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Paging Dr :: Graduate Entry Admission :: GAMSAT :: Section 2: Essay Writing :: Sample Quotes for Essay Practice

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hectopascal
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Sample Quotes for Essay Practice
« Thread Started on Feb 25, 2007, 5:51pm »

I saved these quotes from the old forum. Thanks to the original poster:

We cannot control the evil tongues of others; but a good life enables us to disregard them.
Cato the Elder (234 BC - 149 BC)

There is so much good in the worst of us, And so much bad in the best of us, That it hardly behooves any of us To talk about the rest of us.
Edward Wallis Hoch (1849 - 1925), Marion (Kansas) Record

Never tell evil of a man, if you do not know it for certainty, and if you know it for a certainty, then ask yourself, 'Why should I tell it?'
Johann K. Lavater

A rumor without a leg to stand on will get around some other way.
John Tudor

Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900), Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892, Act III

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Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter because nobody listens.
Nick Diamos

It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 - 1894)

Know how to listen, and you will profit even from those who talk badly.
Plutarch (46 AD - 120 AD)

As I get older, I've learned to listen to people rather than accuse them of things.
Po Bronson, quoted in Publishers Weekly

A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something.
Wilson Mizner (1876 - 1933)

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Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
Edward R. Murrow (1908 - 1965), television broadcast, December 31, 1955

Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest of violence.
Francis Jeffrey (1773 - 1850)

Prejudice is opinion without judgement.
Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to find my way across the room.
William Hazlitt (1778 - 1830)

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely re-arranging their prejudices.
William James (1842 - 1910)

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There can be no real individual freedom in the presence of economic insecurity.
Chester Bowles (1901 - 1986)

Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?
Kelvin Throop III

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.
Laurence J. Peter (1919 - 1988)

An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.
Nicholas Chamfort (1741 - 1794)

In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from.
Peter Drucker (1909 - 2005)

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I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many or the prejudices of the few.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881), campaign speech at High Wycombe, England, November 27, 1832

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
Hannah Arendt (1906 - 1975)

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910), Notebook, 1935

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 - 1968)

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.
Robert Anton Wilson

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It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"

The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made.
Jean Giraudoux (1882 - 1944)

Judge thyself with the judgment of sincerity, and thou will judge others with the judgment of charity.
John Mitchell Mason

I am not sincere, even when I say I am not.
Jules Renard (1864 - 1910)

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900), The Critic as Artist, part 2, 1891

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A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
George Moore

Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.
George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.
Miriam Beard

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.
Paul Theroux (1941 - ), in The Washington Post

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost (1874 - 1963), The Road Not Taken

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Yesterday I was a dog. Today I'm a dog. Tomorrow I'll probably still be a dog. Sigh! There's so little hope for advancement.
Charles M. Schulz (1922 - 2000), (Snoopy)

It's funny how dogs and cats know the inside of folks better than other folks do, isn't it?
Eleanor H. Porter (1868 - 1920), Pollyanna, 1912

If you are a dog and your owner suggests that you wear a sweater, suggest that he wear a tail.
Fran Lebowitz (1950 - )

No animal should ever jump up on the dining-room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation.
Fran Lebowitz (1950 - )

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.
George Eliot (1819 - 1880), 'Mr. Gilfil's Love Story,' Scenes of Clerical Life, 1857

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It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship.
Colette (1873 - 1954), The Pure and the Impure, 1932

Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.
Eric Hoffer (1902 - 1983)

We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), "You Never Can Tell" (1898), act I

One of the greatest victories you can gain over someone is to beat him at politeness.
Josh Billings (1818 - 1885)

To have respect for ourselves guides our morals; and to have a deference for others governs our manners.
Lawrence Sterne (1713 - 1768)

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Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.
Amy Lowell (1874 - 1925)

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
Andre Gide (1869 - 1951)

Let each man exercise the art he knows.
Aristophanes (450 BC - 388 BC), Wasps, 422 B.C.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
Ben Shahn (1898 - 1969)

