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Quotes about things beginning with C
Cain
The inventor of murder, the father of art... a man
of first-rate genius. Thomas De Quincey
Calamity
I am poured out like water, and my bones are out of
joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the
midst of my bowels. Bible: Psalms, XXII, 14.
Two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good
fortune to others. Ambrose Bierce
A mighty leveller. Edmund Burke
The perfect glass wherein we truly see and know
ourselves. William D'Avenant
The test of integrity. Samuel Richardson
Virtue's opportunity. Seneca
See also Misfortune.
Calendar
Events are... the best calendar.
Benjamin Disraeli
Modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our
lives by reminding us that each day that passes is
the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting
event. Oscar Wilde
See also Time.
California
A fine place to live in?if you happen to be an
orange. Fred Allen
The end of the rainbow. American Proverb
A state that's washed by the Pacific on one side
and cleaned by Las Vegas on the other.
Albert Cooper
A state so blessed in climate no one ever dies
there from a natural death.
Adapted from Robert Frost
The land of perpetual pubescence, where cultural
lag is mistaken for renaissance.
Ashley Montagu
God's great exaggerated land. Anon.
The congested land of high taxes and good weather.
Anon.
See also Hollywood, Los Angeles.
Calumny
Mere dirt?throw a great deal, and some of it will
stick. George Coleman
Only the noise of madmen. Diogenes
To spread suspicion... to propagate scandal... To
create an unfavorable impression, it is not
necessary that certain things should be true, but
that they have been said. William Hazlitt
Diseases of others that break out in your body.
Friedrich W. Nietzsche
A vice of curious constitutions; trying to kill it
keeps it alive; leave it to itself and it will die
a natural death. Thomas Paine
See also Gossip, Scandal.
Calvinism
A religion without a prelate, a government without
a king. George Bancroft
Calvinism, or the belief in election, is not simply
blasphemy, but the superfetation of blasphemy.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
You will and you won't?you'll be damned if you
do?and you'll be damned if you don't.
Adapted from Lorenzo Dow
The doctrine that an infinite God made millions of
people, knowing that they would be damned.
Robert G. Ingersoll
Absurdities. Thomas Jefferson
Candy
A universal food; it speaks all languages; it dries
the tears in the eyes of little children... it is
the advance agent of happiness in every clime.
National Confectioners Association
Cannibal
A gastronome of the old school who preserves the
simple tastes and adheres to the natural diet of
the pre-pork period. Ambrose Bierce
Anyone who takes his fellow-being at his physical
valuation. Elbert Hubbard
One who appreciates his fellow-being at his true
worth. Elbert Hubbard
An assassin who has an excuse.
Pierre Valdagne
A man who loves his neighbor with sauce.
Jean Riguax
One who goes into a cafe and orders the waiter.
Anon.
Cannon
Cruel and damnable machines... the direct
suggestion of the Devil. If Adam had seen in a
vision the horrible instruments his children were
to invent, he would have died of grief.
Martin Luther
The last argument of governments. Anon.
See also Arms, War.
Cant
Cant means untruthfulness, but joined to the
feeling that one is truthful or telling the truth;
the deceiving of others which is at the same time a
self-deception. Moritz Busch
The grand primum mobile of England.
Lord Byron
A double-distilled lie, the material prima of the
devil, from which all falsehoods... and
abominations body themselves. Thomas Carlyle
Capital
Abstinence from enjoyment is the only source of
capital. Thomas Brassey
A result of labor, and is used by labor to assist
it in further production. Labor is the active and
initial force, and labor is therefore the employer
of capital. Henry George
What is left over when the primary needs of a
society have been satisfied. Aldous Huxley
Only the fruit of labor, and could never have
existed if labor had not first existed.
Abraham Lincoln
That part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining
further wealth. Alfred Marshall
Dead labor that, vampire-like, lives only by
sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more
labor it sucks. Karl Marx
A social power. Karl Marx
That part of the wealth of a country which is
employed in production, and consists of food,
clothing, tools, raw materials, machinery, etc.,
necessary to give effect to labor.
David Ricardo
Capitalism
The result of the secularization of economic life,
and by the hierarchical subordination of the
material to the spiritual. Nicholas Berdyaev
The power of anonymity over human life.
Nicholad Berdyaev
Production for a market by enterprising individuals
or combines with the purpose of making a profit.
Peter Berger
Means investment, and investment means the
direction of labor toward the production of the
greatest returns?returns that so far as they are
great show by that very fact that they are consumed
by the many, not alone by the few.
Oliver Wendell Holmes 2
Based on private property, where normal economic
activity consists of commercial transactions
between consulting adults. Irving Kristol
Uneven economic and political development.
Nikolai Lenin
The basic law of capitalism is you or I, not both
you and I. Karl Liebknecht
(When) civilization is the monopoly of a privileged
minority. William Liebknecht
A spirit of exaltation of active and inventive
power, of the dynamic energies of man and of
individual enterprise. Jacques Maritain
A system of plunder. Karl Marx
Not merely the production of commodities; it is
essentially the production of surplus value.
Karl Marx
A system under which the means of
production?industrial plant and tools, raw
materials and partly finished products of all kinds
in process of manufacture?are owned by private
persons. John Nef
That system which is devoted to securing wealth for
its citizens. Abraham Rosenblum
An economic system, resting on the organization of
legally free wage-earners, for the purpose of
pecuniary profit, by the owners of capital or his
agents, and setting its stamp on every aspect of
society. Richard H. Tawney
The social counterpart of Calvinism. The central
idea is expressed in the... phrase "a calling." To
the Calvinist, the calling is... a strenuous and
exacting enterprise to be chosen by himself, and to
be pursued with a sense of religious
responsibility. Richard H. Tawney
See also America, Business, Money, Riches, Wealth.
Capitalist
A man who owns all of the rainbows.
American Saying
The robber barons. Matthew Josephson
What every American hopes to be before he dies.
Adapted from Henry Louis Mencken
One who will do anything for the poor except get
off his back. Leon Tolstoy
A man who works not for a living but to stay alive.
Anon.
Every American who works for a living. Anon.
Capital Punishment
Life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for
tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.
Bible: Deuteronomy, XIX, 21.
The infliction of public vengeance.
John Calvin
Only an administrative murder. Albert Camus
An anachronism too discordant to be suffered,
mocking with grim reproach all our clamorous
professions of the sanctity of life.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
A warning. J. Edgar Hoover
Simply doubles the number of murders.
David Schwartz
The worst form of assassination, because... it is
invested with the approval of society.
George Bernard Shaw
Not... murder. Murder is an offensive act. The term
cannot be applied legitimately to any defensive
act. Benjamin R. Tucker
The thirst for vengeance satisfied. Anon.
Legalized murder. Anon.
The manner in which society rids itself of cancer
cells. Anon.
See also Execution, Punishment.
Caprice
The only difference between a caprice and a
lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little
longer. Oscar Wilde
A fancy fancy. Anon.
Cards
A world of pure power politics where rewards and
punishments were meted out immediately. A deck of
cards was built like the purest of hierarchies,
with every card a master to those below it, a
lackey to those above it. Ely Culbertson
The Devil's books. English Proverb
Cards were at first for benefits designed, sent to
amuse, not enslave the mind.
Adapted from David Garrick
(An amusement which) generates kindness and
consolidates society. Samuel Johnson
The safest insurance against the tedium of old age.
William Somerset Maugham
See also Gambling.
Career
See Labor, Vocation, Work.
Carelessness
To have an eye on Eternity, wherein nothing
matters. Elbert Hubbard
To perform an act wisely, but not too well.
Elbert Hubbard
Caricature
The most penetrating of criticisms.
Aldous Huxley
Rough truth. George Meredith
The tribute that mediocrity pays to genius.
Oscar Wilde
Exaggeration of a fact. Robert Zwickey
Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881)
Carlyle's eye was a terrible organ: he saw
everything. Augustine Birrell
I lead a most dyspeptic, solitary, self-shrouded
life; consuming, if possible in silence, my
considerable daily allotment of pain; glad when any
strength is left in me for working, which is the
only use I can see in myself. Thomas Carlyle
A spectre moving in a world of spectres.
Thomas Carlyle
He is like a lover or an outlaw who wraps up his
message in a serenade, which is nonsense to the
sentinel, but salvation to the ear for which it is
meant. Ralph Waldo Emerson
The indubitable champion of England.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
At bottom... simply an English atheist who makes
it a point of honor not to be one.
Friedrich W. Nietzsche
A poet to whom nature has denied the faculty of
verse. Alfred Lord Tennyson
Rugged, mountainous, volcanic, he was himself a
French Revolution than any of his volumes.
Walt Whitman
Carnality
Enmity against God. Bible: Romans, VIII, 6.
Death. Bible: Romans, VIII, 6.
Treating people as objects to gratify personal
needs. Martin Buber
The desire for flesh beyond all moral
considerations. Max Gralnick
See also Lust, Sex (Love).
Cash
See Capital, Money, Wealth.
Cat
A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature
to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic
circle. Ambrose Bierce
The only non-gregarious domestic animal. It is
retained by its extra-ordinary adhesion to the
comforts of the house in which it is reared.
Francis Galton
A pygmy lion who loves mice, hates dogs, and
patronizes human beings. Oliver Herford
An example of sophistication minus civilization.
Anon.
See also Kitten.
Cathedral
See Churches.
Catholicism
The Church, the Body of Christ, the Kingdom of God.
Karl Adam
By far the most elegant worship... with incense,
pictures, statues, altars, shrines, relics, and the
real presence, confession, absolution,?there is
something sensible to grasp at... it leaves no
possibility of doubt. Lord Byron
A superstructure within which you can work, like
the sonnet. Jean Kerr
The Catholic religion... never wholly lost the
spirit of the Great Teacher whose precepts form the
noblest code... It is of religions the most
poetical. Thomas B. Macaulay
Acceptance of a Supernatural Order, here and now,
at every point and turn of daily life, impinging...
on all we do, breaking through, always at hand,
always real. Rosalind Murray
A vast assemblage of human beings with wilful
intellects and wild passion, brought together into
one of the beauty and majesty of Superhuman Power.
John Henry Newman
Nothing else but simply the legitimate growth and
complement, that is, the natural and necessary
development of the doctrine of the early Church.
John Henry Newman
A continuous picture of Authority and Private
Judgment alternately advancing and retreating in
the ebb and flow of the tide. John Henry Newman
The Catholic religion is the only one that is true.
Pope Leo 13
It... is called Catholic because it extends over
all the world... and because it teaches universally
and completely all the doctrines which ought to
come to men's knowledge, concerning things both
visible and invisible. Saint Cyril
Paganism spiritualised. George Santayana
See also Christianity, Churches (Roman Catholic).
Cause
That which follows ever conforms to that which went
before. Marcus Aurelius
It's like champagne or high shoes, and one must be
prepared to suffer for it. Arnold Bennett
Simply everything which the effect would not
result, and with which it must result.
Charles Bradlaugh
Everything is the cause of itself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No one effect is ever the effect of a single cause,
but only of a combination of causes, and the
essence of causation is in the combination.
Herbert Samuel
Everything in nature is a cause from which there
flows some effect. Baruch Spinoza
God is the free cause of all things.
Baruch Spinoza
See also Fate, Predestination.
Caution
Thinking today and speaking tomorrow.
Adapted from Henry G. Bohn
The word of cowardice. John Brown
The prominent feature of weakness of character.
Elbert Hubbard
The eldest child of wisdom. Victor Hugo
(The) feature of genius. Alternately inspired and
depressed, its inequalities of mood are stamped
upon its labors. Edgar Allan Poe
What we call cowardice in others. Oscar Wilde
The confidential agent of selfishness.
Woodrow Wilson
See also Cowardice, Prudence.
Celebrity
A person who works hard all his life to become well
known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being
recognized. Fred Allen
Someone who is known for being known.
Studs Terkel
One who is known to many persons he is glad he
doesn't know. Henry Louis Mencken
A person thousands of flash bulbs give their lives
for. Anon.
Celibacy
The result of a long spiritual maturation in the
Church, meditating on the celibate witness of
Christ's own priesthood.
America, Editorial, March, 1964.
The worst form of self-abuse. Peter De Vries
The ideal state, first because the time is short
and detachment from the things of this age is
required, and secondly because marriage diverts man
and woman alike from the service of God.
C. H. Dodd
The celibate's life taken on for God is an enacted
prophecy, shouting to the world that the world is
passing away. Francis J. Filas
To live without feeling or exciting sympathy, to be
fortunate without adding to the felicity of others,
or afflicted without tasting the balm of pity.
Samuel Johnson
A state more gloomy than solitude: it is not
retreat, but exclusion from mankind.
Samuel Johnson
The man who never in his life has washed the dishes
with his wife or polished up the silver plate?he
still is largely celibate. Christopher Morley
Single blessedness. William Shakespeare
A celibate, like the fly in the heart of an apple,
dwells in a perpetual sweetness, but sits alone,
and is confined and dies in singularity.
Jeremy Taylor
To divest yourself of the body. Anon.
See also Abstinence, Chastity.
Cemetery
An isolated suburban spot where mourners match
lies, poets write at a target and stonecutters
spell for a wager. Ambrose Bierce
Man's final comment on earth.
Eugene E. Brussell
The place which receives all without asking
questions. English Proverb
The surest cure for conceit. All get equal billing
there. Anon.
The cast-off clothes of God.
Christian Morgenstern
The country home I need. Mark Twain
The last resort. Anon.
See also Coffin, Funeral, Grave.
Censor
(One who) believes he can hold back the mighty
traffic of life with a tin whistle and a raised
right hand. For after all, it is life with which he
quarrels. Heywood Broun
A person who did not like the movie and burned the
book. Jerry Dashkin
People with secret attractions to various
temptations... they are defending themselves under
the pretext of defending others, because at heart
they fear their own weaknesses. Ernest Jones
The artist and censor differ in this wise: that the
first is a decent mind in an indecent body and that
the second is an indecent mind in a decent body.
George Jean Nathan
A man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
Laurence J. Peter
The guardian of orthodoxy. Anon.
Censorship
Sooner or later a weapon directed against freedom
of thought. Poul Borchsenius
The courts... duty of protecting the weaker members
of society from corrupt, depraving, and lecherous
influences... exerted through the guise and medium
of literature, drama or art... judged by the mores
of the day. Hyman Bushel
(To stop) people reading or seeing what we do not
want to read or see ourselves. Lord Diplock
A caste system of romance, but always with a
joinder of antisex and propriety.
Morris Ernst and Alan Schwartz
To prohibit the propagation of opinions which have
a dangerous tendency... No member of a society has
a right to teach any doctrine contrary to what
the society holds to be true. Samuel Johnson
The tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius
of its time. Joseph Lewis
(A) righteous form of sin-hunting.
Thomas Merton
Nothing more than a legal corollary of public
modesty. Jonathan Miller
Art made tongue-tied by authority.
William Shakespeare
When nobody is allowed to read any books except
the books nobody can read. George Bernard Shaw
See also Obscenity.
Ceremony
The superstition of good-breeding, as well as of
religion; but yet, being an outwork to both, should
not be absolutely demolished.
Lord Chesterfield
The wine of human experience. Morris R. Cohen
A means for strengthening... religio-ethical
sentiments... When ceremonies no longer... fulfill
this purpose... they become entirely worthless...
and the reign of superstition has been inaugurated.
Abraham Geiger
Vehicles to spiritual heights. Judah Halevi
Ignorance. Samuel Johnson
An invention to take off the uneasy feeling which
we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the
object of love and esteem with a fellow-creature
than some other person is. Samuel Johnson
It endeavors to make up, by superior attentions in
little points, for that invidious preference which
it is forced to deny in the greater.
Charles Lamb
The invention of wise men to keep fools at a
distance. Richard Steele
A training in self-conquest, while it links the
generations... and unifies our atoms dispersed to
the four corners of the earth as nothing else
could. Israel Zangwill
Certainty
Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
Ambrose Bierce
Absolute uncertainty. We can no more have this
than we can have absolute certainty.
Samuel Butler 2
Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not
the destiny of man. Oliver Wendell Holmes 2
I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the
heart's affections and the truth of imagination.
John Keats
A dusty answer. George Meredith
We can say nothing with certainty about anything,
because the picture presented to us is not
constant. Philo
The only certainty is that nothing is certain.
Pliny 1
(One) of the greatest evils that man has inflicted
upon man. Bertrand A. Russell
See also Absolute, Belief, Conviction, Dogma,
Faith, Religion.
Cervantes, Miguel De (1547-1616)
Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away; a single
laugh demolished the right arm of his own country.
Adapted from Lord Byron
The man who set the sword back in its sheath.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Chair
The reward of the aged. Anon.
The headquarters for the hindquarters. Anon.
Champagne
Those bottled windy drinks that laugh in a man's
face and then cut his throat. Thomas Adams
The drink of least resistance. Anon.
Here's to champagne, the drink divine
That makes us forget our troubles;
It's made of a dollar's worth of wine
And three dollar's worth of bubbles. Anon.
See also Drinking.
Chance
Serves... as rationalization for every people that
is not master of its own destiny. Hanah Arendt
A nickname for Providence. Nicolas Chamfort
Implies an absolute absence of any principle.
Chuang-tzu
What a capricious man believes in.
Adapted from Benjamin Disraeli
(That which) makes us known to others and to
ourselves. La Rochefoucauld
(That which) favors the mind that is prepared.
Louis Pasteur
Another master. Pliny 1
All chance, direction which thou canst not see.
Alexander Pope
Chance is blind and the sole author of creation.
Joseph X. Saintine
The rude stone which receives its life from the
sculptor's hand? Providence gives us chance?and man
must mold it to his own designs.
Johann C. Schiller
There is no such thing. Johann C. Schiller
A name for our ignorance. Leslie Stephen
A word devoid of sense; nothing can exist without a
cause. Voltaire
The instrument of Providence and the secret agent
that counteracts what men call wisdom, and
preserves order and regularity, and continuation in
the whole. Horace Walpole
See also Accident, Luck.
Change
What is behind the desire of every revolution.
Eugene E. Brussell
What people fear most. Fedor M. Dostoievski
Truths being in and out of favor. Robert Frost
The succession of becomings, each of which
embodies, objectifies, its predecessors.
Charles Hartshorne
To shift one's position and be bruised in a new
place. Washington Irving
The only thing that has brought progress.
Charles F. Kettering
To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have
changed often. John Henry Newman
The seen is the changing, the unseen is the
unchanging. Plato
Means the unknown. Eleanor Roosevelt
This sad vicissitude of things. Laurence Sterne
A political catchword for Communist propaganda.
Andries Teurnicht
See also Evolution.
Character
That which reveals moral purpose, exposing the
class of things a man chooses or avoids.
Aristotle
The result of our conduct. Aristotle
The highest power of causing a thing to be
believed. Aristotle
A kingdom established within yourself.
Adapted from Henry Ward Beecher
Character is money; and according as the man earns
or spends the money, money in turn becomes
character. Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Our description of ourselves as we want others to
see us. John Ciardi
Raising your soul so high that offence cannot reach
it. Adapted from Rene Descartes
Not only what one does and says, but what one
fails to do and say.
Adapted from Norman Douglas
A development which is higher than intellect.
Norman Elright
That which can do without success.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do what you know and perception is converted into
character. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Moral order seen through the medium of an
individual nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson
A reserved force which acts directly and without
means. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Character is centrality, the impossibility of being
displaced or overset. Ralph Waldo Emerson
(A quality) built on the debris of our despair.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A certain undemonstrable force... genius, by whose
impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he
cannot impart. Ralph Waldo Emerson
A dispensation of Providence, designed to have not
merely an immediate, but a continuous,
progressive, and never-ending agency.
Edward Everett
Mastery over your thoughts and actions.
Mohandas Gandhi
The stamp on our souls of the free choices of good
and evil we have made through life.
John C. Geikie
Means carrying through what you feel able to do.
Johann W. Goethe
Man's... fate. Heraclitus
(That which) must stand behind and back up
everything?the sermon, the poem, the picture, the
play. None of them is worth a straw without it.
Josiah G. Holland
Not so much where we are, but in what direction we
are moving. Oliver Wendell Holmes 1
The result of two things?mental attitude and the
way we spend our time. Elbert Hubbard
The sum of tendencies to act in a certain way.
