Short Quotes
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After a very long year we've got a very short knight.
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More Short Quotes
The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful, and then only for a short while.
Albert Einstein— The New Quotable Einstein
Life is short, even for those who live a long time, and we must live for the few who know and appreciate us, who judge and absolve us, and for whom we have the same affection and indulgence. The rest I look upon as a mere crowd, lively or sad, loyal or corrupt, from whom there is nothing to be expected but fleeting emotions, either pleasant or unpleasant, which leave no trace behind them. We ought to hate very rarely, as it is too fatiguing; remain indifferent to a great deal, forgive often and never forget.
sarah bernhardt— Ch. 33 (My Double Life (1907))
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile, The short and simple annals of the poor.
thomas gray— Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, St. 8 (1750)
The wild November come at last beneath a veil of rain. The night wind blows its folds aside, her face is full of pain. The latest of her race, she takes the Autumn's vacant throne, She has but one short moon to live, and she must live alone.
richard henry stoddard— November
Life is too short to silver over this tarnish. The gods, employed to haunt and punish husbands, have no hand for trigger-fine distinctions, their myopia makes all error mortal.
robert lowell— NewYear's Eve (1968)
If I were fierce and bald and short of breath I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base, And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
— 1918 'Base Details'.
It is very important to generate a good attitude, a good heart, as much as possible. From this, happiness in both the short term and the long term for both yourself and others will come.
Dalai Lama— Kindness, Clarity, and Insight (1984) Tenzin Gyatso
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding.
friedrich nietzsche— Friedrich Nietzsche, On truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.
It is the relentless onward march of the texters, the SMS (short Message Service) vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years ago.They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped.
john humphrys— "I h8 txt msgs: How texting is wrecking our language," The Daily Mail (2007-09-24)
Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, Or where the beetle winds His small but sullen horn, As oft he rises midst the twilight path, Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum.
william collins— 1747 Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects,'Ode to Evening', l.9-14.
If you had said to a young Syd, ‘Look, this is your bargain in life, you know, you’re going to do this fantastic stuff, but it won’t be forever, it’ll be this short period. There’s the dotted line, are you going to sign for this?’ I suspect, maybe, a lot of people would sign for that, for making their mark.
syd barrett— Bob Klose, The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story (2003)
One needs only to study a certain positioning of the hand in relation to the keys to obtain with ease the most beautiful sounds, to know how to play long notes and short notes and to [attain] certain unlimited dexterity... A well formed technique, it seems to me, [is one] that can control and vary a beautiful sound quality.
frédéric chopin— Chopin: Pianist and Teacher as Seen by His Pupils by Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger (1986)
Empires are synonymous with centralized if occasionally schismatized hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through usually a judicious use of oppression and skilled manipulation of both the society’s information dissemination systems and its lesser as a rule nominally independent power systems. In short, it’s all about dominance.
iain banks— Chapter 1 (p. 91)
"Dominicus Corea had a posthumous son, Lewis Corea who became the Dissawe of Uva. Sir Paul Peiris wrote that `With the disappearance of Dominicus Corea, came a short lull in military operations of which the Portuguese officials availed themselves to give free rein to that rapacity which so frequently disgraced their careers in the East’. Dominicus Corea was succeeded by his brother Simon, as Dissawe of the Sat Korale, Kotte and Sitawaka."
dominicus corea— By Deva Corea in his article 'Dominicus Corea of Kotte.' [7]
For 60 years Gross Domestic Product, or GDP for short, has been the yardstick by which the world has measured and understood economic and social progress. However, it has failed to capture some of the factors that make a difference in people’s lives and contribute to their happiness, such as security, leisure,income distribution and a clean environment–including the kinds of factors which growth itself needs to be sustainable.
— Joseph Stiglitz, in Beyond GDP: Measuring the impact of Operational Programmes in relation to economic growth and sustainable development at a local/regional level., QeC-ERAN
Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society; in short, to the very conditions confronting us to-day. … The rulers of the earth have realized long ago what potent poison inheres in the Christian religion. That is the reason they foster it; that is why they leave nothing undone to instill it into the blood of the people. They know only too well that the subtleness of the Christian teachings is a more powerful protection against rebellion and discontent than the club or the gun.
emma goldman— Emma Goldman, The Failure of Christianity (1913).
I could have been a serious athlete, only to have my promise cut short when I discovered Woodbines and women. Thankfully I have long since given up the former, and the latter have long since given up on me—except, of course, for the lovely Lady Stratford, who for reasons beyond my comprehension still tolerates my presence.
lord stratford— maiden speech to the House of Lords, 20 July 2005; quoted by United Kingdom Parliament World Wide Web Service
The New Finance focused on the market's major systematic mistake. In failing to appreciate the strength of competitive forces in a market economy, it over estimates the length of the short run. In doing so, it overreacts to records of success and failure for individual companies, driving the prices of successful firms too high and their unsuccessful counterparts too low.
robert haugen— Chapter 15, The Wrong 20-yard Line, p. 142
You could make a good case that the history of social life is about the history of the technology of memory. That social order and control, structure of governance, social cohesion in states or organizations larger than face-to- face society depends on the nature of the technology of memory--both how it works and what it remembers... In short, what societies value is what they memorize, and how they memorize it, and who has access to its memorized form determines the structure of power that the society represents and acts from.
eben moglen— Talk titled "Freedom Business" @ The O'Reilly Media MySQL Conference, 2007-04-25 [5]
Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
— Albert Einstein, in "Why Socialism?" Monthly Review (May 1949)
The ideas survived and they can now be said to be in agreement with reason. They survived because prejudice, passion, conceit, errors, sheer pigheadedness, in short because all the elements that characterize the context of discovery, opposed the dictates of reason and because these irrational elements were permitted to have their way. To express it differently: Copernicanism and other "rational" views exist today only because reason was overruled at some time in their past. (The opposite is also true: witchcraft and other "irrational" views had ceased to be influential only because reason was overruled at some time in their past.)
paul karl feyerabend— Pg. 155 (Against Method (1975))
Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic and power adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place.
friedrich hayek— p. xi (The Road to Serfdom (1944))
Unconscious assumptions or opinions are the worst enemy of woman; they can even grow into a positively demonic passion that exasperates and disgusts men, and does the woman herself the greatest injury by gradually smothering the charm and meaning of her femininity and driving it into the background. Such a development naturally ends in profound psychological disunion, in short, in a neurosis.
carl jung— "Woman in Europe" (1927) In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. P.245
Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.
john muir— Terry Gifford, EWDB, page 204
It is apparent that nothing short of contraceptives can put an end to the horrors of abortion and infanticide.
margaret sanger— Chapter 2, "Women's Struggle for Freedom"
Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
Albert Einstein— "Why Socialism?" Monthly Review (May 1949)
The word "agronomy" is the short way of indicating agriculture , horticulture, viticulture, arboriculture, dairying, breeding of live stock, beekeeping, &c.
— South Australia. Dept. of Agriculture (1899) Journal of Agriculture and Industry of South Australia, p. 363
We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus [all things being equal] of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses in short from fewer premisses; for... given that all these are equally well known, where they are fewer knowledge will be more speedily acquired, and that is a desideratum . The argument implied in our contention that demonstration from fewer assumptions is superior may be set out in universal form...
— Book I, Part 25
— Also known as Occam's razor or the principle of parsimony / economy (lex parsimoniae)
— Richard McKeon (tr.) (1963), p. 150
