Wise Quotes
Some favorite and unknown wise quotes, from throughout the ages:
Fear less, hope more; eat less, chew more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; hate less, love more; and all good things are yours.
~Swedish Proverb
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If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.
~Henry Ford, on Money
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A decent breakfast, a nice swim, a cold beer and good company.These are the things that make me happy.
~ Dave Grohl, musician, on Happiness
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In my life nothing goes wrong. When things seem to not meet my expectations, I let go of how I think things should be. It’s a matter of not having any attachment to any fixed outcome.
~ Deepak Chopra, on a Life Philosophy
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The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.
~Thomas Edison
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Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.
~Malcolm S. Forbes
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Never confuse thoughtlessness with malice.
~Robert Charles Whitehead
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You have to plant. You can’t just eat.
~Neil Young, on Success
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Yet some things you miss and some things you lose by keeping your arm outstretched.
~Author Unknown
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It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark.
~Howard Ruff, How to Prosper in the Coming Bad Years, 1979
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Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you’re tired, go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.
~Bruce Lee
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Happiness is a function of fulfilment. When people are able to express their creativity, when they have meaning and purpose in life, when they have meaningful relationships and are able to make other people happy, in general they are happy then.
~ Deepak Chopra, on Happiness and Creativity
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While seeking revenge, dig two graves - one for yourself.
~Doug Horton
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Never make your home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You’ll find what you need to furnish it - memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey.
~Tad Williams
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Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others.
~Buddha
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To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy.
~Hippocrates
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I’m bent on proving you can make a living as an artist and not die young and crazy like Mozart, Lenny Bruce, Dylan Thomas and so many others who risked their lives to make things they believed would be their salvation.
~ John Cale, on Creativity
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Trust in God, but tie up your camel.
~ Mohammed
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We should help people, not destroy them. Abraham Lincoln said we have to feed America and then Africa and the Middle East. What do we do? We sold weapons to them.
~ Tony Bennett, on War
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Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
~Abraham Lincoln
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The best way to predict your future is to create it.
~Peter Drucker
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It is better to sleep on things beforehand than lie awake about them afterwards.
~Baltasar Gracian
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Never undertake anything for which you wouldn’t have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.
~G.C. Lichtenberg
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Never saw off the branch you are on, unless you are being hanged from it.
~Stanislaw Lec
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If you have a second job as well as being a writer, it needn’t be as a public intellectual: you might work at the foreign office or you might run a shop, or you could be an engineer; there are actually lots of jobs that feed very well into writing. Jeanette Winterson has a deli.
~ Alain de Botton and Creativity
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You want to run out in front, prepare to be tripped from behind.
~S.A. Sachs
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Whatever we worship, short of God, is sure to be our undoing.
~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960
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Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
~Theodore Roosevelt
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The vow that binds too strictly snaps itself.
~Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Last Tournament,” Idylls of the King
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Tough and funny and a little bit kind: that is as near to perfection as a human being can be.
~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966
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Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
~Jonathan Kozel
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The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile.
~Plato
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I play nice concert halls. Intimate venues. It was Liberace who started the trend for huge stadiums. Now everyone does these huge events like Hitler did.
~ Tony Bennett on Music
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Almost everyone with both debts and savings is wasting a fortune.
~ Martin Lewis, on Money
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Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.
~Frank Herbert, Dune Chronicles
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You will turn over many a futile new leaf till you learn we must all write on scratched-out pages.
~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960
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See everything; overlook a great deal; correct a little.
~Pope John XXIII
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How long do you listen to someone before your attention wanders? Someone told me 16 minutes. In this life, if you can’t explain yourself in 16 minutes you’re in a lot of trouble.
~ Tony Bennett, on Explaining Yourself
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Good for the body is the work of the body, and good for the soul is the work of the soul, and good for either is the work of the other.
~Henry David Thoreau
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Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.
~Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ, c.1420
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You’ve got a lot of choices. If getting out of bed in the morning is a chore and you’re not smiling on a regular basis, try another choice.
~Steven D. Woodhull
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We try to create products people love to use. We create value, then think of appropriate ways of monetization.
~ Peter Birch from Google, on Business
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I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it…. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
~Alice Walker,The Color Purple, 1982
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Be pleasant until ten o’clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself.
~Elbert Hubbard
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Promise only what you can deliver. Then deliver more than you promise.
~Author Unknown
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God is good, but never dance in a small boat.
~Irish Saying
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Don’t let it be all in your head, nor all in your body.
~V.L. Allineare
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Think of your faults the first part of the night when you are awake, and the faults of others the latter part of the night when you are asleep.
~Chinese Proverb
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Whatever you are be a good one.
~Abraham Lincoln
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In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest.
~Henry Miller, The Books in My Life
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Be kind to your shadow.
~Rebecca Lawless
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When you’re travelling, pack light. Bring less clothes, do some laundry in the sink. I can live out of one suitcase for weeks and weeks. I’ll bring a couple of pounds of coffee with me, and protein bars, so that’s ballast you throw off every week - I’ll go home with those things gone and CDs in their place.