Thomas Henry Huxley
What is character but the determination of
incident? What is incident but the illustration of
character? Henry James
Every man has three characters: that which he
exhibits, that which he has, and that which he
thinks he has. Alphonse Karr
The decision to take responsibility for being
yourself, to make up your mind you're going to
succeed in this life because there's no stopping
you. Peter Koestenbaum
Character is built out of circumstances. From
exactly the same materials one man builds pal-
aces, while another builds hovels.
George H. Lewes
Character is like a tree and reputation like its
shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree
is the real thing. Abraham Lincoln
The measure of a man's real character is what he
would do if he knew he would never be found out.
Thomas B. Macaulay
What God and the angels know of us.
Horace Mann
Committing the Golden Rule to memory and to life.
Adapted from Edwin Markham
(That which is) shaped by deeds, and... partly
habit. Claude Montefiore
What you are in the dark. Dwight Moody
A perfectly educated will. Novalis
What God and the angels know of us.
Thomas Paine
The grand aim of man's creation... and... by its
very nature, the product of probationary
discipline. Austin Phelps
(Something) made by what you stand for; reputation
by what you fall for. Robert Quillen
The sum of those qualities which make a man a good
man and a woman a good woman.
Theodore Roosevelt
The governing element of life, and is above genius.
Frederick Saunders
Property. Samuel Smiles
Moral order embodied in the individual.
Samuel Smiles
Not what you are thought to be, but are.
Publilius Syrus
The arbiter of a man's fortune. Publilius Syrus
Portion... potion, and passion.
Talmud: Erubin, 65b.
Fame is what you have taken,
Character's what you give. Bayard Taylor
The power... in... industry, application, and
perseverence under the promptings of a brave,
determined spirit. Mark Twain
The total of thousands of small daily strivings to
live up to the best that is in us... the final
decision to reject whatever is demeaning to oneself
or to others and with confidence and honesty to
choose the right. Arthur G. Trudeau
The sum total of all our capacities and gifts.
Rahel L. Varnhagen
The spiritual body of the person.
Edwin P. Whipple
A by-product... produced in the great manufacture
of daily duty. Woodrow Wilson
Character is made by what you stand for; reputation
by what you fall for. Alexander Woollcott
Intellect associated with moral excellence.
Theodore D. Woolsey
The stamp on our souls of the free choices of good
and evil we have made through life. Anon.
What the public doesn't know about you. Anon.
Something tested through business, wine, and
conversation. Anon.
A conquest, not a bequest. Anon.
See also Breeding (Manners), Gentleman, Superior
Man.
Charity
The perfection and ornament of religion.
Joseph Addison
The bond of perfectness.
Bible: Colossians, III, 14.
Charity suffereth long and is kind; charity envieth
not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.
Bible: Corinthians, XIII, 4.
Atonement for sin.
Bible: Ecclesiastes, III, 33.
A helping hand stretched out to save men from the
inferno of their present life. William Booth
The love of God for himself, and our neighbor for
God. Thomas Browne
Organized charity is doing good for
good-for-nothing people.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A disciple having asked for a definition of
charity, the Master said: Love One Another.
Confucius
This only is charity, to do all, all that we can.
John Donne
To squander... superfluous wealth on those to whom
it is sure of doing the least possible good.
William Hazlitt
The spice of riches. Hebrew Proverb
No man giveth, but with intention of good to
himself; because gift is voluntary, and of all
voluntary acts the object is to every man his own
good. Thomas Hobbes
On a large scale... the worst abuse of private
ownership?from the economic point of view.
Oliver Wendell Holmes 2
A thing that begins at home, and usually stays
there. Elbert Hubbard
A debt of honor. Immanuel Kant
Universal benevolence whose fulfillment the wise
carry out conformably to the dictates of reason so
as to obtain the greatest good.
Gottfried W. Leibnitz
The bone shared with the dog when you are just as
hungry as the dog. Jack London
Helping a man to help himself.
Moses Maimonides
Charity... is kind, it is not easily provok'd, it
thinks no evil, it believes all things, hopes all
things. Cotton Mather
A matter on which the immediate effect on the
persons directly concerned, and the ultimate
consequence to the general good, are apt to be at
complete war with one another. John Stuart Mill
The perfection of the Christian life... which in
some sort unites or joins man to his God.
Pope John 23
(That which) opens in each heart a little Heaven.
Matthew Prior
A gift of God, and when it is rightly ordered,
likens us to God himself, as far as that is
possible; for it is charity which makes the man.
Saint John Chrysostom
(That which) deals with symptoms instead of causes.
Herbert Samuel
To help the feeble up and support him after.
Adapted from William Shakespeare
Money put to interest in the other world.
Robert Southey
Feeling for others?in your pocket.
Adapted from Charles H. Spurgeon
Whatever capital you divert to the support of a
shiftless and good-for-nothing person.
William G. Sumner
The desire to be useful to others without thought
of recompense. Emanuel Swedenborg
To will and do what is just and right in every
transaction. Emanuel Swedenborg
(That which) equals all the other commandments.
Talmud: Baba Bathra, 9a.
Friendship to all the world... friendship expanded
like the face of the sun when it mounts above the
eastern hills. Jeremy Taylor
Essentially it is a mere act of justice.
William Temple
With one hand I take thousands of dollars from the
poor, and with the other I hand back a few dimes.
Leon Tolstoy
Christian charity is the supernatural virtue of the
love for God insofar as it extends from God to our
fellow men. Eberhard Welby
A religious duty. Louis Wirth
A disguise for the injustice that we mete out to
our fellow men. Ida A. Wylie
Good will is the best charity. Yiddish Proverb
A magnet with more power to attract the divine
influence than any other precept.
Shneor Zalman
See also Benevolence, Generosity, Gift, Giving,
Philanthropy.
Charm
A sort of a bloom on women. If you have it, you
don't need to have anything else; if you don't have
it, it doesn't much matter what else you have.
James M. Barrie
A glow within a woman that casts a most becoming
light on others. John Mason Brown
Lots of soap and water, decent clothes, and a
little learning. Eugene E. Brussell
A way of getting the answer yes without having
asked any clear question. Albert Camus
Smiles and soap. Lewis Carroll
A sex attribute which has become a habit.
Elbert Hubbard
That extra quality that defies description.
Alfred Lunt
Character exercising its influence.
Edgar Magnin
See also Breeding (Manners), Manners.
Chastity
A virtue... and a virtue of high deserving... Not
because it diminishes, but because it heightens
enjoyment. Jeremy Bentham
A supreme form of unselfishness.
John M. Cooper
The cement of civilization and progress.
Mary Baker Eddy
Perhaps the most peculiar of all sexual
aberrations. Remy de Gourmont
A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, in a
series of coats. Nathaniel Hawthorne
The most unnatural of the sexual perversions.
Aldous Huxley
God's rarest blessing. George Meredith
A virtue in some, but in many almost a vice. These,
it is true, are abstinent; but from all that they
do the bitch of sensuality looks out with envious
eyes. Friedrich W. Nietzsche
She whom no one has asked. Ovid
Chastity, the lily of virtues, makes men almost
equal to angels. Nothing is beautiful but what is
pure, and the purity of men is chastity.
Saint Francis de Sales
The first degree of chastity is pure virginity; the
second is faithful marriage.
Saint John Chrysostom
A monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater
foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual
sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic
happiness, and consigns more than half of the human
race to misery. Percy Bysshe Shelley
A wealth that comes from an abundance of love.
Rabindranath Tagore
Chastity is either abstinence or continence.
Abstinence is that of virgins or widows;
continence, of married persons. Jeremy Taylor
Salvation. Tertullian
The spirit of poverty applied to our emotional
life?all the clutch and feverishness of desire, the
"I want" and "I must have" taken away and replaced
by absolute single-mindedness, purity of heart.
Evelyn Underhill
A woman's lack of temptation and a man's lack of
opportunity. Anon.
A state peculiar to women?where there are no men.
Anon.
See also Abstinence, Celibacy, Self-Denial,
Virginity.
Chaucer, Geoffrey (1340-1400)
And Chaucer, with his infantive
Familiar clasp of things divine.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A rough diamond; and must first be polished e'er he
shines. John Dryden
(A man) glad and erect. Ralph Waldo Emerson
The poet of the dawn.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
That broad famous English poet.
Thomas Middleton
He is ever master of himself and of his subject.
The light upon his page is the light of common day.
Alexander Smith
The first warbler. Alfred Lord Tennyson
Cheerfulness
A kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a
steady and perpetual serenity. Joseph Addison
A Habit of the Mind... fixed and permanent.
Joseph Addison
A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance.
Bible: Proverbs, XV, 13.
Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign of
cheerfulness. Ralph Waldo Emerson
That modest, hopeful, and peaceful joy which
springs from charity and is protected by patience.
F. X. Lasance
The most certain sign of wisdom.
Michel de Montaigne
The principal ingredient in the composition of
health. Arthur Murphy
One of the very but articles of dress one can wear
in society. William M. Thackeray
The habit of looking at the good side of things.
W. B. Ullanthorne
The rich and satisfying result of strenuous
discipline. Edwin P. Whipple
See also Happiness, Laughter.
Cheese
Milk's leap toward immortality.
Clifton Fadiman
Cheese it is a peevish elf,
It digests all things but itself. John Ray
Chess
A total kind of warfare. Robert Fischer
The movement of pieces eating one another.
Marcel Duchamp
The touchstone of the intellect.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The art of human reason. Gustavus Selenus
A foolish expedient for making idle people believe
they are doing something very clever, when they
are only wasting their time.
George Bernard Shaw
A game of war in which no element is left to
chance. Anon.
Chesterfield, Earl of (1694-1773)
This man I thought had been a lord among wits, but
I find he is only a wit among lords.
Samuel Johnson
Lord Chesterfield stands much lower in the
estimation of posterity than he would have done if
his letters had never been published.
Thomas B. Macaulay
The only Englishman who ever argued for the art of
pleasing as the first duty of life. Voltaire
A man of much wit, middling sense, and some
learning; but as absolutely void of virtue as any
Jew, T urk, or heathen that ever lived.
John Wesley
Chewing Gum
A dentiferous treadmill. Thomas Alva Edison
A confection that gratifies the palate and cheats
the stomach. Anon.
The national anthem without words. Anon.
Chicago
Where the bulls and the foxes live well and the
lambs wind up head-down from the hook.
Nelson Algren
City on the make. Nelson Algren
A double Newark. Heywood Broun
Queen of the West! Bret Harte
The Second City. A. J. Liebling
Where the used-car lots succeed one another like a
string of past lives. Sean O'Faolain
Beautiful, strong and alert, a goddess in purpose
and mien. Wallace Rice
A Walt Whitman storehouse of democracy come alive,
a Sears catalogue of people and occupations
endlessly varied in repetitive similarities.
Isaac Rosenfeld
City of big shoulders. Carl Sandburg
The Winded City. William G. Shepherd
Chicken
See Egg, Hen.
Child
A beam of sunlight from the Infinite and Eternal,
with possibilities of virtue and vice?but as yet
unstained. Lyman Abbott
The best security for old age. Sholom Asch
Not to know what happened before one was born is
always to be a child. Cicero
A man is a small letter, yet the best copy of Adam
before he tasted of Eve or the apple.
John Earle
Nature's fresh picture newly drawn in oil, which
time and much handling dims and defaces. His soul
is yet a white paper unscribbled with observations
of the world, wherewith at length it becomes a
blurred notebook. John Earle
A curly, dimpled lunatic. Ralph Waldo Emerson
The beginning of a revolution... But you must have
the believing and prophetic eye.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(One who) thinks twenty shillings and twenty
years can scarce ever be spent.
Benjamin Franklin
An ever-bubbling fountain in the world of humanity.
Friedrich Froebel
Love's by-product. Warren Goldberg
The most desirable pest. Max Gralnick
A lower animal in the form of a man.
Luis de Granada
The greatest poem ever known.
Christopher Morley
Behold the child, by nature's kindly law, pleased
with a rattle, tickled with a straw.
Adapted from Alexander Pope
The creatures of example?whatever surrounding
adults do, they will do. Josiah Warren
The child is father of the man.
William Wordsworth
One who stands halfway between an adult and a t.v.
set. Anon.
That which tells in the street what its parents say
at home. Anon.
Something you can account for before it's born, but
once it's here?good Lord! Anon.
An island of curiosity surrounded by a sea of
question marks. Anon.
See also Boy, Boyhood, Girls, Youth.
Childhood
A forward, upward movement.
Simone de Beauvoir
Vanity. Bible: Ecclesiastes, XI, 10.
The period of human life intermediate between the
idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth?two
removes from the sin of manhood and three from the
remorse of age. Ambrose Bierce
Childhood is the country that produces the most
nostalgic, contentious and opinionated exiles.
Richard Eder
Health. George Herbert
All mirth. John Keble
The age without pity. Jean de La Fontaine
A forgotten journey. Jean de La Varrenne
A garden of god is our childhood, each day
A festival radiant with laughter and play.
Micah J. Lebensohn
The ability to forget a sorrow.
Phyllis McGinley
The sleep of reason. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A stage in the process of that continual
remanufacture of the Life Stuff by which the human
race is perpetuated. George Bernard Shaw
Days of woe. Robert Southey
To believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to
believe in belief... To know not yet that you are
under sentence of life, nor petition that it be
commuted to death. Francis Thompson
That wonderful time when all you need to lose
weight is to bathe. Anon.
See also Boyhood, Girls, Youth.
Children
(They that) increase the cares of life, but...
mitigate the remembrance of death.
Francis Bacon
Impediments to great enterprises.
Francis Bacon
A heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb
is his reward. Bible: Psalms, CXXVII, 3?5.
My jewels. Robert Burton
Those who always smell of bread and butter.
Lord Byron
Children in a family are like flowers in a bouquet:
there's always one determined to face in an
opposite direction from the way the arranger
desires. Marcelene Cox
All children are by nature children of wrath, and
are in danger of eternal damnation in Hell.
Jonathan Edwards
The symbol of the eternal marriage between love and
duty. George Eliot
Children are all foreigners. We treat them as such.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Certain cares and uncertain comforts.
English Proverb
The husband's dangerous rivals. Sigmund Freud
Poor men's riches. Thomas Fuller
Children we think of affectionately as divided
pieces of our own bodies. Joseph Hall
Our most valuable natural resource.
Herbert Hoover
Exquisite receptacles of flesh that hold the
scrolls of our deeds.
Adapted from Elbert Hubbard
Little children, headache; big children, heartache.
Italian Proverb
A great comfort in your old age?and they help you
to reach it faster, too. Lionel Kaufman
(Those who) think not of what is past, nor what is
to come, but enjoy the present time, which few of
us do. Jean de La Bruyere
Not things to be molded, but... people to be
unfolded. Jess Lair
God's apostles, day by day sent forth to preach of
love and hope and peace. James Russell Lowell
Of all people... the most imaginative. They abandon
themselves without reserve to every illusion.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Those who do not prattle of yesterday. Their
interests are all of today.
Adapted from Richard Mansfield
(They) constitute man's eternity. Isaac Peretz
Anchors that hold a mother to life. Sophocles
All children... are God's little enemies at heart.
Samuel Spring
The keys of paradise. Richard H. Stoddard
A torment, and nothing else. Leon Tolstoy
Children are our immortality?in them we see the
story of our life re-written in a fairer hand.
Alfred North Whitehead
Defective adults. Evelyn Waugh
God's small interpreters.
John Greenleaf Whittier
A staff for the hand and a hoe for the grave.
Talmud: Yebamot, 65b.
Natural mimics?they act like their parents in spite
of every attempt to teach them good manners.
Anon.
People which can be raised graciously?if you don't
have any. Anon.
See also Baby, Boy, Girls, Youth.
Chinese
Cunning and ingenious; and have a great talent at
bowing out ambassadors who come to visit them.
Leigh Hunt
All Chinese are Confucianists when successful, and
Taoists when... failures. The Confucianist in us
builds and strives, while the Taoist in us watches
and smiles. Lin Yutang
In the United States, everybody's favorite
minority. Paul Weinberger
A race whose families are the pivot of their
civilization. Anon.
A people who think all caucasions look alike.
Anon.
Chivalry
A thing which must be courteously and generously
conceded, and must never be pettishly claimed.
A. C. Benson
The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of
nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic
enterprise. Edmund Burke
The whole of... chivalry is in courtesy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The border-land of all romance; where glitter
hauberk, helm, and lance, and banner waves, and
trumpets sound. Ladies ride with hawk on wrist, and
warriors sweep along magnified by mist. The dusk
of centuries and of song.
Adapted from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Going about releasing beautiful ladies from other
men's castles, and taking them to your own castle.
Henry W. Nevinson
I shall maintain and defend the honest adoes and
quarrels of all ladies of honor, widows, orphans
and maids of good fame. Oath of a Knight
When every morning brought a noble chance, and
every chance brought out a noble knight.
Adapted from Alfred Lord Tennyson
The deportment of a man toward any woman not his
wife. Anon.
Choice
Life's business. Robert Browning
Trouble. Dutch Proverb
The strongest principle of growth. George Eliot
No choice is also a choice. Jewish Proverb
The difficulty in life. George Moore
The power of choice must involve the possibility of
error?that is the essence of choosing.
Herbert Samuel
Christ
The one great word?well worth all languages in
earth or heaven. Philip J. Bailey
Christ is all, and in all.
Bible: Colossians, III, 11.
A virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall
call his name Immanuel.
Bible: Isaiah, VII, 14.
A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.
Bible: Isaiah, LIII, 3.
I am the light of the world; he that follow me
shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the
light of life. Bible: John, VII, 12.
I am the resurrection of the life.
Bible: John, XI, 25.
The incarnation of the genius of Judaism.
Kurt Breysig
The condescension of divinity, and the exaltation
of humanity. Phillips Brooks
The King of Kings. Gerald Bullett
The immeasurably great Unconscious.
Thomas Carlyle
The best of men... a sufferer, a soft, meek,
patient, humble tranquil spirit. The first true
gentleman that ever breathed.
Adapted from Thomas Dekker
The most scientific man that ever trod the globe.
He plunged beneath the material surface of things,
and found the spiritual cause.
Mary Baker Eddy
The record of a pure and holy soul, humble,
absolutely disinterested, a truthspeaker, and bent
on serving, teaching and uplifting men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
An era in human history... and its immense
influence for good leaves all the perversion and
superstition that has accrued almost harmless.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The most fascinating figure in history. In him is
combined what is best and most mysterious and most
enchanting in Israel?the eternal people whose child
he was. Hyman G. Enelow
A path. Giles Fletcher
The one completely harmonious man, unfolding all
which was in humanity. Alice French
The only one in whom the real and ideal met and
were absolutely one. Alice French
It is light that enables us to see the differences
between things; and it is Christ that gives us
light. Julius and Augustus Hare
A modest God of the People, a citizen God.
Heinrich Heine
Shepherd of mortals. Daniel Henderson
The world's here, the desire of nations. But
besides he is the hero of single souls.
Gerard M. Hopkins
His parentage was obscure; His condition poor; His
education null; His natural endowments great; His
life correct and innocent; He was meek, benevolent,
patient, firm, disinterested, and of the sublimest
eloquence. Thomas Jefferson
An abyss filled with light. One must close one's
eyes if one is not to fall into it. Franz Kafka
A great teacher of morality and an artist in
parable. Joseph Klausner
The foremost of those who have made humanity
divine. Joseph Krauskopf
My hope. Latin Phrase
The Saviour of men. Latin Phrase
A priest and king, though He was never consecrated
by any papist bishop or greased by any of those
shavelings; but He was ordained and consecrated by
God Himself, and by Him anointed.
Martin Luther
Christ is an example, showing us how to live.
Martin Luther
The personal embodiment of truths which are
permanently central for the spiritual life of
mankind. Eugene W. Lyman
The immanent Spiritual Life of God focalized in a
human personality. Shailer Mathews
Expresses both the infinite possibilities of love
in human life and the infinite possibilities beyond
human life... a true revelation of the total situa-
tion in which human life stands.
Reinhold Niebuhr
A God to whom we can approach without pride, and
before whom we may abase ourselves without despair.
Blaise Pascal
In Politics He was a leveller or communist; in
morals He was a monk; He believed that only the
poor and despised would inherit the kingdom of God.
W. Winwood Reade
An inexhaustible principle of moral regeneration.
Ernest Renan
The best husband. Saint Augustine
Know that Our Lord is called in Scripture the
Prince of Peace, and hence, wherever He is
absolute Master, He preserves peace.
Saint Francis de Sales
The prototype of a humanity that is yet to be; not
the great exception but the great example.
