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Jeff Valdez
- Cats are smarter than dogs. You can not get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.
Paul Valery
- Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
- La politique est l'art d'empêcher les gens de se mêler de ce qui les regarde. (Politics is the art of preventing people from sticking their noses in things that are properly their business.
- God made everything out of nothing.
But the nothingness shows through.
Philo Vance
- The democratic theory is that if you accumulate enough ignorance at the polls, you produce intelligence.
Amy Vanderbilt
- Everyone knows that a man can always marry even if he reaches 102, is penniless, and has all his faculties gone. There is always some woman willing to take a chance on him. (from the Complete Book of Etiquette, 1952)
Henry Van Dyke
(1852-1933)
- Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars.
- Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.
- The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another. The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month. - from Fisherman's Luck
Vincent Van Gogh
(1853-1890) Dutch artist
- It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to. . . . The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.
- Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul.
- What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
- A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.
- One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever come to sit by it. Passersby see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on the way.
- If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.
- How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?
John Varley
- Never trust anybody who says "trust me." Except just this once, of course. - from Steel Beach
Jules Verne
- Whatever one man is capable of conceiving, other men will be able to achieve.
Lou Vickery
American Business Writer
- Nothing average ever stood as a monument to progress. When progress is for a partner it doesn’t turn to those who believe that they are only average. It turns instead to those who are forever searching and striving to become the best they possibly can. If we seek the average level, we cannot hope to achieve a higher level of success. Our only hope is to avoid being a failure.
Gore Vidal
- Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.
Leonardo da Vinci
- Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will be powerless to vex your mind.
- As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.
Alfred Victor Vigny
(1797-1863) French author, translator
- Above all, we must abolish hope in the heart of man. A calm despair, without angry convulsions, without reproaches to Heaven, is the essence of wisdom.
- Greatness is the dream of youth realized in old age.
- The true God, the mighty God, is the God of ideas.
- Perform your long and heavy task with energy, treading the path to which Fate has been pleased to call you.
- Fainthearted animals move about in herds. The lion walks alone in the desert. Let the poet always walk thus.
Virgil
(70-19 BC) Roman Epic Poet
- Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit (Perhaps it will be pleasing sometime to have remembered these things, from The Aeneid)
- Possunt quia posse videntur. (They can because they think they can, from The Aeneid)
- Audentis Fortuna iuvat. (Fortune assists the bold)
also: Fortune favors the bold.
- Latet anguis in herba. (There's a snake hidden in the grass)
Francis M. Voltaire
(1694-1778)
- Dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.
(In this country [England] it is thought well to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others. from
Candide)
- A witty saying proves nothing.
- Love truth but pardon error.
- To hold a pen is to be at war.
- All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
- If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.
- Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
- Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.
- I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
- When it's a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.
- Love is a canvas pattern furnished by Nature, and embroidered by imagination.
- It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.
- A multitude of laws in a country is like a great number of physicians, a sign of weakness and malady.
- Hamlet is a course and barbarous play. One might think the work is the product of a drunken savage's imagination.
- Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.
- Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.
- History is little else than a picture of human crimes and misfortunes.
- The first who was king was a fortunate soldier: Who serves his country well has no need of ancestors.
- In this country [England] it is well to kill from time to time an admiral to encourage the others.
- There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.
- It is said that God is always on the side of the heaviest battalions.
- Love truth, but pardon error.
Kurt Vonnegut
- High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.
- Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.
- I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
- I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.
- All persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental, and should not be construed.
Peter De Vries
- I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.
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