So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
Brenda Ueland

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Nobody talks so constantly about God as those who insist that there is no God.
Heywood Broun (1888 - 1939)

An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.
John Buchan (1875 - 1940)

It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
Peter De Vries

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, "Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"
Quentin Crisp

You've got your phenomenon on one hand. Concrete and knowable. On the other hand you've got the incomprehensible. You call it God, but to me, God or no, it remains just that, the unknowable.
Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess, Northern Exposure, A Wing and a Prayer, 1994

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He who builds a better mousetrap these days runs into material shortages, patent-infringement suits, work stoppages, collusive bidding, discount discrimination--and taxes."
H. E. Martz

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.
Herman Wouk (1915 - )

The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward.
John Maynard Keynes (1883 - 1946)

When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.
Plato (427 BC - 347 BC), The Republic

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Preach not to others what they should eat, but eat as becomes you, and be silent.
Epictetus (55 AD - 135 AD)

What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease.
George Dennison Prentice

It's important to begin a search on a full stomach.
Henry Bromel, Northern Exposure, The Big Kiss, 1991

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973)

Food is our common ground, a universal experience.
James Beard, O Magazine, November 2003

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The perfect bureaucrat everywhere is the man who manages to make no decisions and escape all responsibility.
Brooks Atkinson (1894 - 1984), Once Around the Sun, 1951

Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy.
Charles Peters

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.
Eugene McCarthy (1916 - ), Time magazine, Feb. 12, 1979

Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.
Laurence J. Peter (1919 - 1988)

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
Milton Friedman (1912 - )

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The farther behind I leave the past, the closer I am to forging my own character.
Isabelle Eberhardt

We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.
Lyndon B. Johnson (1908 - 1973), December 13, 1963

Time is just something that we assign. You know, past, present, it's just all arbitrary. Most Native Americans, they don't think of time as linear; in time, out of time, I never have enough time, circular time, the Stevens wheel. All moments are happening all the time.
Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess, Northern Exposure, Hello, I Love You, 1994

Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.
Sir William Osler (1849 - 1919), to his students

I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), The Moon and Sixpence

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Laughter gives us distance. It allows us to step back from an event, deal with it and then move on.
Bob Newhart (1929 - )

Total absence of humor renders life impossible.
Colette (1873 - 1954), Chance Acquaintances, 1952

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
E E Cummings (1894 - 1962)

Laugh at yourself first, before anyone else can.
Elsa Maxwell, September 28, 1958

Man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.
Joseph Addison (1672 - 1719), The Spectator, September 26, 1712
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The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.
George Eliot (1819 - 1880)

It is our choices...that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets, 1999

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
John Dewey (1859 - 1952)

An executive is a person who always decides; sometimes he decides correctly, but he always decides.
John H. Patterson

A weak man has doubts before a decision, a strong man has them afterwards.
Karl Kraus (1874 - 1936)

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I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
E. B. White (1899 - 1985)

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.
H. G. Wells (1866 - 1946)

One cannot fix one's eyes on the commonest natural production without finding food for a rambling fancy.
Jane Austen (1775 - 1817), Mansfield Park

It's amazing how quickly nature consumes human places after we turn our backs on them. Life is a hungry thing.
Scott Westerfeld, Peeps, 2005

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.
Tennessee Williams (1911 - 1983), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)

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Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
Edith Sitwell (1887 - 1964), Taken Care Of ,1965

I am still determined to be cheerful and happy, in whatever situation I may be; for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances.
Martha Washington (1732 - 1802)

A strong positive mental attitude will create more miracles than any wonder drug.
Patricia Neal

Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
William James (1842 - 1910)

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.
William James (1842 - 1910)

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The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.
Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650), 'Le Discours de la Methode,' 1637

Nothing is as certain as that the vices of leisure are gotten rid of by being busy.
Seneca (5 BC - 65 AD), Moral Letters to Lucilius, 64 A.D.