George Seaver
He is what we should call an artist and a Bohe-
mian in His manner of life.
George Bernard Shaw
A parish demagogue. Percy Bysshe Shelley
He went about to cure poor people who were blind,
and many who were sick and lame.
Adapted from Ann and Jane Taylor
The spirit of Compassionate Goodness at the heart
of reality. Harold B. Walker
God clothed with human nature.
Benjamin Whichcote
See also Bible, Catholicism, Christianity,
Christians, Christmas, Cross, Papacy, Religion,
Salvation.
Christianity
God seeking after men. Thomas Arnold
The complete negation of common sense and sound
reason. Mikhail A. Bakunin
An uneasy, a tragic, an impossible faith, in high
tension between the real and the ideal, the "is"
and the "ought"?that is one of the sources of its
strength. Crane Brinton
To let Christ lead us to our Father.
Phillips Brooks
The expression of an effort to build up and
organize temporal life in accordance with the
principles of the Gospel. R. L. Bruckberger
An instrument of warfare against vice.
Samuel Butler 1
The bastard progeny of Judaism. It is the basest of
all national religions. Celsus
Prophetic Judaism. Hermann Cohen
Not a theory, or a speculation; but a life;?not a
philosophy of life, but a life and a living
process. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Chistianity is within a man, even as he is a being
gifted with reason; it is associated with your
mother's chair, and with the first-remembered-tones
of her... voice. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The religion of loving, speaking, and doing, as
well as believing. John Cumming
Consists in the reconciliation of the human will
with the Divine?the control of the human will as
it expresses itself in action.
William Cunningham
Completed Judaism. Benjamin Disraeli
Judaism for the multitude. Benjamin Disraeli
Undying hope both for this world and the next.
Jonathan Edwards
The triumph of Judaism... to Israel fell the
singular privilege of giving a god to the world.
Anatole France
A philosophy which intends to be a rational
interpretation of data, but considers as the
essential element of these data the religious
Faith, the object of which is defined by the
Christian revelation. Etienne Gilson
Not the religion of Jesus; it is that of the
followers of Jesus. Maurice Goguel
A system of radical optimism. William R. Inge
The highest perfection of humanity.
Samuel Johnson
What was invented two thousand years ago was the
spirit of Christianity. Gerald S. Lee
The real... Christianity is to be found in its
benevolent morality... in the consolation which it
bears to the house of mourning, in the light with
which it brightens the great mystery of the grave.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Primarily the conversion of all the ancient moral
and mystic efforts of humanity into a higher
religion, which in fulfilling their aspirations,
transcends them. Eugene Masure
In great part merely a protest against paganism;
its ideal is negative rather than active.
John Stuart Mill
A missionary religion, converting, advancing,
aggressive, encompassing the world.
Friedrich M. Mu ller
At once a philosophy, a political power, and a
religious rite: as a religion, it is Holy; as a
philosophy, it is Apostolic; as a political power,
it is imperial, that is, One and Catholic.
John Henry Newman
The element and principle of all education.
John Henry Newman
Christianity aims at mastering the beasts of prey;
its modus operandi is to make them ill?to make
feeble is the Christian recipe for taming, for
"civilizing." Friedrich W. Nietzsche
Not so much the pursuit of an ideal as an Ideal
that pursues humanity, stooping down in an
Incarnation to take up dwelling in the hearts of
man. James E. O'Mahony
The enemy of human love. Ouida
That sweet music which kept in order the rulers of
the people. Theodore Parker
A denial of this world... a means of redemption
from, not for, life. Isaac Peretz
A battle, not a dream. Wendell Phillips
More than history. It is also a system of truths.
Every event which its history records, either is a
truth, or... expresses a truth, which man needs
to... put into practice. Noah Porter
Simply a "petrifaction" of an alien state of
consciousness, projecting into the present from
vanished ages. Herman Rauschning
The masterpiece of Judaism, its glory and the
fullness of its evolution. Ernest Renan
The relation of the soul to God... not the relation
of man to his fellow man. Bertrand A. Russell
The true aim is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit
of God. Saint Seraphim
The paganization of monotheism.
George Santayana
The only organization truly potent for the
perfection of Society. Julius H. Seelye
Does not remove you from the world and its
problems; it makes you fit to live in it,
triumphantly and usefully. Charles Templeton
The companion of liberty in all its conflicts, the
cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its
claims. Alexis de Tocqueville
Humility, penitence, submissiveness, progress,
life. Leon Tolstoy
Requires two things from every man who believes in
it; first, to acquire property by just and
righteous means, and second, to look not only on
his own things, but also on the things of others.
Henry Van Dyke
A too ardent monotheism. Edward B. White
The religion of everyman, the religion for every
man, the religion of all conditions.
Maurice Zundel
The name of a number of different religions.
Anon.
See also Baptism, bible, Catholicism, Charity,
Churches, Commandments, Conversion, Cross, Luther,
Piety, Prayer, Protestantism, Religion, Salvation,
Sin.
Christians
A sinful man who has put himself to school to
Christ for the honest purpose of becoming better.
Henry Ward Beecher
Every one whose life and disposition are
Christ-like, no matter how heretical the
denomination may be to which he belongs.
Henry Ward Beecher
The disciples were called Christians first in
Antioch. Bible: Acts XI, 26.
One who believes that the New Testament is a
divinely inspired book admirably suited to the
spiritual needs of his neighbor. Ambrose Bierce
It is not some religious act that makes a Christian
what he is, but participation in the suffering of
God in the light of the world.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
One who rejoices in the superiority of a rival.
Edwin Booth
Those Christians best deserve the name who
studiously make peace their aim.
Adapted from William Cowper
To be a Christian is not purely to serve God... it
is also an ethic, a service to mankind... not
merely a theology but also an anthropology.
Albert Dondeyne
A worldly-minded people going to church for
recreation and in conformity to custom.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Like ripening corn; the riper he grows the more
lowly he bends his head. Thomas Guthrie
God Almighty's gentleman.
Julius and Augustus Hare
One of several Jewish heresies. Eric Hoffer
To make one a complete Christian he must have the
works of a papist, the words of a Puritan, and the
faith of a Protestant. James Howell
A man who keeps one day in the week holy and raises
hell with folks and fauna the other six.
Elbert Hubbard
Whoever would be a Christian must be a
nonconformist. Martin Luther King 2
They are infidels who say, Verily God is Christ the
son of Mary. Koran 5.
A wise man will always be a Christian, because the
perfection of wisdom is to know where lies
tranquility of mind, and how to attain it, which
Christianity teaches. Walter Savage Landor
Unhappy men who are persuaded that they will
survive death and live forever... they despise
death and are willing to sacrifice their lives to
their faith. Lucian
Not he that has no sin, but he to whom God imputes
not his sin because of his faith in Christ.
Martin Luther
A maid, after she had been confirmed, was asked how
she knew she was a Christian. "Because," she
replied, "now I do not sweep the dirt under the
rugs." John H. Miller
He that can apprehend and consider vice with all
her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain,
and yet distinguish and prefer that which is truly
better, he is the true warfaring Christian.
John Milton
We are Christians by the same token we are
Frenchmen or Germans. Michel de Montaigne
The domestic animal, the herd animal.
Friedrich W. Nietzsche
In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died
on the cross. Friedrich W. Nietzsche
The Jew all over again?he is threefold the Jew.
Friedrich W. Nietzsche
To be like Christ is to be a Christian.
William Penn
The supernatural man who thinks, judges, and acts
consistently in accordance with right reason
illumined by the supernatural light of the example
and teaching of Christ. Pope Pius 11
The true citizen, lofty of purpose, resolute in
endeavor, ready for a hero's deeds, but never
looking down on his task because it is cast in the
day of small things. Theodore Roosevelt
The heathens, too, believe that Christ died; the
belief, the faith in His resurrection makes the
Christian Christian... It is faith in this
resurrection that justifies us. Saint Augustine
A good Christian would rather be robbed than rob
others?rather be murdered than murder?martyred than
tyrant. Saint Francis de Sales
A man who leads on others with him. He must run
towards Christ. Roger Schutz
A part of a whole, a citizen of the Kingdom of God,
a child in the family of the Trinity, a cell in the
organism of the Whole Christ and a member of the
Mystical Body. Fulton J. Sheen
Give, give, give... the best definition of the
Christian life I have yet heard. W. F. Stride
A man becomes a Christian; he is not born one.
Tertullian
One who so believes in Christ, as that sin hath no
more domination over him. John Wesley
No man... who does not think constantly of how he
can lift his brother, how he can assist his friend,
how he can enlighten mankind, how he can make
virtue the rule of conduct in the circle in which
he lives. Woodrow Wilson
The highest style of man. Edward Young
Scratch the Christian and you find the
pagan?spoiled. Israel Zangwill
See also Baptism, Charity, Churches, Luther,
Religion, Saint, Salvation, Sin.
Christmas
Unto you is born this day in the city of David a
Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
Bible: Luke, II, 2.
The hour in which the Prince of Peace was born.
William Cullen Bryant
A lesson of humanity... in every house the Christ
is born. Adapted from Richard W. Gilder
Glorious time of great Too-Much. Leigh Hunt
When children gather round their tree.
Tudor Jenks
This is the happy morn, wherein the Son of Heaven's
eternal King, of wedded maid and virgin mother our
great redemption from above did bring.
Adapted from John Milton
If it means anything (it) means the exaltation and
glorification of the spirit of the child, which is
just another word for humility. Fulton J. Sheen
The glory of God and of good-will to man!
John Greenleaf Whittier
Dashing through the dough. Ralph M. Wyser
The time when the year comes to a head. Anon.
Churches
The actual inner unity of redeemed humanity united
with Christ. Karl Adam
It is the law of human nature that the Church
should wish to do everything and be everything.
Charles Baudelaire
The inner company of those who, under the
leadership of Christ, and empowered by Him, insist
on living, and if necessary dying, rather than
surrender to the selfish, hateful folly of a
perishing race of men. B. I. Bell
Nothing less than the cosmos Christianized.
Nicholas Berdyaev
And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and
upon this rock I will build my church; and the
gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
Bible: Matthew, XVI, 18.
Where two or three are gathered together in my
name, there am I in the midst of them.
Bible: Matthew, XVIII, 20.
Nothing but a section of humanity in which Christ
has really taken form. The Church is the man in
Christ, incarnate, sentenced and awakened to new
life. Dietrich Bonhoeffer
An organization which should fight not for itself
but for the salvation of the world.
Adapted from Dietrich Bonhoeffer
A place where one day's truce ought to be allowed
to the dissensions and animosities of mankind.
Edmund Burke
Wherever we see the Word of God purely preached and
heard, and the sacraments administered according to
Christ's institution, there... a church of God
exists. John Calvin
A worshipping, witnessing, confessing community of
forgiven sinners who rejoice in the grace that has
been given them and who proclaim the word of
judgment and redemption to those who have not
acknowledged the sovereignty of God over their
lives. Kenneth Cauthen
A sacred corporation for the promulgation and
maintenance in Europe of certain Asian principles
which, although local in their birth, are of divine
origin and eternal application.
Benjamin Disraeli
Beliefs and practices which unite into one single
moral community... all those who adhere to them.
Emile Durkheim
Part of the sky. Ralph Waldo Emerson
An anvil that has worn out many hammers.
English Proverb
The only place where someone speaks to me... and I
do not have to answer back. Charles de Gaulle
A temple built to God. George Herbert
A congregation of baptized believers, associated by
a convenant in faith and fellowship of the Gospel;
observing the ordinances of Christ; governed by His
laws. E. T. Hiscox
A community of solitude before God.
Richard Hocking
A church is God between four walls.
Victor Hugo
The community in which men share the process of
total evaluation of every aspect of life, arrive at
what they conceive to be spiritual judgments on
their own lives in the light of an absolute
imperative. Ernest Johnson
A center of light and leading, of inspiration and
guidance, for its specific community.
Rufus Jones
The Body of Christian believers and transmitters of
Christ's mind and spirit through the centuries.
Rufus Jones
The community of destiny operating under a divine
mandate. Edward J. Jurji
The mansion-house of the Omnipotent God.
Legal Maxim
A voluntary society of men, joining themselves
together of their own accord, in order to the
public worshipping of God, in such a manner as they
judge acceptable to him, and effectual to the
salvation of their souls. John Locke
It takes men, not a creed, to make a church.
Cleland B. McAfee
A totality of segregated and independent units,
unknown both to themselves and to others.
A. C. McGiffert
A place in which gentlemen who have never been to
heaven brag about it to persons who will never get
there. Henry Louis Mencken
A hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.
L. L. Nash
A collection of souls, brought together in one by
God's secret grace, though that grace comes to them
through visible instruments, and unites them to a
visible hierarchy. John Henry Newman
A people on the move. John O'Conner
Wherever one hand meets another helpfully.
John Ruskin
Means convocation, or assembly... because all are
called to be members of it. Saint Isidore
A Christian church is a body or collection of
persons, voluntarily associated together,
professing to believe that Christ teaches, to do
what Christ enjoins, to imitate his example,
cherish his spirit, and make known his gospel to
others. R. F. Sample
The Church should have a tapering spire,
To point to realms where sin's forgiven,
And lead men's thoughts from earth to heaven.
John E. Woodrow
Soul agents for nations. Anon.
See also Bible, Christianity, Church (Roman
Catholic), Cross, God, Luther, Prayer, Preaching,
Religion, Salvation, Synagogue, Worship.
Church of England
It's pure in doctrine, correct in deeds,
has nought redundant, and nothing needs.
Adapted from George Crabbe
Charity and love is the known doctrine of the
Church of England. Daniel Defoe
Not a mere depository of doctrine. The Church of
England is a part of England... part of our
strength and... liberties, a part of our national
character. Benjamin Disraeli
The doctrine of the Old Testament.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A decorous simplicity. Justice Lushington
A popish liturgy, a Calvinistic creed, and an
Aminian clergy. William Pitt
Ours is the only church where the skeptic stands at
the altar, and where St. Thomas is regarded as the
ideal apostle. Oscar Wilde
Church (Roman Catholic)
A sword, the hilt of which is at Rome, and the
point everywhere. Andre M. Dupin
The mother and mistress of all the faithful.
Fourth Council of Lateran, 1215.
The work of an Incarnate God. Like all God's works,
it is perfect. James C. Gibbons
No other than the ghost of the deceased Roman
Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.
Thomas Hobbes
The one great spiritual organization which is able
to resist, and must, as a matter of life and death,
the progress of science and modern civilization.
Thomas Henry Huxley
A church where there are so many helps to get to
Heaven. Samuel Johnson
The great fact which dominates the history of
modern civilization. Homer Lea
Less a religion than a priestly tyranny armed with
the spoils of civil power which, on pretext of
religion, it hath seized against the command of
Christ himself. John Milton
Salvation. Saint Augustine
The Holy Church, the One Church, the True Church...
which fights against all errors.
Saint Augustine
The society of the faithful collected into one and
the same body, governed by its legitimate pastors,
of whom Jesus Christ is the invisible head?the
pope, the successors of St. Peter, being His
representative on earth. Saint John the Baptist
A faithful and ever watchful guardian of the dogmas
which have been committed to her charge. In this
sacred deposit she changes nothing, she takes
nothing from it, she adds nothing to it.
Saint Vincent
See also Catholicism, Papacy, Priests.
Churchyard
See Cemetery, Death, Grave.
Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
An exalted patriot. Thomas Jefferson
A journalist in the worst sense of the word.
Theodor Mommsen
Cigarette
Cigarette-smoking is like drinking beer out of a
thimble. Elizabeth A. Dillwyn
Killers that travel in packs. Mary S. Ott
The perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is
exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.
Oscar Wilde
A neurotic habit that double-times you to the
grave. Robert Zwickey
A fire at one end, a fool at the other, and a bit
of tobacco in between. Anon.
See also Tobacco.
Circumcision
Ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and
it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and
you. Bible: Genesis, XVII, 11.
An example of the power of poetry to raise the low
and offensive. Ralph Waldo Emerson
A sign of the covenant between man and his Creator,
not to pollute himself with unchastity.
Abraham Ibn Ezra
An institution, not a mere ceremony.
Zohar, Genesis, 197a.
See also Covenant.
Circumstance
That unspiritual god and miscreator that makes
and helps along our coming evils.
Adapted from Lord Byron
Something beyond the control of man.
Adapted from Benjamin Disraeli
The creatures of men. Benjamin Disraeli
The fresh banana-peel just around the corner.
Elbert Hubbard
Things round about; we are in them, not under them.
Walter Savage Landor
The rulers of the weak; they are but the
instruments of the wise. Samuel Lover
What determines all our thoughts and acts.
Anon.
Circus
A place where horses, ponies and elephants are
permitted to see men, women and children acting the
fool. Ambrose Bierce
A show as entertaining as the human race.
Eugene E. Brussell
An oasis of Hellenism in a world that reads too
much to be wise, and thinks too much to be
beautiful. Oscar Wilde
Animals acting like the human race, and the human
race acting like animals. Anon.
A show that smells. Anon.
An amusement competing for laughs with humanity.
Anon.
See also Clown.
Citizen
The most important office. Louis D. Brandeis
It is the function of the citizen to keep the
government from falling into error.
Robert H. Jackson
The first requisite... is that he shall be able and
willing to pull his weight. Theodore Roosevelt
Civis, the most honorable name among the Romans;
a citizen, a word of contempt among us.
Jonathan Swift
One who accepts his responsibilities in raising his
children well, paying taxes, and obeying the law.
Anon.
See also Patriot.
City
The chaos of eternal smoke. John Armstrong
A great mess composed of a multitude of primitive
forms of consciousness who are naturally attracted
to gore, egoistic grandeur and gross excitement.
Charles Bolte
A world of men for me. Robert Browning
Struggling tides of life that seem in wayward,
aimless course to tend.
Adapted from William Cullen Bryant
Torture. Lord Byron
Nowadays... the only desert within our means.
Albert Camus
The abiding place of wealth and luxury.
Grover Cleveland
Where works of man are clustered close around, and
works of God are hardly to be found.
Adapted from William Cowper
The centre of a thousand trades.
William Cowper
(A place which will) force growth and make men
talkative and entertaining, but... artificial.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first requisite to happiness. Euripides
Not that which shows the palace of government as
the origin and climax of every radiating avenue;
the true city is that of a burgher people,
governing themselves from their own town hall and
yet expressing also the spiritual ideal which
governs them. Patrick Geddes
Any place where men have built a jail, a bagnio, a
gallows, a morgue, a church, a hospital, a saloon,
and laid out a cemetery?hence a center of life.
Elbert Hubbard
Any part of the earth where ignorance and stupidity
integrate, agglomerate and breed.
Elbert Hubbard
A herding region. Elbert Hubbard
A settlement that consistently generates its
economic growth from its own local economy.
Jane Jacobs
America's glory and sometimes America's shame.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
A great solitude. Latin Proverb
A river leading nowhere. Amy Lowell
A prison for speculative minds. Franz Mehring
Where homes thick and sewers annoy the air.
Adapted from John Milton
A busy hum of men. John Milton
(A phenomenon) growing so fast its arteries are
showing through its outskirts. Clyde Moore
A human zoo. Desmond Morris
Has always been the fireplace of civilization,
whence light and heat radiated out into the dark.
Theodore Parker
Any city... is... divided into two, one the city of
the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war
with one another. Plato
A stone forest. John B. Priestly
A natural territory for the psychopath with
histrionic gifts. Jonathan Raban
(A place where) there is no room to die.
Felix Riesenberg
The sink of the human race.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The people are the city. William Shakespeare
The greatest diversion from external circumstances.
Sydney Smith
A magnet?the bigger it is, the greater the drawing
power. Samuel Tenenbaum
Millions of people being lonesome together.
Henry David Thoreau
It is men who make a city, not walls or ships.
Thucydides
(A place) of conventions and artificialities ...
where the friends of today will fall upon one
another tomorrow. Joseph Trumpeldor
The place where men are constantly seeking to find
their door and where they are doomed to wandering
forever. Thomas Wolfe
A place so big that no one counts. Anon.
See also London, Los Angeles, New York City,
Paris.
Civilization
A method of living, an attitude of equal respect
for all men. Jane Addams
The lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
A constant quest for nonviolent means of solving
conflicts. Max Ascoli
The beginning is marked by an intense legality;
that legality is the very condition of its
existence, the bond which ties it together.