~ Henry Rollins, on Travelling
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The victor does not believe in chance.
~ Nietzsche
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With women, it’s about finding somebody who lives at the same pace as you and is independent, who gets on with their work and lets you get on with yours. I think being on the same block - maybe even the same building - is good, but shared space is a very complex matter.
~ John Cale on Relationships
For me, the secret to happiness, which I may not be able to follow myself, is that you should be happy with what you have and not always be hankering.
~ Ravi Shankar, on Happiness
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Cooking is very important for men. If you can’t cook well, take some lessons. It’s an asset that will carry you into any relationship.Women love it: it takes the burden off them and alludes to a sharing of responsibility.
~ Kim Gordon, on Relationships
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Decorate yourself from the inside out.
~Andrei Turnhollow
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A name can form you. I’ve got a sort of American Ivy League surname for a first name. It always marked me out. You’re at a disadvantage if you’re lost in the jungle of Daves or Mikes.
~ Grayson Perry
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One of the great con tricks that life can pull on the conventional and the obedient is that rewards so often seem to go to those who choose other paths than those which are laid down.
~ Stephen Fry, on Success
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I’m not worried about posterity. If one of my pots is on Antiques Roadshow in 2106, I’m happy for the presenter to say, ‘He used to be quite famous.’
Fame is like watching someone ride past very fast on a horse. It looks exciting and you think: ‘I want to do that’ but the actual experience can be frightening or a substantial pain in the arse.
Sex is so close to creativity.
After orgasm men want to be men. I do. For a few precious minutes the whole world seems very simple and one dimensional. I always want to fix my motorbike or build something.
~ Grayson Perry
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I don’t have an outside life. Think of this as pretentious if you like, but I see myself as an artist, like Picasso gets up in the morning and does a bit of painting, so I’m going to be doing what I do until I die.
~ Rik Mayall on Creativity
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The best view is always from the mountain you’ve climbed.
~ Grayson Perry
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Money is a form of responsibility. It’s like being incredibly good-looking: you have to deal with it in a way that is not self-centred.
~ Lou Paget, on Money
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If you’re not a good cook, and I’m not, make an oven dish. They’re easy. I recommend a codfish casserole.
~ David Byrne, on Cooking
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War will make a pacifist of any sane man. War is the lowest form of humanity. We’re all here. Let’s get on with it.
~ Tony Bennett, on War and Peace
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On the bathing-tub of King T’ang the following words were engraved: “If you would one day renovate yourself, do so from day to day. Yea, let there be daily renovation.”
~Confucian Analects
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What a strange narrowness of mind now is that, to think the things we have not known are better than the things we have known.
~Samuel Johnson
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Never explain. Your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe it anyway.
~Elbert Hubbard, A Thousand and One Epigrams, 1911
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It’s immoral to suppress a natural desire, whatever it is, because why would God give it to you otherwise? If God gives you a pleasurable experience, and then says it’s wrong, then he or she or whoever it is, is a totally dysfunctional person.
~ Deepak Chopra, on Desire
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Ginsberg told me the only way to get friends in New York is to physically hang on to them and never let go.
~ John Cale, on Friendship
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What I took away from the whole Talking Heads experience was the idea that if you know the kinds of restrictions you have to work within - budgetary restrictions, or creative restrictions or whatever - that can be great, that can even be a spur to creativity. That old idea of, ‘Oh, I don’t want anybody telling me what to do’, or ‘I want my creative freedom’ - that’s bullshit. What you need is to be told clearly what the parameters are. Because, if you allow them to do anything, most people will just waffle about.
~ David Byrne, on Creativity
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The brain cells for depression are the ones that die out first.
~ Leaonard Cohen
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The surprising things about fame came after. I was shocked at how strongly people could get imprinted with one image of you. That you were the guy in the big suit, or whatever.
~ David Byrne, on Fame
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After three divorces, I’ve come to learn the necessity of empathy, sympathy, concern and generosity. All components that in their sum seem to make up the term ‘love’.
~ William Shatner, on Love
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He (Elvis) always listened to that still, small voice inside. At the end of a show in Milwaukee, he was walking off stage when he stopped to take off a black diamond ring worth $40,000 - and that was in 1976. He just threw it into the audience and walked off without even looking to see who caught it. He said that a voice inside told him that someone out there needed that ring.
~ Larry Geller, Elvis’ Hairdresser
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Whenever I’ve gambled I’ve lost. I’ve never made money that I haven’t earned.
~ William Shatner, on Money
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Taking LSD was fantastic. If I had not had that experience, I would not be where I am today.
~ Deepak Chopra, on Drugs
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Money can’t buy you love, but it can buy you an around-the-world air ticket whenever you want. Splitting up with Mat [Collishaw] was incredibly heart breaking, but you have to deal with it. Tough shit. I went to Australia for a few months.
