Memory
- Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.
-- Jean Paul Richter
- A retentive memory is a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.
-- Elbert Hubbard
- Unless we remember we cannot understand.
-- Edward M. Forster
- Memory is the cabinet of imagination, the treasury of reason, the registry of conscience, and the council chamber
- of thought.
-- Saint Basil
- Many a man fails to become a thinker only because his memory is too good.
-- Nietzsche
- Every man's memory is his private literature.
-- Aldous Huxley
- If you have to keep reminding yourself of a thing, perhaps it isn't so.
-- Christopher Morley
- Experience teaches that a strong memory is generally joined to a weak judgment.
-- Michel de Montaigne
- A man of great memory without learning hath a rock and a spindle and no staff to spin.
-- George Herbert
- The leaves of memory seemed to make A mournful rustling in the dark.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Mercy
- Sweet mercy is nobility's true badge.
-- William Shakespeare
- Mercy among the virtues is like the moon among the stars ... It is the light that hovers above the judgment seat.
-- Edwin Hubbel Chapin
- Hate shuts her soul when dove-eyed mercy pleads.
-- Charles Sprague
- Teach me to feel another's woe,
To hide the fault I see:
That mercy I to others show,
That mercy show to me
-- Alexander Pope
- The quality of mercy is not strain'd;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
-- William Shakespeare
Merit
- Nature makes merit, and fortune puts it to work.
-- François de La Rochefoucauld
- Contemporaries appreciate the man rather than his merit; posterity will regard the merit rather than the man.
-- Charles Caleb Colton
- It never occurs to fools that merit and good fortune are closely united.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- There's a proud modesty in merit; averse from asking, and resolved to pay ten times the gifts it asks.
-- John Dryden
- The world rewards the appearance of merit oftener than merit itself.
-- François de La Rochefoucauld
- If you wish your merit to be known, acknowledge that of other people.
-- Oriental Proverb
Mind
- Few minds wear out; more rust out.
-- Christian Nestell Bovee
- I have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.
-- Mark Twain
- The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests.
-- Albert Jay Nock
- Life is not a static thing. The only people who do not change their minds are incompetents in asylums, who can't, and those in cemeteries.
-- Everett M. Dirksen
- Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.
-- John Quincy Adams
- Some men are like pyramids, which are very broad where they touch the ground, but grow narrow as they reach the sky.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
- The defects of the mind, like those of the face, grow worse as we grow old.
-- François de La Rochefoucauld
- I not only use all the brains I have, but all that I can borrow.
-- Woodrow Wilson
- Commonplace minds usually condemn what is beyond the reach of their understanding.
-- François de La Rochefoucauld
Minority
- Minorities are the stars of the firmament; majorities, the darkness in which they float.
-- Martin H. Fischer
- The smallest number, with God and truth on their side, are weightier than thousands.
-- Charles Simmons
- The minority of a country is never known to agree, except in its efforts to reduce and oppress the majority.
-- James Fenimore Cooper
- All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- The political machine works because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.
-- Will Durant
- If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
- That cause is strong which has not a multitude, but one strong man behind it.
-- James Russell Lowell
- Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.
-- Thomas Carlyle
- The only tyrannies from which men, women and children are suffering in real life are the tyrannies of minorities.
-- Theodore Roosevelt
Miracles
- In those parts of the world where learning and science has prevailed, miracles have ceased; but in those parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue.
-- Ethan Allen
- All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.
-- Matthew Arnold
- Miracles happen to those who believe in them. Otherwise why does not the Virgin Mary appear to Lamaists, Mohammedans, or Hindus who have never heard of her?
-- Bernard Berenson
- The world presents enough problems if you believe it to be a world of law and order; do not add to them by believing it to be a world of miracles.
-- Louis D. Brandeis
- As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.
-- Voltaire
- "God works in many ways His wonders to perform." But He's not a skillful mechanic. A man drived over a cliff and "by a miracle" he only breaks his back. It would be more divine if he were a better driver and stayed on the road.
-- Paul Goodman
- Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.
-- William Shakespeare
- Most people would rather die than think: many do.
-- Bertrand Russell
Miser
- The miser is as much in want of that which he has, as of that which he has not.
-- Publilius Syrus
- The miser, starving his brother's body, starves also his own soul, and at death shall creep out of his great estate of injustice, poor and naked and miserable.
-- Theodore Parker
- The happiest miser on earth is the man who saves up every friend he can make.
-- Robert Emmet Sherwood
- A miser grows rich by seeming poor; an extravagant man grows poor by seeming rich.
-- William Shenstone
- The devil lies brooding in the miser's chest.
-- Thomas Fuller
- Through life's dark road his sordid way he wends; an incarnation of fat dividends.
-- Charles Sprague
- Misers mistake gold for good, whereas it is only a means of obtaining it.
-- François de La Rochefoucauld
Misery
- There is no greater grief than to remember days of joy when misery is at hand.
-- Dante
- Threescore years and ten is enough; if a man can't suffer all the misery he wants in that time, he must be numb.
-- Josh Billings
- Misery loves company, but company does not reciprocate.
-- Addison Mizner
- Man is only miserable so far as he thinks himself so.
-- Jacopo Sannazaro
- There are a good many real miseries in life that we cannot help smiling at, but they are the smiles that make wrinkles and not dimples.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
- He that is down need fear no fall.
-- John Bunyan
- If misery loves company, misery has company enough.
-- Henry David Thoreau
- A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer
-- Joseph Addison
Mob
- It is proof of a bad cause when it is applauded by the mob.
-- Seneca
- A mob is a group of persons with heads but no brains. Thomas Fuller
-- Thomas Fuller
- The mob is the mother of tyrants.
-- Diogenes
- The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- A mob is the scum that rises upmost when the nation boils.
-- John Dryden
- The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.
-- Edgar Allan Poe
- Every numerous assembly is a mob; everything there depends on instantaneous turns.
-- Cardinal de Retz
- Get together a hundred or two men, however sensible they may be, and you are very likely to have a mob.
-- Samuel Johnson
- A crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.
-- William Rounseville Alger
- Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.
-- D. H. Lawrence
- A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures.
-- Francis Bacon
- You will never escape the will of the mob; about the best anyone has ever figured out how to do is herd them into voting booths.
-- Barry Shein
Moderation
- It is better to rise from life as from a banquet--neither thirsty nor drunken.
-- Aristotle
- Moderation is a fatal thing: nothing succeeds like excess.
-- Oscar Wilde
- To go beyond the bounds of moderation is to outrage humanity.
-- Blaise Pascal
- He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little.
-- Horace
- Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance.
-- Mark Twain
- Moderation is the inseparable companion of wisdom, but with it genius has not even a nodding acquaintance.
-- Charles Caleb Colton
- The pursuit, even of the best things, ought to be calm and tranquil.
-- Cicero
- Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.
-- Thomas Paine
Modesty
- With people of only moderate ability modesty is mere honesty; but with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
- Modesty is not only an ornament, but also a guard to virtue.
-- Joseph Addison
- There's a lot to be said for the fellow who doesn't say it himself.
-- Maurice Switzer
- Modesty is the conscience of the body.
-- Honoré de Balzac
- Modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.
-- Jonathan Swift
- Modesty is the only sure bait when you angle for praise.
-- Lord Chesterfield
- Modesty antedates clothes and will be resumed when clothes are no more. Modesty died when clothes were born. Modesty died when false modesty was born.
-- Mark Twain
- False modesty is the refinement of vanity. It is a lie.
-- Jean de La Bruyère
- It is easy for a somebody to be modest, but it is difficult to be modest when one is a nobody.
-- Jules Renard
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