Walter Bagehot
Mankind's struggle upwards, in which millions are
trampled to death, that thousands may mount their
bodies. Clara Balfour
Trade and law. Jacques Barzun
Civilization does not lie in a greater or lesser
degree of refinement, but in an awareness shared by
a whole people. Albert Camus
Gunpowder, printing and the Protestant religion.
Thomas Carlyle
A society based on the opinion of civilians.
Winston S. Churchill
Civilization and profits go hand in hand.
Calvin Coolidge
A strange heterogeneous assemblage of vices and
virtues, and of a variety of other principles, for
ever at war, for ever jarring, for ever producing
some dangerous, some distressing extreme.
St. John de Cre vecoeur
The cooperation of regional societies under a
common spiritual influence. Christopher Dawson
Increased means and leisure are the two civilizers
of man. Benjamin Disraeli
Order and freedom promoting cultural activity.
Will Durant
(That which) exists by geological consent, subject
to change without notice. Will Durant
A stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled
with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting
and doing the things historians usually record,
while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes,
make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry
and even whittle statues. The story of civilization
is what happened on the banks. Will Durant
Civilization is carried on by superior men, and not
by people in the mass; if nature sends no such men,
civilization declines. Victor Duruy
Quality... not... speed. Irwin Edman
A decent provision for the poor is the true test.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The test... is the power of drawing the most
benefit out of the cities. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Consists in progressive renunciation.
Sigmund Freud
Consists in an ever increasing subjection of our
instincts to repression. Sigmund Freud
Consists not in the multiplication, but in the
deliberate and voluntary reduction of wants.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Paralysis. Paul Gauguin
Simply a series of victories over nature.
William Harvey
The process of reducing the infinite to the finite.
Oliver Wendell Holmes 2
Nothing more than politeness, industry and
fairness. Edgar W. Howe
A device for increasing human ills.
Elbert Hubbard
Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. Of that divine tear
and of that human smile is composed the sweetness
of the present civilization. Victor Hugo
An arrangement for domesticating the passions and
setting them to do useful work. Aldous Huxley
Details the steps by which men have succeeded in
building up an artificial world within the cosmos.
Thomas Henry Huxley
A condition of mankind which neither embodies any
worthy ideal nor even possesses the merit of
stability. Thomas Henry Huxley
True civilization is where every man gives to every
other every right that he claims for himself.
Robert G. Ingersoll
The history of the slow and painful enfranchisement
of the human race. Robert G. Ingersoll
The organization of all those faculties that resist
the mere excitement of sport. William James
All the civilization we know has been created and
directed by small intellectual aristocracies, never
by people in the mass. The power of crowds is only
to destroy. Gustave Lebon
Teaching men to govern themselves by letting them
do it. Abraham Lincoln
(Securing) the largest possible measure of
individual liberty consistent with the welfare of
society. Meyer London
A slow process of learning to be kind.
Charles Lucas
Our common heritage. Mike Mansfield
The degree of a nation's disregard for the neces-
sities of existence. William Somerset Maugham
A concerted effort to remedy the blunders and
check the practical joking of God.
Henry Louis Mencken
Consists in the multiplication and refinement of
human wants. Robert A. Millikan
Found in the softening of manners, in growing
urbanity, in politer relations and in the spreading
of knowledge in such ways that decency and
seemliness are practiced until they transcend
specific and detailed laws. Comte de Mirabeau
The outcome of a spiritual work... born of man's
need to fulfill himself by bringing the universe to
fulfillment. Jean Mouroux
The development of art out of nature, and of
self-government out of passion, and of certainty
out of opinion, and of faith out of reason.
John Henry Newman
To convert man, a beast of prey, into a tame and
civilized animal, a domestic animal.
Friedrich W. Nietzsche
Respect for human life, the punishment of crimes
against property and persons, the equality of all
good citizens before the law?or, in a word,
justice. Max Nordau
Nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to
being the last resort. Jose Ortega y Gasset
Restrictions, standards, courtesy, indirect
methods, justice, reason. Jose Ortega y Gasset
A coat of paint that washes away when the rain
falls. Auguste Rodin
The making of civil persons. John Ruskin
A heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge
slowly accumulated in the course of centuries.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The aim of civilization is to make politics
superfluous and science and art indispensable.
Arthur Schnitzler
Man is at bottom a wild, terrific animal. We know
him only in connection with taming and training,
which is called civilization.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Heaps of agonizing human maggots, struggling with
one another for scraps of food.
George Bernard Shaw
The sum total of man's material acquisitions.
C. Bezalel Sherman
A progress from an indefinite, incoherent homo
geneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity.
Herbert Spencer
A movement and not a condition.
Arnold J. Toynbee
A limitless multiplication of unnecessary neces
saries. Mark Twain
Rich, luxuriant, varied personalism.
Walt Whitman
The art and practice of living equally in the
community. Thornton Wilder
A long hard fight to maintain and advance.
Thornton Wilder
A primary basis of any kind of civilization is
destruction of the absurd belief that in government
and the ordering of human society the end justifies
the means. Leonard Woolf
The semblance of peace by manifold illusion.
William Butler Yeats
One aim?to liberate man from all that is mys tic...
and to cultivate the purely rational side of his
being. Ignaz Zollschan
A slow process of getting rid of our prejudices.
Anon.
The time when men learn to live off one another
instead of off the land. Anon.
A slow process of adopting the ideas of the
minority. Anon.
See also Culture, Education, Great Men, Greatness,
Heritage, Minority, Thinking, Thought.
Civilized
When you take a bath. When you don't take a bath,
you are cultured. Lin Yutang
A certain list of things about which we permit a
man to have an opinion different from ours. Usually
they are things which we have ceased to care about:
for instance, the worship of God. Aubrey Menen
The radical progressive desire on the part of each
individual to take others into consideration.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
To be incapable of giving unnecessary offense, to
have some quality of consideration for all who
cross our path. Agnes Repplier
A man's ability to remain in one place and linger
in his own company. Seneca
Preferring the best not only to the worst but to
the second best. Anon.
See also Gentleman, Manners.
Clarity
The supreme politeness of him who wields a pen.
Jean Henri Fabre
The greatest of legislative and judicial virtues,
like the sunshine, revealing and curative.
Charles Evans Hughes
So clearly one of the attributes of truth that very
often it passes for truth. Joseph Joubert
Care should be taken, not that the reader may
understand, but that he must understand.
Quintilian
The good faith of philosophers.
Luc de Vauvenargues
To speak without erring, and to be brief without
repeating. Joseph Zabara
See also Art, Language, Style, Writing.
Classes
One soweth, and another reapeth.
Bible: John, IV, 37.
He that has, to him shall be given; and he that has
not, from him shall be taken even that which he
has. Bible: Mark, IV, 25.
Men of low degree are vanity, and men of high
degree are a lie. Bible: Psalms, LXII, 9.
The rich and the poor?the have-nots and the haves.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
The Washed and the Unwashed. Thomas Carlyle
Those who consume more than they create, and those
who create more than they consume.
Adapted from Edward Carpenter
There are but two families in the world?Have-much
and Have-little. Miguel de Cervantes
Three classes of citizens. The first are the rich,
who are indolent and yet always crave more. The
second are the poor, who have nothing, are full of
envy, hate the rich, and are easily led by
demagogues. Between the two extremes lie those who
make the state secure and uphold the laws.
Euripides
All communities divide themselves into the few and
the many. The first are the rich and well-born,
the other the mass of people.
Alexander Hamilton
There must be a class to do the menial duties, to
perform the drudgery of life. Its requisites are
vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must
have, or you would not have that other class which
leads progress, civilization and refinement.
James H. Hammond
We are, by our occupations, education and habits of
life, divided... into different species, which
regard one another... with scorn and malignity.
Samuel Johnson
Jupiter placed two tables in the world. The
cunning, the vigilant and the strong eat at the
first: the inferior have the leavings at the
second. Jean de La Fontaine
Some men labor with their minds and some with their
muscles. Those who labor with their minds govern
those who labor with their muscles. Mencius
Merely the ratification of an order of nature, of a
natural law of the first rank, over which no
arbitrary flat, no "modern idea" can exert any
influence. Friedrich W. Nietzsche
To the church there are only two kinds of men?those
who follow Christ and those who do not.
Frank M. North
Two or more orders of people who are believed to
be, and are accordingly ranked by the members of
the community, in socially superior and inferior
positions. W. Lloyd Warner
Two classes, those who believe the incredible, and
those who do the improbable. Oscar Wilde
The working class and the employing class.
Anon.
See also Aristocrat, Middle Class, Multitude,
Wealth, Workers.
Classics
Examples of how to think, not of what to think.
Jacques Barzun
A work which gives pleasure to the minority which
is intensely and permanently interested... It lives
on because the minority... is eternally curious and
is therefore engaged in an eternal process of
rediscovery. Arnold Bennet
In science, read by preference the newest works; in
literature, the oldest. The classics are always
modern. Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
The literature of which we do not expect anything
new. Karel C apek
Primitive literature. Stephen Leacock
A true classic is an author who has enriched the
human mind, augmented its treasure, and made it
advance a step. Charles A. Sainte-Beuve
(That which teaches one to) love the instrument
better than the end... not what may be read in
Greek, but Greek itself. Sydney Smith
The noblest recorded thoughts of man... the only
oracles which are not decayed.
Henry David Thoreau
Something that everybody wants to have read and
nobody wants to read. Mark Twain
A book which people praise and don't read.
Mark Twain
Truth and clarity, logically arranged, is classic
style in all languages. Isaac Wise
Something people know by name but never read.
Anon.
A good art work neglected by too much appreciation.
Anon.
See also Book, Literature, Writing.
Classification
A repertory of weapons for attack upon the future
and the unknown. John Dewey
A bore, both to the describer and the describee.
Benjamin Disraeli
Class, Middle
See Middle Class, Philistine.
Cleanliness
Cleanness of body was ever deemed to proceed from a
due reverence to God, to society, and to ourselves.
Francis Bacon
(An act which) leads to the sanctification of the
soul. Moses Maimonides
Respect for God. Talmud: Sabbath, 50b.
Next to godliness. John Wesley
A fine life-preserver. Anon.
Clemens, Samuel
See Twain, Mark.
Clergymen
Not so much what a man says in the pulpit, but what
he does out of the pulpit, gives power to his
ministry. Henry Berkowitz
We are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did
beseech you by us. Bible: Corinthians, V, 20.
A man who undertakes the management of our
spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his
temporal ones. Ambrose Bierce
It is his profession to support one side.
Samuel Butler 2
The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human
Sunday. Samuel Butler 2
He that negotiates between God and man, as God's
ambassador, the grand concerns of judg- ment and
mercy. Adapted from William Cowper
Three classes of clergy: Nimrods, ramrods and
fishing-rods. English Proverb
(Those) who are set apart to the care of sacred
matters, and the conducting (of) our public devo-
tions with greater decency and order.
David Hume
An immense body who are ignorant and speak out; a
small proportion who know and are silent; and a
minute minority who know and speak according to
their knowledge. Thomas Henry Huxley
A man who is good enough to go to heaven.
Samuel Johnson
They think nobly of the Universe, and believe in
Souls and Eternal Happiness. Logan P. Smith
A landscape painter of Christianity.
Oliver H. Smith
A man... thrown into life with his hands tied, and
bid to swim; he does well if he keeps his hands
above water. Sydney Smith
See also Bishop, Clericalism, Preach ers,
Preaching, Priests, Rabbi
Clericalism
The utilization of a church, a faith, and the
discipline of the faithful for political ends.
R. L. Bruckberger
The pursuit of power, especially political power,
by a religious hierarchy, carried on by secular
methods and for purposes of social domination.
John Mackay
One of the chief hindrances to social progress.
Herbert L. Samuel
Cleverness
(That which is) serviceable for everything,
sufficient for nothing. Henry F. Amiel
Often annoying, like a lamp in a bedroom.
Ludwig Boerne
A tool used to fetch foolish admirers.
Jewish Proverb
Consists in knowing perfectly the price of things.
La Rochefoucauld
A quality you distrust when it becomes
self-conscious. Anon.
A quality which is entertaining but is never
confused with trust or wisdom. Anon.
Thinking of a bright remark in time to say it. The
other consists in not saying it. Anon.
The tool with which bad men work. Anon.
See also Cunning, Wit.
Cliche
Hush little bright line
Don't you cry...
You'll be a cliche
Bye and bye. Fred Allen
To make a cliche is to make a classic.
James Borne
An expression of the lowest common denominator
which fits you for the company of the lowest common
denominator. Eugene E. Brussell
Only something well said in the first place.
William Granger
See also Platitude.
Climate
A theory. Weather is a condition.
Oliver Herford
What lasts all the time; weather only lasts a few
days. Anon.
See also Weather.
Clock
A machine of great moral value to man, allaying his
concern for the future by reminding him what a lot
of time remains to him. Ambrose Bierce
A heart. Its ticks indicate the passing of
time?only the clock is apt to keep ticking longer.
Jerry Dashkin
A device which owns no more than sixty minutes an
hour. Samuel Liptzin
The symbol of man. His heart, too, beats
incessantly... and his moods, swinging between hope
and despair, may be brought to a sudden halt by the
least jar. Eliakim Zunser
A device which measures out our life. Anon.
See also Calendar, Day, Life, Time.
Clothes
The woman shalt not wear that which pertaineth unto
a man, neither shalt a man put on a woman's
garment. Bible: Deuteronomy, XXII, 5.
The intellect of the dandy. Josh Billings
The greatest provocations of lust.
Robert Burton
Clothes gave us individuality, distinctions, social
polity; clothes have made men of us.
Thomas Carlyle
Ought to be... remembrances of our lost innocency.
Thomas Fuller
An expression of the social life of the time.
Elizabeth Hawes
(Items) good only as they supply the want of other
means of procuring respect. Samuel Johnson
The imprint of sin; we ought therefore to... cover
with decency in accordance with the law of God.
Saint John Baptist
Clothes keep my various selves buttoned up
together, and enable all these otherwise
irreconcilable aggregates of psychological
phenomena to pass themselves off as one person.
Logan P. Smith
Two-thirds of beauty. Welsh Proverb
Wrappings worn by men for warmth, women for spite,
and children because they have to. Anon.
Always the reflection of one's self-respect.
Anon.
See also Dress, Fashion.
Clouds
The only birds that never sleep. Victor Hugo
A roof beautifully painted but unable to satisfy
the mind. Charles Lamb
Clouds are like Holy Writ, in which theologians
cause the faithful or the crazy to see anything
they please. Voltaire
Clown
It is meat and drink to me.
William Shakespeare
A man who acts too natural. Anon.
A person with a sixth sense who fortunately for
mankind doesn't have the other five. Anon.
See also Comedian.
Club
The scene of savage joys, the school of coarse
good-fellowship and noise.
Adapted from William Cowper
An assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain
conditions. Samuel Johnson
Mausoleums of inactive masculinity... places for
men who prefer armchairs to women.
Victor S. Pritchett
The feeble coxcombry. John Ruskin
A place where we sleep. Anon.
A wealthy man's saloon. Anon.
Cocktail
A pleasant drink. It's mild and harmless?I don't
think. When you've had one, call for two, and
then you don't care what you do.
Adapted from George Ade
A cocktail is to a glass of wine as rape is to
love. Paul Claudel
All the disagreeability, without the utility, of a
disinfectant. Shane Leslie
Drinks that passion the night. Anon.
A little whiskey to make it strong,
A little water to make it weak,
A little lemon to make it sour,
A little sugar to make it sweet. Anon.
See also Drinking.
Cocktail Party
A gathering held to enable forty people to talk
about themselves at the same time. The man who
remains after the liquor is gone is the host.
Fred Allen
The form of friendship without the warmth.
Brooks Atkinson
A device... for making overtures towards more
serious social relationships, as in the etiquette
of whoring. Brooks Atkinson
An affair where you meet old friends you never saw
before. Fulton Bryan
Midst meatless platters of little treats, the
pitiless patter of little feats. Frank Malone
A device for paying off obligations to people you
don't want to invite to dinner.
Charles M. Smith
A gathering at which drinks mix people. Anon.
An excuse to drink for those who don't need
excuses. Anon.
A gathering where sandwiches and friends are cut
into small pieces. Anon.
Drinks supporting bores. Anon.
Coed
A girl sent to college to find a husband. Anon.
A girl who didn't get her man in high school.
Anon.
Coffee
Break fluid. R. R. Anderson
Coffee in England is just toasted milk.
Christopher Fry
(A drink which) should be black as Hell, strong as
death, and sweet as love. Turkish Proverb
Coffin
The end of the legend. Elbert Hubbard
An ornamental... box which no one cares to open.
Elbert Hubbard
A room without a door or a skylight.
Elbert Hubbard
A costly container for which even the poor gladly
pay. Anon.
A container small enough for bums, large enough for
presidents. Anon.
See also Death, Grave.
Coin
See Dollar, Money.
Cold (Illness)
An ailment cured in two weeks with a doctor's
care, and in fourteen days without it.
C. C. Furnas
Both positive and negative. Sometimes the eyes
have it and sometimes the nose.
William Lyon Phelps
Cold (Temperature)
The source of more suffering to all animal nature
than hunger, thirst, sickness, and all the other
pains of life and of death itself put together.
Thomas Jefferson
See also Winter.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
How great a possibility; how small a realized
result! Thomas Carlyle
My instincts are so far dog-like that I love being
superior to myself better than my equals.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
He talked on for ever; and you wished him to talk
on for ever. William Hazlitt
A subtle-souled psychologist. Charles Lamb
To tell the story of Coleridge without the opium is
to tell the story of Hamlet without... the ghost.
Leslie Stephen
His general appearance would have led me to suppose
him a dissenting minister. J. C. Young
College
A place where learned professors conduct research
and talk mainly to themselves.
Eugene E. Brussell
Not an education, but the means of education.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(A place where one) may learn the 'principles' of
salesmanship from a Ph.D. who has never sold
anything, or the 'principles' of marketing from a
Ph.D. who has never marketed anything.
Abraham Flexner
A refuge from hasty judgment. Robert Frost
A student on one end of a log and Mark Hopkins on
the other. James A. Garfield
A place to keep warm between high school and an
early marriage. George Gobel
A place where you have to go in order to find out
that there is nothing in it. Elbert Hubbard
A place where pebbles are polished and diamonds are
dimmed. Robert G. Ingersoll
An experience which seldom hurts a fellow if he is
willing to learn a little something after he
graduates. Anon.
An institution which holds your children until they
decide what they want to do in life. Anon.
A place to pursue knowledge under a handicap.
Anon.
A place where a pigskin is as valuable as a
sheepskin. Anon.
A four year plan for confusing the mind
methodically. Anon.
A social advantage, as compared with proof of
excellence. Anon.
See also Academy, Professor, University.
Columbus, Christopher (1451-1506)
If Columbus had not sailed westward with the
obstinacy of a maniac, he would not have
encountered some pieces of wood, worked by the hand
of man... and he would have had to swallow his
shame, return to Europe, and count himself lucky to
get there. Hector Berlioz
A patient master, for whom the far is near.
Adapted from Louis J. Block
Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as
himself. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every ship that comes to America got its chart from
Columbus. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Columbus found a world, and had no chart, save one
that faith deciphered in the skies. To trust the
soul's invincible surmise was all his science and
his only art. Adapted from George Santayana
He gave the world another world.
George Santayana
World-finder. Lydia H. Sigourney
When he started out he didn't know where he was
going; when he got there he didn't know where he
was; and when he got back he didn't know where he
had been. Anon.
See also America.
Comedian
A fellow who finds other comedians too humorous to
mention. Jack Herbert
Man... happy under any fate, and he says funny
things at funerals, and when the bailiffs are in
the house, or the hero is waiting to be hanged.
Jerome K. Jerome
The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at
him before he opens his mouth.
George Jean Nathan
One who is no better than his script.
Louis Reid
(One who) can only last till he either takes
himself seriously or his audience takes him
serious. Will Rogers
A man on the slow slide to oblivion. Anon.
A hilarity of one. Anon.
Comedy
(That which) ridicules persons by drawing them in
their proper characters. Joseph Addison
Comedy aims at representing men as worse, and
tragedy as better, than in real life. Aristotle
Comedy is tragedy interrupted. Alan Ayckbourn
A sad business. Charles Chaplin
The essence... seems to be an honest... halfness; a
nonperformance of what is pretended to be
performed, at the same time that one is giving loud
pledges of performance. The balking of the
intellect, the frustrated expectation, the break of
continuity in the intellect, is comedy and it
announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call
laughter. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Comedy like sodomy is an unnatural act.