~ Tracy Emin on Money
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I’ve learnt to really respect women on all levels. I’ve also learnt that I’ll never quite understand them, and I’m cool with that - I’ll always just be a student. I’ve also learnt that I can totally live without them and I’m proud of that. There’s gorgeous women everywhere, I go back to my room alone, do I turn into a little pile of salt and just blow away in the wind? No, I’m still here.
~ Henry Rollins, on Relationships
Culture helps us to feel less lonely. I try to connect my own life with culture. I go to see an art exhibition, I read a book, and I apply it to the world I see around me.
~ Alain de Botton, on Culture
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In science, if you can’t explain what you’re doing to a non-scientist of reasonable intelligence, then you probably don’t really know yourself.
~ James Lovelock, on Explaining Yourself
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We’ve got to learn math and history, why isn’t there a course in school on love? It doesn’t make any sense when you think about it.
~ Val Kilmer, on Love
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I have experienced levitation. It’s totally effortless; you’re surprised. But after a while the surprise wears off and then it is not so interesting any more.
~ Deepak Chopra, on the Paranormal
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There shouldn’t be a conflict between good things and commercial success. There’s often a belief that if it sells, it must be bad, or if it sells, it must be good. Neither of those is true.
~ Alain de Botton, on Money
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If I were to have a motto it might be: how can I tell you what I think until I’ve heard what I’m going to say?
~ Stephen Fry, on Creativity
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The secret of a long-term relationship? Allowing your partner to be who they are.
~ All Deepak Chopra
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I think fame is kind of vulgar. It’s like having a big car or gold-plated taps in your bathroom. It’s hard not to see it as some sort of character defect, that I colluded with my own notoriety. But, like a vulgar car that you’ve bought and somehow got used to as a mode of transport, I’m certainly not uncomfortable with it.
~ Will Self, on Fame
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Every night now I say this: ’The night was quiet and nature was resting and I was at peace.’ And then I can sleep. I made it up myself. Isn’t that great? Saying it now my eyes feel a little tired.
~ Brian Wilson, on Prayer
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There are a lot of things that are wrong with the world, but if you watch the news, that’s not the world; that’s a condensed version of everything negative that’s happening. If I look around the television set, things are pretty peaceful, and people treat each other pretty well.
~ Jim Carrey, on War and Peace
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I’ve always been a fairly reserved middle-class kind of girl.That’s why I like music, because I’m able to express my dark side. It’s not about thinking - it’s like your brain is in your body. It feels good.
~ Kim Gordon, on Music
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It’s as if there’s a golden city that everyone wants to visit and I’m coming down from having visited and I see people sweating and tearing through brambles trying to get up and I want to say, ‘Don’t go there, it doesn’t exist, it’ll hurt you and it’s pointless.’ That golden city is fame, achievement, riches and all the rest of it.
~ Stephen Fry, on Fame
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Some people might think I’m about money, but I never have been about that. If I was negotiating myself I’d probably be earning somewhere above minimum wage, but I’ve got guys that go in there like killers.
~ Jim Carrey on Money
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When I saw my mother struggle it gave me ambition. It made me want to be rich enough to buy her a better life.
~ Tony Bennett, on Money
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If you value the person you’re with, you have to be aware of them all the time. That’s a duty in a relationship that I hadn’t figured earlier on. It’s like making love - it becomes deeper and more satisfying if your attention is on the other person.
~ William Shatner, on Love
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People shouldn’t borrow money to start married life. Better they have a bring-a-bottle reception in the local park.
~ Martin Lewis, on Money
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The best lovers do not have the best bodies. They are not the best-looking, and they do not have the largest respective body parts.What they do have is the best attitude: they are completely enthusiastic.
~ Lou Paget, on Sex
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A few years ago when I was cleaning up from drugs and booze, a friend of mine said to me, ‘Allow yourself the luxury of doubt.’ I love that expression, viewing doubt as an actual luxury, not as something troubling.
~ Will Self, on Doubt
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If you said that money made you miserable, you’d be lying through your back teeth. I used to think about money all the time when I never had it and now that I do, I don’t.
~ Irvine Welsh, on Money
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You must concentrate on one thing, then everything else becomes easier. But if you concentrate on many things, you achieve nothing. My guru Baba Allaudin Khan told me this when I was 15 and I was torn between playing sitar or being a dancer. It changed my life.
~ Ravi Shankar, on Success
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It’s better to fight for something than against something.
~Author Unknown
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To know the road ahead, ask those coming back.
~Chinese Proverb
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Men who kiss well should be cloned. Kissing is the number one thing that gets women’s motors running. And that’s one of the things that ends up slacking off in a long-term relationship.
~ Lou Paget, on Relationships
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Everyone should learn to do one thing supremely well because he likes it, and one thing supremely well because he detests it.
~Brigham Young
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What are your favorite wise sayings?