He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)

Here's a rule I recommend: Never practice two vices at once.
Tallulah Bankhead (1903 - 1968)

It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.
Walter Bagehot (1826 - 1877),

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The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892)

My passions were all gathered together like fingers that made a fist. Drive is considered aggression today; I knew it then as purpose.
Bette Davis (1908 - 1989), The Lonely Life, 1962

He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason.
Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC)

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
D. H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930)

The worst sin - perhaps the only sin - passion can commit, is to be joyless.
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893 - 1957), Gaudy Night
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An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948), (attributed)

If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.
Niccolo Machiavelli (1469 - 1527)

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
Paul Gauguin (1848 - 1903)

Nothing inspires forgiveness quite like revenge.
Scott Adams (1957 - )

In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior.
Sir Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626)

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Faith must have adequate evidence, else it is mere superstition.
Alexander Hodge

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970), Unpopular Essays (1950), "Outline of Intellectual Rubbish"

We do not destroy religion by destroying superstition.
Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC)

A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.
George Iles

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature.... Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
Helen Keller (1880 - 1968), The Open Door (1957)
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Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882 - 1945)

It's choice - not chance - that determines your destiny.
Jean Nidetch

Fortune can, for her pleasure, fools advance,
And toss them on the wheels of Chance.
Juvenal (55 AD - 127 AD)

In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.
Louis Pasteur (1822 - 1895), lecture 1854

Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.
Ovid (43 BC - 17 AD)
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There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.
Anatole Broyard

Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900 - 1944), "The Little Prince", 1943

Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to come back home.
Bill Cosby (1937 - )

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.
Bill Watterson (1958 - ), Calvin and Hobbes

If you can give your son or daughter only one gift, let it be enthusiasm.
Bruce Barton
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That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.
Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC), Politics

The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)

In the state of nature...all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the law.
Charles de Montesquieu (1689 - 1755)

The love of democracy is that of equality.
Charles de Montesquieu (1689 - 1755) _______________________________________________

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention - invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.
Agatha Christie (1890 - 1976), An Autobiography, 1977

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Alan Kay

An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn't take his education too seriously.
Charles F. Kettering (1876 - 1958)

We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.
Eric Hoffer (1902 - 1983)

Invention is the mother of necessity.
Thorstein Veblen (1857 - 1929)

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Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

"My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."
G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), "Misalliance"

Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.
George Jean Nathan (1882 - 1958)

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All married couples should learn the art of battle as they should learn the art of making love. Good battle is objective and honest - never vicious or cruel. Good battle is healthy and constructive, and brings to a marriage the principle of equal partnership.
Ann Landers (1918 - 2002)

A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one's husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I used to believe that marriage would diminish me, reduce my options. That you had to be someone less to live with someone else when, of course, you have to be someone more.
Chantal Saperstein

Marriage. It's like a cultural hand-rail. It links folks to the past and guides them to the future.
Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, Northern Exposure, Our Wedding, 1992

I pay very little regard...to what any young person says on the subject of marriage. If they profess a disinclination for it, I only set it down that they have not yet seen the right person.
Jane Austen (1775 - 1817), Mansfield Park

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Let's not kid ourselves. Whatever we diagnose, most patients, if they don't die, get well by themselves. Our job is mainly to try to make them feel better; do no harm.
Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, Northern Exposure, Wake Up Call, 1992

The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
Sir William Osler (1849 - 1919), In H. Cushing, Life of Sir William Osler (1925)

Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.
Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin (1973) "Science and Scientism"

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

One has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.
Alice James

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No moral system can rest solely on authority.
A. J. Ayer (1910 - 1989), Humanist Outlook

Good laws have their origins in bad morals.
Ambrosius Macrobius

Compassion is the basis of all morality.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860)

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach but do not practice, and another which we practice but seldom preach.
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970),

« Last Edit: Mar 13, 2007, 6:26pm by ~WunderBunny~ »