Martin Feldman
An escape, not from truth but from despair; a
narrow escape into faith. Christopher Fry
Tragedy viewed from the wings. Elbert Hubbard
Comedy is criticism. Louis Kronenberger
Comedy takes place in a world where the mind is
always superior to the emotions.
Joseph Wood Krutch
The debauching of virgins and the amours of
strumpets are the subject of comedy.
Firmianus Lactantius
The very last alternative to despair.
Franklin Marcus
A man in trouble. Jerry Lewis
The fountain of sound sense. George Meredith
Society protecting itself?with a smile.
Jonathan B. Priestly
(When) life is caught in the act.
George Santayana
The last refuge of the non-conformist mind.
Gilbert Seldes
The chastening of morals with ridicule.
Adapted from George Bernard Shaw
Simply a funny way of being serious.
Peter Ustinov
Comedy is a clash of character. Eliminate char
acter from comedy and you get farce.
William Butler Yeats
See also Humor, Laughter, Wit.
Comfort
A state of mind produced by contemplation of a
neighbor's uneasiness. Ambrose Bierce
That stealthy thing that enters the house as a
guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master.
Kahlil Gibran
To be beyond all bounds of shame.
Philip Sydney
Positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
Henry David Thoreau
See also Contentment.
Commandments
Precepts... given expressly to purify mankind.
Abba Arika
Not in heaven... nor beyond the sea... But the
word is very nigh to you, in your mouth and
heart, that you may do it.
Bible: Deuteronomy, XXX, 11.
(They) are divided first into those which effect
the welfare of the body and those which effect the
welfare of the soul, and secondly into the
practical and the speculative. Joseph Caspi
The essence... is to make the heart upright.
Abraham Ibn Ezra
All the commandments follow three ways: faith,
word, and deed... the essence of every com-
mandment... is faith of heart.
Abraham Ibn Ezra
The pillars of the service of God.
Joseph Ibn Pakuda
The mighty stream of spirituality. Moses Jung
The canals through which flow constantly the
Torah's abundant faith and love. Abraham Kook
The purpose... is... to promote compassion, lov-
ing-kindness and peace in the world.
Moses Maimonides
That which obliges us to live after a certain
fashion. Jose Ortega y Gasset
Their purpose is to unify the nation and refine
man's nature. Jehiel Pines
The Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not be found
out. George Whyte-Melville
See also Christianity, God, Judaism, Religion, Ten
Commandments.
Commerce
A kind of transaction in which A plunders from B
the goods of C, and for compensation B picks the
pocket of D of money belonging to E.
Ambrose Bierce
A transaction which is good for both parties.
Louis D. Brandeis
The willingness to accept one another's mistakes at
a discount. John Ciardi
The greatest meliorator of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
That pride and darling of our ocean, that educator
of nations, that benefactor in spite of itself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The principle of liberty... it settled America, and
destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps
peace. Ralph Waldo Emerson
A plant which grows wherever there is peace, as
soon as there is peace, and as long as there is
peace. Ralph Waldo Emerson
The equalizer of the wealth of nations.
William Gladstone
The great civilizer. We exchange ideas when we
exchange fabrics. Robert G. Ingersoll
That spirit which knows no countries, feels no
passion or principle but that of gain.
Adapted from Thomas Jefferson
A social act. John Stuart Mill
Really nothing but a refinement of piratical
morality. Friedrich W. Nietzsche
The propensity to truck, barter, and exchange.
Adam Smith
The school of cheating. Luc de Vauvenargues
See also Business, Merchant.
Committee
A mutual protection society formed to guarantee
that no one person can be held to blame for a
botched... job that one man could have performed
satisfactorily. Russell Baker
A group of the unfit, appointed by the unwilling,
to do the unnecessary. Henry Cooke
A thing which takes a week to do what one good man
can do in an hour. Elbert Hubbard
An arrangement enabling one to share the blame with
others. Franklin P. Jones
A cul-de-sac to which ideas are lured and then
quietly strangled. John A. Lincoln
A simple cure for insomnia. Red O'Donnell
A group which succeeds in getting something done
only when it consists of three members, one of whom
happens to be sick and another absent.
Hendrick W. Van Loon
A body of people formed to delay progress.
Anon.
A group of people who talk for hours to produce a
result called minutes. Anon.
A group that keeps minutes and wastes hours.
Anon.
See also Group.
Common Man
See Masses, People (The)
Common Sense
A kind of ultimate validation after science has
completed its work. Russell L. Ackoff
The measure of the possible. Henry F. Amiel
Common sense is instinct, and enough of it is
genius. Josh Billings
The voice of the Lord is the voice of common
sense, which is shared by all that is.
Samuel Butler 1
The best sense I know of. Lord Chesterfield
What the world calls wisdom.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The most widely shared commodity in the world, for
every man is convinced that he is well supplied
with it. Rene Descartes
The deposit of prejudice laid down in the mind
before the age of 18. Albert Einstein
The shortest line between two points.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Genius dressed in its working clothes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ability to detect values?to know a big thing
from a little one. Elbert Hubbard
Our secret gift. George Meredith
What makes men; the rest is all rubbish.
Petronius
The knack of seeing things as they are, and doing
things as they ought to be done. C. E. Stowe
The rare quality to detect what is right.
Joan Tepperman
Genius is homespun. Alfred North Whitehead
The one unteachable gift in life. Anon.
See also Experience, Judgment.
Communism
Nobody's got nothing, but everybody's working.
Fred Allen
A depository of granite solidity under a
guardianship that resolves all ethical and moral
problems. Marquis Childs and Douglass Cater
A disease of the heart. Chinese Saying
A quasi-religion... It competes with any and all
other ultimate loyalties, or religions for men's
very souls. Merrimon Cunningham
The real "opium of the people," distracting men's
minds from their essential task... the... myth of
an earthly paradise. Jean Danielou
The full-blown fruit of secularism.
Lester De Koster
A necessity of sacrificing the ideal of what is
excellent for the individual to the ideal of what
is excellent for the whole. Thomas De Quincey
That type of totalitarianism which consists of
three basic factors for controlling the peo-
ple... power... ownership... ideology.
Milovan Djilas
A means of integration to men whose souls and
social structures are obviously disintegrating, who
have lost their absolutes and hence are lonely and
afraid. W. R. Forrester
An untenable illusion. Sigmund Freud
(In Russia) autocracy turned upside down.
Alexander Herzen
A monolithic company?the Communist party takes
possession of a whole country... The aim of this
super-Capitalistic company is to turn the captive
population into skilled mechanics and so shape
their souls that they would toil from sunup to
sunset. Eric Hoffer
A capitalist heresy. Eric Hoffer
A race in which all competitors come in first with
no prizes. Lord Inchcape
A combination of two things which Europeans have
kept for some centuries in different compartments
of the soul?religion and business.
John Maynard Keynes
A mighty, unifying thunderstorm, marking the
springtime of mankind. Nikita Khrushchev
Hatred is the basis of Communism. Children must be
taught to hate their parents if they are not
Communists. Nikolai Lenin
The opiate of the intellectuals. Clare B. Luce
A hammer which we use to crush the enemy.
Mao Tse-tung
A Christian heresy?the ultimate and altogether
radical Christian heresy... Collective revolution
renewing history and society only for the life here
below. Jacques Maritain
May be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all
private property.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
A fanatical foe who has become the high priest of a
new religion. Laurence J. McGinely
Whenever it ceases to be true that mankind...
prefer themselves to others, and those nearest to
them to those more remote, from that moment
Communism is not only practicable, but the only
defensible form of society. John Stuart Mill
An apostasy from civilization. John C. Murray
Treason... not against governments but against
humanity. Richard Milhous Nixon
A monotonous repetition of the eternal
revolution... the perfect common-place of
revolutions. Jose Ortega y Gasset
The theory which teaches that the labor and the
income of society should be distributed equally
among all its members by some constitutional
authority. Robert Palgrave
What is thine is mine, and all of mine is thine.
Plautus
The fatal plague which insinuates itself into the
very marrow of human society only to bring about
its ruin. Pope Leo XIII
The exploitation of the strong by the weak...
inequality springs from placing mediocrity on a
level with excellence. Pierre J. Proudhon
Communism to me is one-third practice and
two-thirds explanation. Will Rogers
What's your is mine, what's mine's my own.
Scottish Saying
Left-wing fascism. Susan Sontag
The dictatorship of the proletariat is the rule?
unrestricted by law and based on force.
Joseph Stalin
The organization of total conformity?in short, of
tyranny?and it is committed to making tyranny
universal. Adlai Ewing Stevenson
An ideal that can be achieved only when people
cease to be selfish and greedy and when everyone
receives according to his needs from communal
production. Josef B. Tito
The worship of collective human power.
Arnold J. Toynbee
The devil's imitation of Christianity.
A. W. Tozer
A system that is based on the belief that man is so
weak and inadequate that he is unable to govern
himself, and therefore requires the rule of strong
masters. Harry S. Truman
Absence of freedom and an endless vista of free
false teeth with nothing to bite on. Anon.
See also Socialism.
Communists
A socialist without a sense of humor.
George Cutton
One who has yearnings for equal division of unequal
earnings. Idler or bungler, or both, he is willing
to fork out his copper and pocket your shilling.
Adapted from Ebenezer Elliot
A socialist in a violent hurry. G. W. Gough
Frustrated capitalists. Eric Hoffer
A surgeon who takes a sharp knife and operates on a
man's body to cut out malignant growths and thus
makes possible the further development and
strengthening of the organisms.
Nikita Khrushchev
The theory of the communists may be summed up in
one sentence: Abolition of private property.
Karl Marx
An intensely proud person who proposes to enrich
the common fund instead of to sponge from it.
George Bernard Shaw
One who has given up hope of becoming a
capitalist. Anon.
One who has nothing and is eager to share it with
the world. Anon.
See also Communism, Socialists.
Community
A fictitious body, composed of the individual
persons who are considered as constituting... its
members. Jeremy Bentham
Tiny fountain-heads of democracy, rising among the
rocks, sometimes lost altogether in their course,
sometimes running underground to reappear at last
in fuller volume. Lord Bryce
The being no longer side by side, but with one
another. Martin Buber
The real... community is when its members have a
common relation to the center overriding all other
relations. Martin Buber
The first link in the series by which we proceed
towards a love for our country and mankind.
Edmund Burke
(That) by which alone your work can be made
universal and eternal in its results.
Samson Hirsch
Something that man seeks to form by virtue of his
nature. Adapted from Edward B. White
A kind of group association in which, through being
ourselves, we may get to something greater than
ourselves. Milton J. Rosenberg
We who are united in heart and soul. Tertullian
The Church alone; not in the helplessness of
spiritual isolation but in the strength of his
communion with his brothers and with his Savior.
Alexander Yelchaninov
A social unit which binds together the collective
experience of its individual members. Anon.
A place where people plan and work together, bound
by a cohesive past and future. Anon.
See also Brotherhood, Christianity, City, Nation,
State, World.
Commuter
One who spends his life in riding to and from his
wife; a man who shaves and takes a train and then
rides back to shave again.
Adapted from Edward B. White
A traveling man who pays short visits to his home
and office. Anon.
One who never knows how a show comes out because he
has to leave early to catch a train to get him back
to the country in time to catch a train to bring
him back to the city. Anon.
One who rides himself to an early grave in order
that the wife and children may thrive. Anon.
See also Suburbia.
Companion
See Company, Friend.
Company
An extreme provocative to fancy; and like a hot bed
in gardening, is apt to make our imagination sprout
too fast. Anthony A. Cooper
The mind is depraved by the company of the low; it
rises to equality with equals; and to distinction
with the distinguished. The Hitopadesa
The best is always with men more excellent than
myself. Adapted from Charles Lamb
Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that
are neither. Logan P. Smith
Good discourse. Isaac Walton
See also City, Crowd, Guest, Society.
Compassion
See Mercy, Pity, Sympathy.
Compensation
Every sweet has its sour, every evil its good.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The whole of what we know is a system of
compensations. Every suffering is rewarded; every
sacrifice is made up; every debt is paid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
This marvellous balance of beauty and disgust,
magnificence and rats. Ralph Waldo Emerson
All our works. Robert Herrick
Competition
The total amount of the supply is increased, and by
increase of the supply a competition in the sale
ensues, and this enables the consumer to buy at
lower rates. Of all human powers operating on the
affairs of mankind, none is greater. Henry Clay
The most extreme expression of that war of all
against all which dominates modern middle-class
society. Friedrich Engels
Nothing more than a partially conventionalized
embodiment of primeval selfishness... the supremacy
of the motive of self-interest.
Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America,
Social Creed, 1932
The keen cutting edge of business, always shaving
away at costs. Henry Ford 2
A fine, wholesome direction of energy.
Nathan Holman
The life of trade, and the death of the trader.
Elbert Hubbard
The very life of science. Horace M. Kallen
The lifeblood of democracy. Anon.
An economic struggle for survival among businessmen
in which the consumer benefits the most. Anon.
The way in which the general welfare of all can be
obtained. Anon.
See also Americanism, Business, Commerce, Natural
Selection.
Complacency
See Self-satisfaction.
Complaint
(An utterance that) is wearisome alike to the
wretched and the happy. Samuel Johnson
The largest tribute heaven receives and the sincer
est part of our devotion. Jonathan Swift
A grief re sume . Anon.
Compliments
(Something) taken literally only by the savage. The
accuracy of compliment is not that of algebra.
William C. Brownell
A sarcastic remark with a flavor of truth.
Elbert Hubbard
A kiss through a veil. Pleasure sets her soft seal
there, even while hiding herself. Victor Hugo
Things you say to people when you don't know what
else to say. Constance Jones
A thing often paid by people who pay nothing else.
Horatio Smith
I have heard say that complimenting is lying.
Jonathan Swift
This barren verbiage. Alfred Lord Tennyson
All of us are so hard up, that the only pleasant
things to pay are compliments. They're the only
things we can pay. Oscar Wilde
Lies in court clothes. Anon.
The applause that refreshes. Anon.
See also Eulogy, Flattery, Praise.
Composer
Almost the only creative artist who must depend
upon a horde of intermediate agents to present his
work... all capable, from first to last, of either
augmenting the brilliance of his work, or of
disfiguring it, misrepresenting it, even destroying
it altogether. Hector Berlioz
A builder and maker of houses not made with hands.
Adapted from Robert Browning
See also Music.
Composition
See Essay, Writing.
Compromise
An adjustment of conflicting interests as gives
each adversary the satisfaction of thinking he has
got what he ought not to have. Ambrose Bierce
The sacrifice of one right or good in the hope of
retaining another, too often ending in the loss of
both. Tyron Edwards
All of the usable surface. The extremes, right or
left, are in the gutters.
Dwight David Eisenhower
Surrender. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Reciprocal concessions. Samuel Johnson
Never anything but an ignoble truce between the
duty of a man and the terror of a coward.
Reginald W. Kauffman
A temporary expedient, often wise in party
politics, almost sure to be unwise in
statesmanship. James Russell Lowell
A good umbrella but a poor roof.
James Russell Lowell
Simply changing the question to fit the answer.
Merrit Malloy
The art of slicing a piece of cake in such a way
that everyone believes he received the biggest
piece. Jan Peerce
(That which) tempts us to believe that injustice,
when it is halved, becomes justice.
Herbert L. Samuel
To passionate natures... a surrender... to intel-
lectual natures... a confusion.
George Santayana
A temporary compromise is a diplomatic act, but a
permanent compromise is the abandonment of a goal.
Leon Stein
Any decision by two or more persons. Anon.
A deal in which two people get what neither of them
wanted. Anon.
Things half done. Anon.
See also Diplomacy.
Conceit
God's gift to little men. Bruce Barton
The most incurable disease that is known to the
human soul. Henry Ward Beecher
A conceited man is (one who is) satisfied with the
effect he produces on himself. Max Beerbohm
The greatest liars. Michael Drayton
Conceit lies in thinking you lack nothing.
Epictetus
(That which) forms the greatest menace to our
spiritual integrity. Jonathan Eybeshitz
The quicksand of success. Arnold H. Glasow
The finest armor a man can wear.
Jerome K. Jerome
Conceit... is rebellion to God.
Moses Maimonides
When someone attributes to himself a perfection
which is not found in him. Baruch Spinoza
Equivalent to all other sins.
Talmud: Sukka, 29b.
Being enclosed entirely by yourself. Anon.
A swelling head and a shrinking brain. Anon.
See also Egoism, Self-love, Self-satisfaction,
Vanity.
Concentration
The secret of strength in politics, in war, in
trade, in short in all management of human affairs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Eternal secret... of every mortal achievement.
Stefan Zweig
See also Study, Thought.
Conditions
When we describe our sensations of another's
sorrows. Samuel Johnson
Something no one is content with. Anon.
Something that is never just right. Anon.
The now that prevails. Anon.
Conduct
Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its
largest concern. Matthew Arnold
(That which) lies in masterful administration of
the unforeseen. Robert Bridges
The force that rules the world... whether it be
moral or immoral. Nicholas Murray Butler
Suiting our behavior to the occasion.
Miguel de Cervantes
The voice of God, who comes down to dwell in our
souls, who knows all our thoughts.
John E. Dalberg-Acton
(Something based on) imitating those we cannot
resemble. Adapted from Samuel Johnson
How we behave when no one is watching. Anon.
How we behave when others are watching. Anon.
When practiced, the only effective sermon.
Anon.
See also Behavior, Deeds, Religion.
Conference
A gathering of important people who singly can do
nothing, but together can decide that nothing can
be done. Fred Allen
A meeting to decide when the next meeting will be
held. Henry Ginsberg
A coffee break with real napkins. Anon.
The confusion of the loudest talking character
multiplied by the number present. Anon.
Confession
The Scripture moveth us, in sundry places to
acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and
wickedness. Book of Common Prayer.
A medicine to the erring. Cicero
A palliative rather than a remedy.
Peter De Vries
The first step to repentance. Edmund Gayton
The purpose of sacramental Confession is atone-
ment?at-onement with God. Caryll Houselander
The Catholic practice... is... little more than a
systematic method of keeping healthy-mindedness on
top. William James
To bring to light the unknown, the unconscious
darkness, and the underdeveloped creativity of our
deeper layers. Fritz Kunkel
Consists of two parts: first, to confess our sins,
and secondly, to receive the absolution or
forgiveness by the confessor, as from God Himself.
Martin Luther
When we are on our knees, speaking to Him about
ourselves. Vincent McNabb
To confess a folly freely is the next thing to
being innocent of it. Publilius Syrus
A Hospital of Souls, where the Good Samaritan,
through the instrumentality of the priest, goes
about binding up wounds and pouring in oil and
wine; a hospital where the Divine Physician
displays His healing art. Alfred Wilson
A fault more than half mended. Anon.
See also Atonement, Priests, Repentance.
Confidence
That feeling by which the mind embarks in great and
honorable courses with a sure hope and trust in
itself. Cicero
That which underlies the whole scheme of
civilization. Adapted from W. Bourke Cockran
An unconquered army. George Herbert
The one big lesson the world needs most to learn.
Elbert Hubbard
The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when
one knows that one would lie in his place.
Henry Louis Mencken
A plant of slow growth in an aged bosom.
William Pitt
What every great pioneering people have.
Ben Yehuda
The feeling you have before you know better.
Anon.
That which compels you to do the thing you think
you cannot do. Anon.
See also Security, Self-confidence.
Conflict
The adventurer is within us, and he contests for
our favour with the social man we are obliged to
be. These two sorts of life are incompatibles; one
we hanker after, the other we are obliged to.
William Bolitho
The gadfly of thought... a sine qua non of
reflection and ingenuity. John Dewey
Conformity
(The result of) happy men whose natures sort with
their vocation. Francis Bacon
The herd-fear. E. Stanley Jones
The jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
The chief danger of the time. John Stuart Mill
No... other faculty than the apelike one of
imitations. John Stuart Mill
To think and do as your neighbors do. Anon.
See also Fashion.
Confusion
A work where nothing is just or fit?one glaring
chaos. Adapted from Alexander Pope
Primarily the anxiety of a people who no longer
know what the bounds are, who can no longer
distinguish truth from falsehood.
William Strickland
The devil is the author of confusion.
Jonathan Swift
Congress
The great commanding theatre of this nation, and
the threshold to whatever department of office a
man is qualified to enter. Thomas Jefferson
The very purpose... is to arrive at national
decisions by bringing together some... individuals,
representing... individuals, to achieve consent on
the way the nation should go.
