Obscurity.
Public opinion always wants easy money, that is, low interest rates.
ludwig von mises— Ludwig von Mises, A Critique of Interventionism, (1929) p. 163
Platitudes are safe, because they're easy to wink at, but truth is something else again.
— Hunter S. Thompson, in a letter to William J. Kennedy (29 October 1959), in The Proud Highway : The Fear and Loathing Letters Volume I (1997) p. 192