Lyndon Baines Johnson
One-third, more or less, scoundrels; two-thirds,
more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or
less, poltroons. Henry Louis Mencken
A body of men who meet.
New York Times Editorial, Jan. 1, 1964.
Bingo with billions. Red Skelton
This is not a government of kings and satraps, but
a government of the people, and... Congress is the
people. Thaddeus Stevens
(A) native American criminal class.
Mark Twain
The stronghold of provincialism. Anon.
A body of men who meet to vote on unpopular laws.
Anon.
A body of men brought together to slow down the
government. Anon.
See also Public Office.
Congressman
A hog. You must take a stick and hit him on the
snout. Henry Adams
A man who votes for all appropriations and against
all taxes. Henry Ashurst
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you
were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Mark Twain
A body of gentlemen charged with high duties and
misdemeanors. Anon.
See also Politics.
Conquer
We wholly conquer only what we assimilate.
Andre Gide
(That which) is rated by the difficulty.
Michel de Montaigne
Yield if you are opposed; by yielding you conquer.
Ovid
See also Victory.
Conquerors
A cruel fame, that arises from the destruction of
the human species. Lord Chesterfield
The greatest... is he who overcomes the enemy
without a blow. Chinese Proverb
A conqueror is always a lover of peace. He would
like to make his entry into our state unopposed.
Karl Clausewitz
The powerful mixers of cultures and races, they
loosen the bonds binding the spirit of the
supernatural, and prepare the way for liberty and
individuality. Friedrich Hertz
The acquiring of the right of sovereignty by
victory. Thomas Hobbes
The conqueror would rather burst a city gate than
find it open to admit him; he would rather ravage
the land with fire and sword than overrun it
without protest... He scorns to advance by an
unguarded road or to act like a peaceful citizen.
Lucan
The Chief who in triumph advances.
Walter Scott
The conquered in the hereafter. Sefer Hasidim.
See also Victory, War.
Conquest
See Victory.
Conscience
A man's judgment of himself according to the
judgment of God of him. William Ames
An imitation within ourselves of the government
without us. Alexander Bain
The perfect interpreter of life. Karl Barth
A thing of fictitious existence, supposed to occupy
a seat in the mind. Jeremy Bentham
That inner tribunal. Anton T. Boisen
One's soul companion. Evelyn Brenzel
Another man within me. Thomas Browne
The great beacon light God sets in all.
Robert Browning
(Something that) is thoroughly well-bred, and soon
leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear
it. Samuel Butler 2
An inward witness and monitor, reminding us of what
we owe to God, pointing out the distinction of good
and evil. Adapted from John Calvin
An actuated or reflex knowledge of a superior power
and an equitable law; a law impressed, and a
power above impressing it. Stephen Charnock
What your mother told you before you were six years
old. Brock Chisholm
The pulse of reason. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All that a man can betray. Joseph Conrad
Conscience emphasizes the word ought.
Joseph Cook
The unknown is an ocean. What is conscience? The
compass of the unknown. Joseph Cook
The still small voice. William Cowper
Your own judgment of the right and wrong of our
actions. Tyron Edwards
What real human progress depends on.
Albert Einstein
A coward, and those faults it has not strength to
prevent it seldom has justice enough to accuse.
Oliver Goldsmith
The advocatus Dei in our soul.
Dietrich von Hildebrand
The dirty and degrading chimaera.
Adolf Hitler
A man's conscience and his judgment is the same
thing. Thomas Hobbes
The muzzle of the will. Elbert Hubbard
The furnace of dreams, the lurking-place of ideas
we are ashamed of... the battlefield of the
passions. Victor Hugo
Simply my whole nature articulate... the voice,
changing and never stationary, that results from my
faith, my actual way of living. Bede Jarrett
The moral sense. Thomas Jefferson
That small inner voice that gives you the odds.
Franklin P. Jones
The voice of our ideal self, our complete self, our
real self, laying its call upon the will.
Rufus Jones
An instinct to judge ourselves in the light of
moral laws. Immanuel Kant
The glory of a good man. Thomas a . Kempis
A sacred sanctuary where God alone may enter as
judge. Felicite R. Lamennais
The most painful wound in the world.
John Large
The guardian in the individual of the rules which
the community has evolved for its own preservation.
William Somerset Maugham
The inner voice that warns us that someone may be
looking. Henry Louis Mencken
A mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
Henry Louis Mencken
The accumulated sediment of ancestral
faint-heartedness. Henry Louis Mencken
Custom. Michel de Montaigne
The voice of your neighbor.
Adapted from Friedrich W. Nietzsche
The belief in authority is the source of
conscience; which is... not the voice of God in the
heart of man, but the voice of some men in man.
Friedrich W. Nietzsche
Nothing but other people inside you.
Luigi Pirandello
My heart. Whatever I feel to be good is good.
Whatever I feel to be evil is evil. Conscience is
the best of casuists. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The voice of the soul. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A mental possession of ours which enables us to
pass some sort of judgment, correct or mistaken,
upon moral questions as they arise.
Josiah Royce
The still small voice that makes you feel still
smaller. James A. Sanaker
The fantastic thing which serves to make men
cowards. Adapted from Thomas Shadwell
A blushing, shamefaced spirit that mutinies in a
man's bosom. William Shakespeare
That undying serpent. Percy Bysshe Shelley
All inhibitions of a religion and ethical
character. Wilhelm Stekel
God's presence in man. Emanuel Swedenborg
A thousand witnesses. Richard Taverner
In most men, an anticipation of the opinion of
others. Henry Taylor
Instinct bred in the house.
Henry David Thoreau
That little spark of celestial fire.
George Washington
Conscience and cowardice are really the same thing.
Oscar Wilde
The soft whispers of the God in man.
Edward Young
Love is the source and substance... If it were not
for our... need to love and to be loved there would
be no conscience; there would remain only animal
fear and animal aggression. Gregory Zilboorg
A voice doing its duty. Anon.
A thinking man's filter. Anon.
A cur that will let you get past it but that you
cannot keep from barking. Anon.
Your moral personality. Anon.
Something that does not keep you from doing things,
but from enjoying them. Anon.
That small inner voice that tells you that the tax
collector might check your return. Anon.
That small inner voice that does not speak your
language. Anon.
See also Bible, Brain, Confession, Guilt, Morality,
Repentance.
Consciousness
Evolution looking at itself and reflecting.
Pierre T. de Chardin
An illness?a real thorough-going illness.
Fedor M. Dostoievski
The name of a nonentity, and has no right to a
place among first principles. William James
The inner light kindled in the soul... a music,
strident or sweet, made by the friction of
existence. George Santayana
Conservation
The wise use of the earth and its resources for the
lasting good of men. Gifford Pinchot
Conservatism
A bag with a hole in it. Josh Billings
The politics of reality. William F. Buckley 2
Old ways... the safest and surest ways.
Edward Coke
An organized hypocrisy. Benjamin Disraeli
(That which) stands on man's confessed
limitations... (It) has no inventions; it is all
mem- ory... believes in negative fate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To keep what progressiveness has accomplished.
R. H. Fulton
The search for a superior moral justification for
selfishness. John Kenneth Galbraith
Distrust of the poeple tempered by fear.
William Gladstone
A philosophy that takes into account the essential
differences between men, and, accordingly, makes
provision for developing the different
potentialities of each man. Barry M. Goldwater
Something that starts with the purchasing of a home
and the birth of a child. Max Gralnick
On the whole, their policy meant that people had to
fill up fewer forms than under the policies of
other parties. Alan P. Herbert
Sometimes a symptom of sterility. Those who have
nothing in them that can grow and develop must
cling to what they have in beliefs, ideas and
possessions. The sterile radical, too, is basically
conservative. He is afraid to let go the ideals and
beliefs he picked up in his youth lest his life be
seen as empty and wasted. Eric Hoffer
Adherence to the old and tried, against the new and
untried. Abraham Lincoln
Traditionalism become self-conscious and forensic.
C. Wright Mills
To believe in thinking as you were brought up to
think. Charles S. Peirce
Not the first by whom the new are tried, nor yet
the last to lay the old aside.
Adapted from Alexander Pope
The worship of dead revolutions.
Clinton Rossiter
Those coercive arrangements which a still-linger-
ing savageness makes requisite.
Herbert Spencer
An instinctive revulsion at any departure from the
accepted way of doing and of looking at things.
Thorstein Veblen
The maintenance of conventions already in force.
Thorstein Veblen
See also Republican Party.
Conservative
(A) quiet, equable, deadly holderon.
Stephen Vincent Benet
A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as
distinguished from the liberal, who wishes to
replace them with others. Ambrose Bierce
Victorians, Tudorians, ghosts surviving from the
Middle Ages, and multitudes whose minds properly
belong to palaeolithic times. Robert Briffault
All great peoples... slow to believe in novelties;
patient of much error in actualities; deeply and
forever certain of the greatness that is in law, in
custom once solemnly established, and now
recognized as just and final. Thomas Carlyle
All conservatives are such from personal defects.
They have been effeminated by position or nature,
born halt and blind, through luxury of their
parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the
defensive. Ralph Waldo Emerson
A conservative... has a philosophy based upon
proven values of the past. When we seek answers for
the problems of today we look to the past to see if
those problems existed. Generally, they have. So we
ask: What was the answer? Did it work? If it did,
let us try again. Barry M. Goldwater
One who desires to retain the wisdom and the
experience of the past and who is prepared to apply
the best of that wisdom and experience to meet the
changes which are inevitable in every new
generation. Barry M. Goldwater
The conservative doubts that the present can be
bettered, and he tries to shape the future in the
image of the present. He goes to the past for
reassurance about the present. Eric Hoffer
One who will not look at the new moon, out of
respect for that ancient institution, the old one.
Douglas Jerrold
A man becomes a conservative at that moment in his
life when he suddenly realises he has something to
conserve. Eric Julber
The "religious man"... for he appeals to an
authority beyond the vanity of Demos or Expediency
and he trusts in the wisdom of our ancestors and in
enduring values. Russell Kirk
Very largely... fear (of the future), with
Anti-Communism replacing belief in freedom as a
national cause and a whole list of hatreds and
rejections and denials as ultimate objectives.
Archibald MacLeish
A man who wants the rules enforced so no one can
make a pile the way he did. Gregory Nunn
He learns how stocks will fall or rise, holds
poverty the greatest vice. He thinks wit the bane
of conversation, and says that learning spoils a
nation. Adapted from Matthew Prior
A man with two perfectly good legs who has never
learned to walk. Franklin Delano Roosevelt
One who admires radicals a century after they're
dead. Leo C. Rosten
A man who believes in reform, but not now.
Mort Sahl
The stalwart defender of things as they are.
Arthur M. Schlesinger 1
A man who thinks things ought to progress, but
would rather they remained as they are.
James F. Stephen
The man for whom the law exists?the man of forms...
a tame man. Henry David Thoreau
No man can be a conservative unless he has
something to lose. James Warburg
That staid come-over-with-the-conqueror type of
mind. Adapted from William Watson
(One) warmly, and unalterably, compassionate to the
individual; his essential respect goes not so much
to mankind as to Man. William S. White
A man who believes nothing should be done for the
first time. Alfred E. Wiggam
A man who just sits and thinks, mostly sits.
Woodrow Wilson
One who is against the Democrats for what they are,
and against the Republicans for what they are not.
Anon.
One who wears both belt and suspenders. Anon.
One who can't see the difference between radicalism
and an idea. Anon.
See also Republican Party.
Consistency
To be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
Bernard Berenson
To act in conformity with circumstances, and not to
act always the same way under a change of
circumstances. John C. Calhoun
The hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little
statesmen and philosophers and divines. With
consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The quality of a stagnant mind. John Sloan
A paste jewel that only cheap men cherish.
William Allen White
The last refuge of the unimaginative.
Oscar Wilde
The foundation of great statesmen. Anon.
One who wears both belt and suspenders. Anon.
Constancy
A virtue particular to those who are about to be
betrayed. Ambrose Bierce
A dull sleepy quality at best. George Farquhar
Merely an invention of self-love to win confidence;
a method to place us above others and to render us
depositories of the most important matters.
La Rochefoucauld
Two kinds... in love: one arises from continually
discovering in the loved person new subjects for
love, the other arises from our making a merit of
being constant. La Rochefoucauld
The besetting sin of the human race... the cause of
most wars and practically all persecutions.
Freya Stark
That which is practiced best by the old and
indifferent. Anon.
Constitution
A vestment which accommodates itself to the body.
Edmund Burke
A law for rulers and people, equally in war and in
peace, and covers with the shield of its protection
all classes of men, at all times and under all
circumstances. David Davis
Should consist only of general provisions; the
reason is... they must necessarily be permanent,
and that they cannot calculate for the possible
change of things. Alexander Hamilton
The... constitution of a society is at once the
expression and the consecration of its economic
constitution. Pe tr A. Kropotkin
A means of assuring that depositories of power
cannot misemploy it. John Stuart Mill
The work of time; one cannot provide in it too
broad a power of amendment. Napoleon 1
A thing antecedent to a government, and a
government is only the creature of a constitution.
The constitution is not the act of its government,
but of the people constituting a government.
Thomas Paine
Scraps of paper. Wilhelm 1
See also American Constitution, Democracy,
Government, Law, Liberty, Supreme Court.
Constitution, United States
See American Constitution.
Contemplation
See Reflection, Silence, Study, Thought.
Contempt
See Laughter, Ridicule, Satire.
Contentment
The utmost we can hope for in this world.
Joseph Addison
Enjoying one's labor. Jehiel Anav
A kind of moral laziness. Josh Billings
The very epitome of depravity. Max Brod
The mind satisfied. Eugene E. Brussell
The all-in-all of life. Thomas Campbell
The power of getting out of any situation all that
there is in it. Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The best powder for women's faces.
Dutch Proverb
More than kingdom. English Proverb
An impregnable fortress. Epictetus
The Philosopher's Stone, that turns all it touches
into gold. Benjamin Franklin
Does not consist in heaping up more fuel, but in
taking away some fire. Thomas Fuller
Simply refined indolence. Richard Haliburton
(The) feeling you are bearing with heroic resigna-
tion the irritating folly of others.
Jerome K. Jerome
The smother of invention. Ethel W. Mumford
A warm sty for eaters and sleepers.
Eugene O'Neill
Not what we have, but what we enjoy.
J. Petit-Senn
The only riches, the only quietness, the only
happiness. George Pettie
Natural wealth. Plato
My crown. William Shakespeare
Our best having. William Shakespeare
To accept change gracefully. James Stewart
The conventional trinity of wine, woman and song.
Rexford G. Tugwell
Being satisfied with what you haven't got.
Anon.
See also Faith, Happiness.
Contraception
See Birth Control.
Contrast
This marvelous balance of beauty and disgust,
magnificence and rats. Ralph Waldo Emerson
(That which) increases the splendor of beauty, but
it disturbs its influence; it adds to its
attractiveness, but diminishes its power.
John Ruskin
Controversy
A battle in which spittle or ink replace the ...
cannon ball. Ambrose Bierce
What is it but the falsehood flying off from all
manner of conflicting true forces, and making such
a loud dust-whirlwind,?that so the truths alone may
remain, and embrace brother-like in some true
resulting force? Thomas Carlyle
That which makes a subject interesting. Anon.
See also Arguments, Quarreling.
Convalescence
That part of the illness in which the patient is
still alive. Adapted from Leo Michel
The part that makes the illness worth while.
George Bernard Shaw
Convent
Supreme egotism resulting in supreme self-denial.
Victor Hugo
(A place which exists) not for the love of virtue,
but the fear of vice. Samuel Johnson
They should only be retreats for persons unable to
serve the public, or who have served it.
Samuel Johnson
Conversation
Debate is masculine; conversation is feminine.
Amos Bronson Alcott
The feminine of silence. Roland Alix
A fair for the display of the minor mental
commodities. Ambrose Bierce
Something that disappears into the television set.
Eugene E. Brussell
Consists in building on another man's observation,
not overturning it. Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
To be prompt without being stubborn, to refute
without argument, and to clothe great matters in
motley garb. Benjamin Disraeli
An art in which a man has all mankind for his
competitors. Ralph Waldo Emerson
A game of circles. Ralph Waldo Emerson
The last flower of civilization... our account of
ourselves. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Where only such things are spoken and heard as we
can reflect upon afterward with satisfaction; and
without any mixture either of shame or repentance.
Desiderius Erasmus
The soul of conversation is sympathy.
William Hazlitt
Silence is the one great art of conversation.
William Hazlitt
The best kind... is that which may be called
thinking aloud. William Hazlitt
A few raisins... into the tasteless dough of
existence. O. Henry
The slowest form of human communication.
Don Herold
(Something that) could be enormously improved by
the constant use of four simple words: "I do not
know." Emile Herzog
Building a house, room by room, while we take
visitors through it. Emile Herzog
The enemy of good wine and food.
Alfred Hitchcock
Like playing on the harp; there is as much in
laying the hands on the strings to stop their
vibration as in twanging them to bring out the
music. Oliver Wendell Holmes 1
The happiest... is that of which nothing is
distinctly remembered, but a general effect of
pleasing impression. Samuel Johnson
No competition, no vanity, but a calm quiet
interchange of sentiments. Samuel Johnson
Telling people a little less than they want to
know. Franklin P. Jones
Consists much less in showing a great deal of it
than in bringing it out in others.
Jean de La Bruyere
Anecdote, tempered by interruption.
Raymond Mortimer
A game played with pruning shears in which each
player cuts off his neighbor's voice as soon as it
sprouts. Jules Renard
Like a salad, should have various ingredients and
should be well stirred with salt, oil and vinegar.
Joaquin Setanti
A phonograph with half-a-dozen records. You soon
get tired of them all. George Bernard Shaw
The image of the mind. As the man is, so is his
talk. Publilius Syrus
The secret... is never to open your mouth unless
you have nothing to say.
Adapted from Oscar Wilde
The profession of the mentally unemployed.
Oscar Wilde
(An art which) should touch everything but
concentrate on nothing. Oscar Wilde
The only proper intoxication. Oscar Wilde
Consists as much in listening as in talking agree
ably. Anon.
Something that starts the moment you put your foot
through the television set. Anon.
See also Eloquence, Language, Orator, Speech, Talk,
Tongue, Words.
Conversion
(Not) repairing of the old building; but it takes
all down and erects a new structure.
Joseph Alleine
For all that psychology has to say, conversion
might be what the convert thinks it is?the soul's
discovery of God... To say that "the subconscious
did it" does not prevent one from saying "God did
it." Charles A. Bennett
A method of confirming others in their errors.
Ambrose Bierce
(When) a man is wholly given unto God, body, soul,
and spirit. Robert Bolton
"Regeneration," literally "to be reborn."
John S. Bonnell
In the exchange of religions, the result of fear or
opportunism. Eugene E. Brussell
May be estimated a gift. William Cowper
Self-purification, self-realization... a revolution
in one's life. Mohandas K. Gandhi
Consists basically in the inculcation and fixation
of proclivities and responses indigenous to the
frustrated mind. Eric Hoffer
To execute a mental and moral pirouette from one
absurdity to a worse one. Elbert Hubbard
A backslider from your own ideas to those of an
inferior. Elbert Hubbard
For one man conversion means the slaying of the
beast within him; in another it brings the calm of
conviction to an unquiet mind; for a third it is
the entrance into a larger liberty and a more
abundant life; and yet again it is the gathering
into one of the forces of a soul at war with
itself. George Jackson
Conversion simply means turning around.
Vincent McNabb
Conversion is not implanting eyes, for they already
exist; but giving them a right direction.
Plato
The process by which a man is received into the
presence of God. Erik Routley
Where a profound change in philosophy, ideology, or
ethics occurs. Leon Salzman
Primarily an unselfing. E. T. Starbuck
See also Assimilation, Missionary.
Conviction
What the boss thinks. Michael Farring
At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we
look; at forty-five they are caves in which we
hide. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Opinions which circumstances have temporarily
backed. Henry S. Haskins
The mainsprings of action, the driving powers of
life. What a man lives are his convictions.
Francis C. Kelley
(The) dangerous enemies of truth.
Friedrich W. Nietzsche
Every conviction has it history, its primitive
forms, its stage of tentativeness and error: it
becomes a conviction only after having been, for a
long time, not one, and then, for an even longer
time, hardly one. Friedrich W. Nietzsche
The conscience of the mind.
Mrs. Humphrey Ward
A belief which can be explained without getting
angry. The opposite is prejudice. Anon.
See also Belief, Creed, Doctrine, Dogma, Faith.
Cooking
A way of giving and of making yourself desirable.
Michel Bourdin
An art, a noble science: cooks are gentlemen.
Robert Burton
An act of love. Alain Chapel
A process of preparing food which would be speeded
up fifty years by the use of zippers on canned
goods. Russel Crouse
The art of poisoning mankind by rendering the
appetite still importunate, when the wants of
nature are supplied. Franc ois de Fe nelon
One of those arts which most require to be done
by persons of a religious nature.
Alfred North Whitehead
A scheme of shortening human life through
overeating. Anon.
With women a weapon to catch men by the stomach and
watch it grow with the years. Anon.
See also Food, Hunger, Stomach, Wife.
Cooperation
A principle of specialization requiring man to work
as one in common purpose with others in order to
accomplish more. Eugene E. Brussell
Cooperation, and not competition, is the life of
trade. William Fitch
Not a sentiment?it is an economic necessity.
Charles Steinmetz
Coquetry
A circulating library in which we seldom ask twice
for the same volume. C. N. Bovee
Waving fans, coy glances, cringes, and all such
simpering humors. Ben Jonson
The glances of a sinful eye, wavings of fans,
treading of toes, biting the lip, the wanton gait.
Adapted from Thomas Middleton
A political institution; its purpose is the
creation of legitimate power in the industrial
sphere. Peter Drucker
The thorn that guards the rose?easily trimmed off
when once plucked. Donald G. Mitchell
(A quality) of advantage only to the beautiful.
Propertius
The gentle art of making a man feel pleased with
himself. Helen Rowland
Mostly innocent cruelty. Anon.
The art of gaining attention without intention.
Anon.
Coquette
A vain, foolish... girl who after a pretty thorough
sampling of oneself prefers another.
Ambrose Bierce
Her pleasure is in lovers coy; when hers, she gives
them not a thought; but, like the angler, takes
more joy in fishing than in fishes caught.
Adapted from George Birdseye
A woman without any heart, who makes a fool of a
man that hasn't got any head. Madame Deluzy
A young lady of more beauty than sense, more
accomplishments than learning, more charms of
person than graces of the mind, more admirers than
friends, more fools than wise men for attend ants.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(One) fair to no purpose, artful to no end.
Alexander Pope
Young without lovers, old without a friend; a fop
their passion, but their prize a sot.
Adapted from Alexander Pope
A wishful winker. Anon.
A woman to turn the head of a dolt. Anon.
A female who believes that it is every man for
herself. Anon.
Self-lovers, and this lifelong passion is something
no one can dislodge. Anon.
Corporation
An ingenious device for obtaining individual
profit without individual responsibility.
Ambrose Bierce
Corporations cannot commit treason, nor be
outlawed, nor excommunicated, for they have no
souls. Edward Coke
Many lesser commonwealths in the bowels of a
greater, like worms in the entrails of a natural
man. Thomas Hobbes
Corporations are invisible, immortal, and have no
soul. Roger Manwood
An artificial being, invisible, intangible, and
existing only in the contemplation of the law...
the mere creature of the law. John Marshall
It is a body... has certainly a head?a new one
every year; arms it has and very long ones, for it
can reach anything... a throat to swallow the
rights of the community, and a stomach to digest
them... but who ever yet discovered... either
bowels or a heart? Howel Walsh
Like any natural person, except that it has no
pants to kick or soul to damn, and, by God, it
ought to have both. Anon.
An artificial entity that can do everything but
make love. Anon.
See also Business, Capitalism, Commerce.
Corpse
(Something) like the cover of an old book, its
contents torn out, and stript of its lettering and
gilding... yet the work itself shall not be lost,
for it will appear once more in a new and more
beautiful edition. Benjamin Franklin
A human been. Kay Goodman
A human with no problems. Anon.
A forgivable person. Anon.
See also Death, Grave.
Correspondence
See Letters.
Corruption
Everything we see before us today. Karl Barth
God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was
corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon
the earth. Bible: Genesis, VI, 12.
The most infallible symptom of constitutional
liberty. Edward Gibbon
An evil that grows respectable with age.
Voltaire
A tree whose branches are of an unmeasurable
length. Anon.
Cosmetics
(That which) makes most women appear not as young
as they are painted. Adapted from Max Beerbohm
Crease paint. Raymond J. Cvikota
Cold water, morning and evening, is the best of all
cosmetics. Hebrew Proverb
The act of tormenting skin with potions, staining
cheeks with rouge, extending the line of the eyes
with black coloring because of a dissatisfaction
with God's plastic skill.
Adapted from Tertullian
The Devil's looking-glass. Anon.
Putting on another face on top of the one God has
given you. Anon.
Cosmopolitanism
A citizen of the world. Francis Bacon
If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers.
Francis Bacon
Our country is the world?our countrymen are all
mankind. William L. Garrison
To be really cosmopolitan a man must be at home
even in his own country. Thomas W. Higginson
Signifies being polite to every country except your
own. Thomas Hood
(An attitude) likely to be an alibi for not doing
one's duty to one's own people.
Mordecai M. Kaplan
Only a parliament of nations, with law and power...
that... will bring on earth the rule which is in
heaven, the rule of Equity. David Lubin
A luxury which only the upper classes can afford;
the common people are hopelessly bound to their
native shores. Benito Mussolini
My country is the world, and my religion is to do
good. Thomas Paine
International integration of an individual's mind.
Anon.
Living within a plurality of loyalties. Anon.
Cosmos
See Universe.
Cough
A convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp
serosity. Samuel Johnson
A dry cough is the trumpeter of death.
John Ray
Counsel
See Advice.
Counterfeiter
See Plagiarist.
Country
The country of every man is that one where he lives
best. Aristophanes
That which is created with one's own toil and
sweat. David Ben-Gurion
A land flowing with milk and honey.
Bible: Exodus, III, 8.
The common parent of all. Cicero
I... do not call the sod, under my feet my country.
But language, religion, laws, government,
blood?identity of these makes men of one country.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A return to self, to one's own roots, to growth.
Franz Kafka
The token of the mission which God has given you to
fulfill in humanity. Giuseppe Mazzini
A fellowship of free and equal men bound together
in a brotherly concord of labor towards a single
end. Giuseppe Mazzini
Our country is wherever we are well off.
John Milton
The world. Thomas Paine
That spot to which our heart is bound. Voltaire
That which focuses a people. Israel Zangwill
See also Nation, State.
Countryside
The country, as distinguished from the woods, is of
man's creation. The savage has no country.
Amos Bronson Alcott
A place no wise man will choose to live in, unless
he has something to do which can be better done
there. Samuel Johnson
The country is lyric,?the town dramatic.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A series of lonely walks and sitting around.
George Bernard Shaw
A kind of healthy grave. Sydney Smith
A damp sort of place where all sorts of birds fly
about uncooked. Anon.
See also Farm, Nature.
Courage
I think the Romans call it Stoicism.
Joseph Addison
Not to die but to live. Vittorio Alfieri
The lovely virtue?the rib of Himself that God sent
down to His children. James M. Barrie
The integrating strength that causes one to
overcome tragedy. Eugene E. Brussell
(That which) lies half-way between rashness and
cowardice. Miguel de Cervantes
A contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire
to live taking the form of readiness to die.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The quality which guarantees all others.
Winston S. Churchill
That virtue which champions the cause of right.
Cicero
Generosity of the highest order, for the brave are
prodigal of the most precious things.
Charles Caleb Colton
Courage is clearly a readiness to risk
self-humiliation. Nigel Dennis
Courage is fire, and bullying is smoke.
Benjamin Disraeli
Consists in equality to the problems before us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Consists in the power of self-recovery.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Inventions, inspirations, flashes of genius.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A virtue only so far as it is directed by
prudence. Franc ois de Fe nelon
Grace under pressure. Ernest Hemingway
A matter of red corpuscles. Elbert Hubbard
A quality so necessary for maintaining virtue, that
it is always respected, even when it is associated
with vice. Samuel Johnson
A peculiar kind of fear. Charles Kennedy
Never to let your actions be influenced by your
fears. Arthur Koestler
Doing unwitnessed what one would be capable of
doing before the whole world. La Rochefoucauld
The power to let go of the familiar.
Raymond Lindquist
The ladder on which all the other virtues mount.
Clare Boothe Luce
The most common and vulgar of the virtues.
Herman Melville
To live dangerously. Benito Mussolini
Knowing what not to fear. Plato
What preserves our liberty, safety, life, and our
homes and parents, our country and children.
Courage comprises all things. Plautus
To take hard knocks like a man when occasion calls.
Plautus
Doing what you are afraid to do. There can be no
courage unless you're afraid.
Edward V. Rickenbacker
Indifference to personal misfortunes.
Bertrand A. Russell
Personal courage is really a very subordinate
virtue?merely the distinguishing mark of a
subaltern?a virtue... in which we are surpassed by
the lower animals. Arthur Schopenhauer
A scorner of things which inspire fear. Seneca
A perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and
a mental willingness to endure it.
William T. Sherman
The footstool of the Virtues, upon which they
stand. Robert Louis Stevenson
Resistance to fear, mastery of fear?not absence of
fear. Mark Twain
Being scared to death?and saddling up anyway.
John Wayne
Fear that has said its prayers. Anon.
Being afraid yet pushing on. Anon.
Merely the animal instinct to survive. Anon.
See also Bravery, Gallantry, Heroism.
Court
See Justice, Jury, Law, Lawyers.
Courtesan
In all ages a popular woman with men, hence, a
woman who never dies. Albert Benson
Women with maids who wear kimonos all day and read
French novels. Anon.
The aristocracy of whoredom. Anon.
A woman whom a fortune makes. Anon.
A fund loving girl. Anon
See also Mistress, Prostitute.
Courtesy
Subduing our inner state while presenting to the
world an agreeable creature.
Eugene E. Brussell
The courtly manners of any two-legged predatory
animal. Adapted from Elbert Hubbard
Fictitious benevolence. Samuel Johnson
Benevolence in trifles. William Pitt
The art of choosing among one's real thoughts.
Abel Stevens
The art of concealing natural impulses. Anon.
A gift notable in well-bred people and courtesans.
Anon.
See also Breeding, Manners, Politeness.
Courtship
Courtship to marriage is but as the music in the
playhouse till the curtain's drawn.
William Congreve
Courtship (is) to marriage, as a very witty
prologue to a very dull play. William Congreve
On the higher physical level... serves the
extremely important function of deepening the
channels of higher psychical and spiritual love.
John M. Cooper
To take aim kneeling. Douglas Jerrold
The art of the girl not showing her hand till you
ask for it. Franklin P. Jones
Sweet reluctant amorous delay. John Milton
A snappy introduction to a tedious book.
Wilson Mizner
A number of quiet attentions, not so pointed as to
alarm, nor so vague as not to be understood.
Lawrence Sterne
It is natural for a man to woo a woman, not for a
woman to woo a man: the loser seeks what he has
lost (the rib). Talmud: Nidda, 31b.
That period during which the female decides whether
or not she can do any better. Anon.
That part of a woman's life that comes between the
lipstick and the broomstick. Anon.
A lively period before a sentence. Anon.
A man pursuing a woman until she catches him.
Anon.
See also Honeymoon, Marriage.
Covenant
That day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham,
saying: "Unto thy seed have I given this land."
Bible: Genesis, IX, 15.
I will establish my covenant between me and thee,
and thy seed after thee, in their generations, for
an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee,
and to thy seed after thee.
Bible: Genesis, XVII, 7.
A symbolic act of the highest pregnancy, revived
three thousand years later as the root of modern
nationalism and democracy. For the Covenant was
concluded... between God and the whole people,
every member in complete equality. Hans Kohn
The Magna Charta of Judaism. George F. Moore
Torah, God, and circumcision are all called
Covenant. All three are inseparably linked
together. Zohar: Leviticus, 73b.
See also Circumcision, Jews, Judaism.
Covetousness
Covetousness has for its mother unlawful desire,
for its daughter injustice, and for its friend
violence. Arabian Proverb
The moving spirit of civilization from its first
dawn to the present day; wealth, and again
wealth... wealth, not of society, but of the puny
individual, was its only and final aim.
Friedrich Engels
The greatest of all monsters, as well as the root
of all evil. William Penn
If you have a longing desire to possess the goods
which you have not, though you may say you would
not possess them unjustly, you are... cov etous.
Saint Francis de Sales
See also Avarice, Envy.
Coward
One who in a perilous emergency thinks with his
legs. Ambrose Bierce
No... man is born a coward... Truth makes a man of
courage, and guilt makes that man of courage a
coward. Daniel Defoe
(One who) only threatens when he is safe.
Johann W. Goethe
Sinners. John G. Neihardt
The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot.
Thomas Paine
One who is always in danger.
Portuguese Proverb
You are the hare of whom the proverb goes, whose
valor plucks dead lions by the beard.
Adapted from William Shakespeare
The coward calls himself cautious.
Publilius Syrus
A man in whom the instinct of self-preservation
acts normally. Sultana Zoraya
One who is brave only when he is safe. Anon.
Caution is ourselves, despicableness in others.
Anon.
Those who fear death the most. Anon.
See also Bravery, Fear, Pacifist.
Cowardice
To know what is right and not do it. Confucius
Almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend
the functioning of the imagination.
Ernest Hemingway
One too weak to face the world and too weak to
leave it. Adapted from Charles Kingsley
To sin by silence. Abraham Lincoln
Defined on the basis of acts performed.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The surest protection against temptation.
Mark Twain
Crazy
See Insanity, Madness.
Creation (World)
It is not difficult for one seal to make many
impressions exactly alike, but to vary shapes
almost infinitely, which is what God has done in
creation. Robert Bellarmine
Creation took place in eternity as an interior act
of the divine mystery of life. The biblical
conception of creation is only the reflection of
this interior act in the consciousness of primitive
man. Nicholas Berdyaev
In the beginning God created the Heaven and the
earth. And the earth was without form, and void;
and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the
Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light; and there was
light. Bible: Genesis, I, 1.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was
with God, and the Word was God.
Bible: John I, 1.
The transformation of an otherwise chaotic world
into a thing of order and beauty... the shaping of
an indifferent matter into a world of value.
J. E. Boodin
A mystery. Thomas Browne
The intention of God that all created things should
represent the likeness of God, so far as their
proper nature will admit. Dante
Means... that He has infused His own being into
another thing which thereby has taken an
independent existence of its own. Erich Frank
Simply an overwhelming outpouring, the overflow of
infinite goodness. Thomas J. Higgins
Allah created men of congealed blood.
Koran, XCVI.
Heaven and earth, center and circumference were
made in the same instant of time... and man was
created by the Trinity on the 26th of October, 4004
B.C. at 9 o'clock in the morning.
John Lightfoot
The will of God. Moses Maimonides
The only admissable moral theory of Creation is
that the Principle of Good cannot at once and
altogether subdue the powers of evil, either
physical or moral. John Stuart Mill
With ten utterances was the world created.
Mishna: Abot, V, 1.
The bible of the Deist. He there reads in the
hand-writing of the Creator himself, the certainty
of his existence, and the immutability of his
power. Thomas Paine
He but spoke the word, and by that intelligible and
eternal one... were all things created.
Saint Augustine
Love which works good to all things pre-existing
overflowingly in the Good... moved itself to
creation. Saint Augustine
God has made all things out of nothing: because...
even although the world has been made of some
material, that very same material has been made out
of nothing. Saint Augustine
God created heaven and earth only... that men
should fear. Talmud: Sabbath, 31b.
See also Adam, Evolution, Universe, World.
Creativity
To strive consciously for an object and to engage
in engineering?that is, incessantly and eternally
to make new roads, wherever they may lead.
Fedor M. Dostoievski
In the creative state a man is taken out of
himself. He lets down... a bucket into his
subconscious, and draws up something which is
normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with
his normal experiences, and out of the mixture he
makes a work of art. Edward M. Forster
Discontent translated into art. Eric Hoffer
The ability to "introduce order into the randomness
of nature." Eric Hoffer
Psychologically it appears to be closely associated
with the sense of security and the desire for
perfection. Ernest Jones
A type of learning process where the teacher and
pupil are located in the same individual.
Arthur Koestler
The defeat of habit by originality. George Lois
It is not the finding of a thing, but the making
something out of it after it is found.
James Russell Lowell
A thing of degree, not of kind... all persons
possess it to a greater or less degree in each of
the many areas of human expression.
F. G. Macomber
(When) the individual has made something new to
himself that is satisfying and... useful to him, if
he has related things that were previously
unrelated in his experience, and if the product is
'surprising' (that is, new) to him. Alice Miel
The power to connect the seemingly unconnected.
William Plomer
To think more efficiently. Pierre Reverdy
The movement of the internal towards the external
and not a movement of the external on the surface.
Pierre Reverdy
To live means to create. Milton Steinberg
Merely a plus name for regular activity... any
activity becomes creative when the doer cares about
doing it right, or better. John Updike
A method of progress. Conformity... maintains the
status quo. Kimball Wiles
The impulse to find some possibilities of rest in
the bewildering phantasmagoria of the outer world.
W. R. Worringer
See also Art, Artists, Composer, Invention, Music,
Painting, Sculpture, Writing.
Credit
The only enduring testimonial to man's confidence
in man. James Blish
A promise to pay. Ralph Waldo Emerson
The lifeblood of commerce. Elbert Hubbard
(Something) proportioned to the cash which a man
has in his chest. Adapted from Juvenal
The economic judgment on the morality of a man.
Karl Marx
That canker at the heart of national prosperity,
the imaginary riches of paper credit.
Thomas Love Peacock
A condition of human relationships. It binds the
future to the present by the confidence we have in
the integrity of those with whom we deal.
James T. Shotwell
The life blood of industry, and the control of
credit is the control of all society.
Upton Sinclair
A socially irresponsible act to induce people to
get deeper into debt. Anon.
A device that gets better the less it is used.
Anon.
Creditor
Creditors are a superstitious sect, great observers
of set days and times. Benjamin Franklin
A creditor is worse than a master; for a master
owns only your person, a creditor owns your
dignity, and can belabor that. Victor Hugo
A body without a soul. Anon.
The people who come because the customers didn't.
Anon.
Credulity
The characteristic of the present age.
Benjamin Disraeli
To swallow and follow. Charlotte P. Gilman
Man's weakness, but the child's strength.
Charles Lamb
The most costly of all follies... It is the chief
occupation of mankind. Henry Louis Mencken
The only disadvantage of honest hearts.
Philip Sidney
Creed
Man's creed is that he believes in God, and
therefore in mankind, but not that he believes in a
creed. Leon Baeck
The best... is charity toward the creeds of others.
John Billings
My creed is: he is safe that does his best, and
death's a doom sufficient for the rest.
William Cowper
A disease of the intellect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The grammar of religion. Henry Fielding
A sacred total to which nothing may be added, and
from which nothing may be taken away.
James A. Froude
To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of
all creeds. Robert G. Ingersoll
Nothing but the mere result of chance and
temperament. Joseph H. Shorthouse
I use the creeds to express, to conserve, and to
deepen my belief in God. William Temple
Creeds are but branches of a tree.
Ella W. Wilcox
See also Belief, Doctrine, Dogma.
Crime
The greatest... are caused by surfeit, not by want.
Men do not become tyrants in order that they may
not suffer cold. Aristotle
An act committed or omitted in violation of a
public law either forbidding or commanding it.
William Blackstone
The culmination of a complex series of inevitable
forces at work in the physical and social
environment of the individual. Abraham A. Brill
A line you adopt to make money you don't deserve.
John Coates
A breach of faith with the community of mankind.
Joseph Conrad
A name for the most obvious, extreme, and directly
dangerous forms of... departure from the norm in
manners and customs. Havelock Ellis
Whoever profits by crime is guilty of it.
French Proverb
The... source of crime consists in... one man's
possessing in abundance that of which another man
is destitute. William Godwin
The source of every crime is some defect of the
understanding, or some error in reasoning, or
some sudden force of the passions.
Thomas Hobbes
A product of social excess. Nikolai Lenin
An overhead you have to pay if you want to live in
the city. George Moscone
A logical extension of the sort of behavior that is
often considered perfectly respectable in
legitimate business. Robert Rice
Only the retail department of what, in wholesale,
we call penal law. George Bernard Shaw
The only big business to escape government
meddling. Anon.
See also Judge, Justice, Law, Lawyers, Murder,
Prison, Punishment.
Criminal
An atheist, though he doesn't always know it.
Honore de Balzac
To the liberal, a victim of society. To the con-
servative, a person of weak character.
Eugene E. Brussell
One who does by illegal means what all the rest of
us do legally. Elbert Hubbard
Those who turn preachers under the gallows.
Italian Proverb
An enemy of the human race. Latin Proverb
The type of the strong man in unfavorable sur-
roundings, the strong man made sick.
Friedrich W. Nietzsche
Creatures who write crooked lines in the book of
their lives. Adapted from Karl Rahner
A person with predatory instincts who has not
sufficient capital to form a corporation.
Howard Scott
It could probably be shown by facts and figures
that there is no distinctly native American
criminal class except Congress. Mark Twain
Those who, along with some judges, take the law
into their own hands. Anon.
In the USA, he who knows his rights rather than his
wrongs. Anon.
Someone who gets caught. Anon.
See also Murderer, Prison.
Crisis
Crises refine life. In them you discover what you
are. Allan Chalmers
May be nothing less than God's call to us to reach
a new level of humanity. Samuel H. Miller
Times that try men's souls. Thomas Paine
The crisis of yesterday is the joke of tomorrow.
Herbert G. Wells
The peacetime relationship between two nations.
Anon.
See also Trouble.
Criticism
The avocation of assessing the failures of better
men. Nelson Algren
A gift, an intuition, a matter of tact and flair;
it cannot be taught or demonstrated,?it is an art.
Henry F. Amiel
A disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the
best that is known and thought in the world.
Matthew Arnold
The test of a democracy. David Ben-Gurion
(Something that) does not depend upon a superior
principle in men, but upon superior knowledge.
Edmund Burke
That in which the critic is not the antagonist so
much as the rival of the author.
Isaac D'Israeli
An instinctive activity of the civilized mind.
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Literary criticism is an art, like the writing of
tragedies or the making of love, and, similarly,
does not pay. Clifton Fadiman
The adventure of the soul among masterpieces.
Anatole France
To appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual
possession, to establish in fine a relation with
the criticised thing and make it one's own.
Henry James
Growing important and formidable at very small
expense. Samuel Johnson
Distorting the general scope and purpose of an
author to one's own particular and private spleen.
Adapted from Ben Jonson
The most agreeable of all amusements.
Henry H. Kames
(That which) takes from us that of being deeply
moved by very beautiful things.
Jean de La Bruyere
A wise scepticism. James Russell Lowell
The art of appraising others at one's own value.
George Jean Nathan
The art wherewith a critic tries to guess himself
into a share of the artist's fame.
George Jean Nathan
To distinguish, to analyze, and separate from its
adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a
landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book,
produces this special impression of beauty or
pleasure, to indicate what the source of that
impression is, and under what conditions it is
experienced. Walter Pater
Regarding the author's end, since none can en-
compass more than they intend.
Adapted from Alexander Pope
A practice which strips the tree of both cater-
pillars and blossoms.
Adapted from Jean Paul Richter
A sort of indirect self-exhibition.
Paul Rosenfeld
A serious and public function; it shows the race
assimilating the individual, dividing the immortal
from the mortal part of a soul.
George Santayana
An attempt to express what the artist tried to
express. Adapted from Joel E. Spingarn
(That which) recognizes in every work of art an
organism governed by its own law.
Joel E. Spingarn
The aim... is to distinguish what is essential.
Arthur Symons
You do not get a man's most effective criticism
until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed
with some bitterness. Henry David Thoreau
Records the adventures of one's soul among
masterpieces. John Wain
A majestic office, perhaps an art, perhaps even a
church. Walt Whitman
Three questions are essential... What is the
author's object? How far has he accomplished it?
How far is that object worthy of approbation?
Nathaniel P. Willis
Something you can avoid by saying nothing, doing
nothing and being nothing. Anon.
Impolite writing in the presence of humbug.
Anon.
See also Reviewers.
Critics
A bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense
of taste. Whitney Balliett
Eunuchs in harem: they know how its done, they've
seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it
themselves. Brendan Behan
A person who boasts himself hard to please
because nobody tries to please him.
Ambrose Bierce
Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.
Robert Burns
A servile race, who in mere want of fault all merit
place; who blind obedience pay to ancient schools,
bigots to Greece, and slaves to musty rules.
Adapted from Charles Churchill
Usually people who would have been poets,
historians, biographers, if they could; they have
tried their talents at one or the other, and have
failed; therefore they turn critics.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Disinterested thieves of our good name; cool, sober
murderers of their neighbor's fame.
Adapted from Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Fools... I write at them, not to them.
William Congreve
He (who) is forced to be literate about the
illiterate, witty about the witless and coherent
about the incoherent. John Crosby
Venomous serpents that delight in hissing.
W. B. Daniel
Men who have failed in literature and art.
Benjamin Disraeli
They who write ill, and they who never dared to
write. Adapted from John Dryden
The clerk. Henry Fielding
He who relates the adventures of his soul among
masterpieces. Anatole France
Brushers of noblemen's clothes.
George Herbert
The critic takes a book in one hand, and uses the
other to paint himself with. When his work is done,
we may fail to find the book in it, but we are sure
to find him. Josiah G. Holland
Nature, when she... manufactured and patented her
authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips
that were left. Oliver Wendell Holmes 1
Men who quarrel over the motive of a book that
never had any. Elbert Hubbard
A man who expects miracles. James G. Huneker
A torch-bearing outrider, the interpreter par
excellence. Henry James
An insect. Samuel Johnson
A certain race of men that either imagine it their
duty, or make it their amusement, to hinder the
reception of every work of learning or genius.
Samuel Johnson
The only independent source of information. The
rest is advertising. Pauline Kael
Sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed
at the corners of newspapers and reviews to chal-
lenge every new author.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A reading-machine, always wound up and going.
James Russell Lowell
He who would write and can't write.
James Russell Lowell
The sorcerer who makes some hidden spring gush
forth unexpectedly under our feet.
Franc ois Mauriac
The lot of critics is to be remembered by what they
failed to understand. George M. Moore
(Something) no chronically happy man is.
George Jean Nathan
A man of such infinite wisdom and flawless taste
that any opinion he may utter is to be accepted
immediately and without question?unless you
happen to disagree with him.
George Oppenheimer
A legless man who teaches running.
Channing Pollock
The men with muck-rake. Theodore Roosevelt
The secretary of the public... who does not wait to
take dictation... who divines, who decides, who
expresses every morning what everybody is thinking.
Charles A. Sainte-Beuve
A man whose watch is five minutes ahead of other
people's watches. Charles A. Sainte-Beuve
A man who leaves no turn unstoned.
George Bernard Shaw
A most stupid and malignant race... an unsuc-
cessful author turned critic.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
(One who) gives directions to the town to cry it up
or run it down. Jonathan Swift
What we ask of him is that he should find out for
us more than we can find out for ourselves.
Arthur Symons
The public is the only critic whose opinion is
worth anything at all. Mark Twain
A necessary evil, and criticism is an evil
necessity. Carolyn Wells
One who tells the artist what he really meant.
Robert Zwickey
Detractors of their betters. Anon.
Someone you read to discover whether you liked it
or not. Anon.
A eunuch?he knows what to do but can't do it.
Anon.
The stupid who discuss the wise. Anon.
Cromwell, Oliver (1599-1658)
A perfect master of all the arts of simulation and
of dissimulation. George Bate
A man in whom ambition had not wholly suppressed,
but only suspended, the sentiments of religion.
Edmund Burke
He stood bare, not cased in... coat-of-mail: he
grappled like a giant, face to face, heart to
heart, with the naked truth of things. I plead
guilty to valuing such a man beyond all other sorts
of men. Thomas Carlyle
A strong-minded, rough-built Englishman, with a
character thoroughly English, and exceedingly
good-natured. Thomas De Quincey
He works, plots, fights, in rude affairs, with
squires, lords, kings, his craft compares.
Adapted from Ralph Waldo Emerson
A brave bad man. Edward Hyde
He nothing common did, or mean,
Upon that memorable scene,
But with his keener eye
The axe's edge did try. Andrew Marvell
A practical mystic, the most formidable and
terrible of all combinations. A man who combines
inspiration... derived... from close communion with
the supernatural and the celestial, a man who has
that inspiration and adds to it the energy of a
mighty man of action. Lord Rosebery
In appearance extremely religious, he preaches
eloquently to the soldiers, persuading them to live
according to God's laws; and to render his
persuasions more efficacious he avails himself of
tears. Giovanni Sagredo
The most terrible of all charlatans. Voltaire
Cross
The death of death, and the defeat of sin, the
beautification of martyrdom, the raising to the
skies of voluntary sacrifice, the defiance of pain.
Henry F. Amiel
The symbol of an Elder Brother who went into the
far country to manifest the Father's forgiving
love. Henry S. Coffin
There and there only is the power to save.
William Cowper
We do not attach any intrinsic virtue to the Cross;
this would be sinful and idolatrous. Our veneration
is referred to Him who died upon it.
James C. Gibbons
God's way of uniting suffering with love.
Georgia Harkness
A throne of God's revelation.
Cleland B. McAfee
The way of light. Medieval Latin Proverb
The inversion of all human values. The human is put
to death; and out of death comes life.
John C. Murray
The way to bliss. Francis Quarles
By the wood of the Cross the work of the Word of
God was made manifest to all. Saint Irenaeus
The only valid symbol for the life of good men.
J. C. Schroeder
A union of the perfect justice and love in response
to the sacrifice demanded by the Father.
Sister Mary Immaculate Creek
The symbol and the reality of the immense labor of
the centuries which has little by little raised up
the created spirit and brought it back to the
depths of the divine context.
Sister Mary Immaculate Creek
Ladders that lead to Heaven. Samuel Smiles
Either the darkest spot of all in the mystery of
existence, or a searchlight by the aid of which we
may penetrate the surrounding gloom.
B. H. Streeter
The fitting close of a life of rejection, scorn,
and defeat. James Thomson
The Jacob's ladder by which we ascend into the
highest heaven. Thomas Traherne
The victorious struggle of Life over and through
death. E. I. Watkin
See also Christ, Christianity, Holiness, Religion,
Salvation.
Crowd
A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery
of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbol, where
there is no love. Francis Bacon
The collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Thomas Carlyle
Accumulated cruelty. Lord Halifax
The worst of tyrants. Homer
Wherever there is... untruth.
So ren Kierkegaard
A mind without subtlety, a mind without compas-
sion, a mind, finally, uncivilized.
Robert Lindner
(A body that) is always caught by appearance and
the crowd is all there is in the world.
Niccolo Machiavelli
A quick way of loosing one's identity. Anon.
A body of people who are more likely to err than
individuals. Anon.
A fatal condition to thought. Anon.
See also Masses, Mob, Multitude, People (The),
Populace.
Cruelty
The first attribute of the Devil. Henry G. Bohn
To beat a cripple with his own crutches.
Thomas Fuller
A tyrant that's always attended with fear.
Thomas Fuller
(That which) proceeds from a vile mind, and often
from a cowardly heart. John Harington
Pleasure in forcing one's will upon other people.
Bertrand A. Russell
See also Mob, Savage, Tyranny.
Crying
See Tears.
Cuckhold
Company makes cuckolds. John Clarke
Cuckolds are Christians the world over.
Thomas Fuller
To wear a horn and not know it. John Lyly
The one who is the last to know about it. Anon.
See also Adultery.
Culture
The best that has been said and thought in the
world. Matthew Arnold
Culture is... properly described not as having its
origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in
the love of perfection: it is a study of
perfection. Matthew Arnold
The passion for sweetness and light... the passion
for making them prevail. Matthew Arnold
There is no better motto which it can have than
these words of Bishop Wilson, "To make reason and
the will of God prevail." Matthew Arnold
The acquiring of culture is the developing of an
avid hunger for knowledge and beauty.
Jesse L. Bennett
A way of coping with the world by defining it in
detail. Malcolm Bradbury
The great law of culture is: Let each become all
that he was created capable of being... casting off
all... noxious adhesions, and show himself at
length in his own shape and stature, be these what
they may. Thomas Carlyle
Keeping up six conversations when there are twelve
in the room. Ernest Dimnet
To overpower nationality. Ralph Waldo Emerson
All that which gives the mind possession of its own
powers. Ralph Waldo Emerson
A product of sublimation. Sigmund Freud
To... do with our own hands all the necessary
labor, from the highest and most complicated... to
the coarsest and hardest and meanest.
Aaron D. Gordon
Always a product of mixing. Friedrich Hertz
The sum of all the forms of art, of love and of
thought, which, in the course of centuries, have
enabled man to be less enslaved. Emile Herzog
The sum of special knowledge that accumulates in
any large united family and is the common property
of all its members. Aldous Huxley
(That which) is commissioned to convert, as far as
lies within its power, pain into enjoyment,
necessity into freedom. Jacob Klatzkin
To have known the best, and to have known it for
the best. John W. Mackail
An order of sensory preferences.
Marshall McLuhan
The essence of a self-reliant and autonomous
culture is an unshakable egoism.
Henry Louis Mencken
Man's adaptive dimension. Ashley Montagu
Man's achievement... exists within the world of
grace?God's Kingdom. Helmut R. Niebuhr
It is what, seven centuries from now, writers of
dreadful texts will instruct college freshmen what
we meant, even if now we don't know what we mean.
Michael Novak
The concrete expression of values too pervasive to
be expressed only in words, except centuries later
in academic circles. Michael Novak
What the rich and the new-rich try to fill their
lives with when sexuality falls short.
Michael Novak
Religion externalized... and bears the imprints of
its molding by Christianity. Edmund A. Opitz
The harmonious development of all the powers and
capacities of man. Felix Perles
(That which) imparts both light and sweetness to
the soul which has the eyes to see. Philo
What your butcher would have if he were a surgeon.
Mary P. Poole
To enhance and intensify one's vision of that
synthesis of truth and beauty which is the highest
and deepest reality. John C. Powys
An acquired taste. John C. Powys
The final wall, against which one leans one's back
in a god-forsaken chaos. John C. Powys
To prevent the expression of everything: that is
the... function of culture. Philip Rieff
The sum total of man's spiritual values.
C. Bezalel Sherman
The substance... is religion and the form of
religion is culture. Paul Tillich
An instrument wielded by professors to manufacture
professors, who when their turn comes, will
manufacture professors. Simone Weil
Anything that people do and monkeys don't.
Anon.
The product of versatility and leisure, aided and
abetted by some cash. Anon.
See also Civilization, Classics, Literature,
Religion.
Cunning
The dwarf of wisdom. William R. Alger
A sinister or crooked wisdom. Francis Bacon
The faculty that distinguishes a weak animal or
person from a strong one. Ambrose Bierce
Refined policy. Edmund Burke
The dark sanctuary of incapacity.
Lord Chesterfield
Knowledge that is divorced from justice. Cicero
Strength withheld. Ralph Waldo Emerson
A characteristic of animals which is called
discretion in men. Jean de La Fontaine
What you are when you rush to get ahead and are not
wise. Anon.
See also Cleverness.
Cupid
A blind gunner. George Farquhar
The greatest little enemy.
Oliver Wendell Holmes 1
A murderous boy. Meleager
A fiery archer making pain his joy. Meleager
Love's heralds. William Shakespeare
Regent of love. William Shakespeare
A knavish lad. William Shakespeare
The greatest little god. Robert Southey
See also Love, Lovers.
Curiosity
The first and simplest emotion which we discover in
the human mind. Edmund Burke
An itching humor or a kind of longing to see that
which is not to be seen, to do that which ought not
to be done, to know that secret which should not be
known, to eat of the forbidden fruit.
Robert Burton
That low vice. Lord Byron
Delight. Walter Charleton
Free-wheeling intelligence. Alistair Cooke
The secret of happiness. Norman Douglas
Ill manners in another's house. Thomas Fuller
Envy and idleness married together.
Thomas Fuller
Little more than another name for hope.
Julius and Augustus Hare
The lust of the mind. Thomas Hobbes
At its lowest, the instinct that boosts us up to
peep over our neighbor's transom.
Elbert Hubbard
A monstrous antenna that feels its way through
matter and mind, and founders in the infinite.
Elbert Hubbard
A peep-hole in the brain. Elbert Hubbard
In great and generous minds, the first passion and
the last. Samuel Johnson
One of the permanent and certain characteristics of
a vigorous intellect. Samuel Johnson
Two sorts... one is from interest, which makes us
desire to know what may be useful to us; another is
from pride, and arises from a desire of knowing
what others are ignorant of. La Rochefoucauld
Only vanity. Blaise Pascal
This disease. Saint Augustine
The mother of science. Charles Singer
Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life
blood of real civilization. George M. Trevelyan
The foundation of science and progress. Anon.
See also Education, Knowledge, Philosophy, Science,
Wonder.
Currency
See Dollar, Money.
Curse
See Profanity.
Custom
The coward's plea. Charles Churchill
The best master. Cicero
A sort of second nature. Cicero
The best interpreter of the law.
The Code of Cannon Law, 2
That unwritten law, by which the people keep even
kings in awe. Adapted from William D'Avenant
Customs constitute moral standards.
John Dewey
The plague of wise men and the idol of fools.
Thomas Fuller
The ancient roots which control the law.
Max Gralnick
Something that serves to contract our ideas, like
our movements, within the circle it has traced for
us; it governs us by the terror it inspires for any
new and untried condition. Francois Guizot
The great guide to human life. David Hume
(It) has furnished the only basis which ethics have
ever had. Joseph Wood Krutch
Great things astonish us, and small dishearten us.
Custom makes both familiar.
Jean de La Bruyere
The tyrant. Latin Proverb
The standing hindrance to human advancement.
John Stuart Mill
Long suffering begets custom... (It is) consent and
imitation. Michel de Montaigne
A violent and deceiving schoolmistress.
Michel de Montaigne
The original content of duty. Friedrich Paulsen
Unwritten laws... impressed on the souls of those
living under the same constitution. Philo
The world's great idol. John Pomfret
The worst disease to which religion is liable, and
the most difficult to cure. Solomon Schechter
Being used to a thing.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
All that lies buried under fifty years.
John Greenleaf Whittier
Custom is another law. Anon.
See also Conformity, Habit, Law, Tradition.
Cynic
One who never sees a good quality in a man, and
never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl,
vigilant in darkness, and blind to light, mousing
for vermin, and never seeing noble game.
Henry Ward Beecher
A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as
they are, and not as they ought to be.
Ambrose Bierce
Just a man who found out when he was about ten that
there wasn't any Santa Claus, and he's still upset.
James Gould Cozzens
A man who tells you the truth about your own
motives. Russell Green
One who reads bitter lessons from the past... One
who is prematurely disappointed in the future.
Sydney J. Harris
(One who) is only seeking to escape his own
inadequacies. Edgar F. Magnin
If to look truth in the face and not resent it when
it's unpalatable, and take human nature as you find
it... is to be cynical, then I suppose I'm a cynic.
William Somerset Maugham
A man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for
a coffin. Henry Louis Mencken
(Those who) are only happy in making the world as
barren for others as they have made it for
themselves. George Meredith
Those canine philosophers. Saint Augustine
A man who looks at the world with a monocle in his
mind's eye. Carolyn Wells
A man who knows the price of everything, and the
value of nothing. Oscar Wilde
One who detaches himself from the broad stream of
humanity and feels superior about it. Anon.
One who looks down on his equals and superiors.
Anon.
A child who goes through life sneering at Santa
Claus. Anon.
An organized sarcasm. Anon.
One who is married to his first love?himself.
Anon.
See also Misanthrope, Pessimist.
Cynicism
A small brass fieldpiece that eventually breaks and
kills the cannoneer. Henry Aldrich
The temptation shared by all forms of intelligence.
Albert Camus
The anticipation of the historical perspective.
Russell Green
Idealism gone sour. Will Herberg
The intellectual cripple's substitute for
intelligence... the dishonest businessman's
substitute for conscience... the communicator's
substitute... for self-respect. Russell Lynes
Intellectual dandyism. George Meredith
The form in which base souls approach what they
call honesty. Friedrich W. Nietzsche
A euphemism for realism. Seeing things as they
really are, instead of the way we'd like them to
be. Harry Ruby
Cynicism such as one finds... frequently among the
most highly educated young men and women of the
West results from the combination of comfort with
powerlessness. Bertrand A. Russell
The only deadly sin I know. Henry L. Stimson
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