Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.
- the movie Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
In individuals, insanity is rare;
but in groups, parties, nations and epochs,
it is the rule.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
There's a fine line between genius and insanity.
I have erased this line.
- Oscar Levant
Well excuse me - we've got something
a little unusual going on here -
time travel, parallel universes,
or just a little common ordinary insanity.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again,
but expecting different results.
- Rita Mae Brown, also attributed to Einstein
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing
over and over and expecting different results.
- Albert Einstein
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again
and expecting different results.
- Albert Einstein (attributed)
There is a fine line between perseverance and insanity.
At what point have you tried your best,
and it's time to do something different?
It's a balance - a paradox.
If you get in the habit of giving up
as soon as something gets difficult,
your life won't work,
but if you keep tilting at windmills -
madly trying the same thing again and again,
your life also won't work.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Surrealism had a great effect on me
because then I realized that
the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity.
Surrealism to me is reality.
- John Lennon
Smell the smells, feel the fear,
and smile at the incoherent way
life runs us in circles
while inscribing the real lessons
in a corner of the margin.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
The World Runs On God's Rules, and On God's Time.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
What is life?
It is the flash of a firefly in the night.
It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.
It is the little shadow which runs across
the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
- Crowfoot (Blackfoot warrior and orator 1830 - 1890)
The River of Life flows without emotion.
The River surges. The River quiets.
The River overflows its banks. The River dries to a trickle.
The River swirls and storms. The River becomes calm.
The River runs clear. The River runs dark with silt.
The River is indifferent to what benefit
or what harm is caused by its water.
The River is the River, and that is all there is to it.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Happiness is having a large, loving, caring,
close-knit family in another city.
- George Burns
Here's a toast to your new bride who has everything a girl
could want in her life, except for good taste in men.
- Anonymous
Nothing echoes like an empty mailbox.
- Charles M. Schulz' cartoon Peanuts
In order to be happy with a man,
you must understand him a lot and love him a little.
To be happy with a woman, you must love her a lot
and not try to understand her at all.
- Helen Rowland
My father and he had one of those English friendships
which begins by avoiding the intimacies
and eventually eliminates speech altogether.
- Jorge Luis Borges
Confused Memories of Childhood:
Hate to my father, cruel hate,
confused with love - a mix not great.
The man I love - the man I hate;
the man I want to emulate.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
- George Bernard Shaw
Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president,
but they don't want them to become politicians in the process.
- John F. Kennedy
Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.
- Margaret Mead
Give a man one rabbit, and he will eat for a day;
give a man two rabbits, and he will
feed his family and his neighbors
and return you 64,768 rabbits in change.
- Anonymous
Families are like fudge... mostly sweet with a few nuts.
- Anonymous
Every child comes with the message
that God is not yet discouraged of man.
- Rabindranath Tagore
The true meaning of life is to plant trees,
under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
- Nelson Henderson
No man stands so tall as when he stoops to help a child.
- Anonymous (often attributed to Abraham Lincoln)
Nothing you do for a child is ever wasted.
- Garrison Keillor
Let parents bequeath to their children
not riches, but the spirit of reverence.
- Plato
Sisters are different flowers from the same garden.
- Anonymous
The ache for home lives in all of us,
the safe place where we can
go as we are and not be questioned.
- Maya Angelou
Tell me about a person's family, friends, and community,
and I'll tell you what his opinions are.
- Mark Twain
(paraphrase)
He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother.
- Roe Fulkerson
Mother is the name for God
in the lips and hearts of little children.
- William Makepeace Thackeray
To the people who love you,
you are beautiful already.
This is not because they're
blind to your shortcomings
but because they so clearly see your soul.
- Victoria Moran
Sister is probably the most competitive
relationship within the family,
but once the sisters are grown,
it becomes the strongest relationship.
- Margaret Mead
Sometimes, our family's most important job
is reminding us how unimportant we are.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
What is our family?
We touch our full hearts and see ourselves
reflected whole in each other's eyes.
- Mary Anne Radmacher
Consider a new beginning with your family -
choose to take them less seriously.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist
except in the mothballs of memory.
- John Steinbeck (Travels With Charley)
You don't choose your family.
They are God's gift to you, as you are to them.
- Desmond Tutu
There's no tragedy in life like the death of a child.
Things never get back to the way they were.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Suspicion and jealousy are the death knell of any relationship.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
But what a cruel thing is war
to separate and destroy families and friends.
- Robert E. Lee
Your greatest gift to your family and friends is yourself -
your relaxed, happy, and fully-present self.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
You are my family because I CHOOSE you.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
What can you do to promote world peace?
Go home and love your family.
- Mother Teresa
The magic words for a great family are,
"I love you just the way you are."
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
The price of freedom for a nation is lives and money.
Often, the price of freedom for an individual
is challenging the closed minds of family and friend.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Nobody has ever asked the nuclear family to live
all by itself in a box the way we do.
With no relatives, no support,
we've put it in an impossible situation.
- Margaret Mead
The best of all gifts around any Christmas tree
is the presence of a happy family all wrapped up in each other.
- Burton Hills
A person isn't who they are during
the last conversation you had with them -
they're who they've been
throughout your whole relationship.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
You are my Family
- Karen Drucker
Unlike grown-ups, children have little need to deceive themselves.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I think, at a child's birth,
if a mother could ask a fairy godmother
to endow it with the most useful gift,
that gift should be curiosity.
- Eleanor Roosevelt
Tell me whom you live with,
and I will tell you who you are.
- Spanish Proverb
No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy,
the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child.
The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.
- Emma Goldman
God could not be everywhere, so he created mothers.
- Jewish Proverb
Home is where our loved ones are.
Home is not a structure, but the place that we feel comfortable,
the place we belong - the place of our loved ones.
A palace is not a home without loved ones.
A shack or an open field can be paradise
when shared with a loving family.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
I soothe my conscience now with the thought that
it is better for hard words to be on paper
than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.
- Anne Frank
No partner in a love relationship...
should feel that he has to give up
an essential part of himself to make it viable.
- May Sarton
When your whole family is loving and supportive, it is a great blessing.
But when family members are indifferent or hostile, release your expectations,
and find the love and support you need elsewhere.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
The final forming of a person's character
lies in their own hands.
- Anne Frank
Instead of needing lots of children,
we need high-quality children.
- Margaret Mead
And when our baby stirs and struggles to be born
it compels humility: what we began is now its own.
- Margaret Mead
In all our contacts, it is probably the sense
of being really needed and wanted
which gives us the greatest satisfaction
and creates the most lasting bond.
- Eleanor Roosevelt
But what a cruel thing is war
to separate and destroy families and friends,
and mar the purest joys and happiness
God has granted us in this world,
to fill our hearts with hatred
instead of love for our neighbors,
and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world!
- Robert E. Lee
We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children
that makes the heart too big for the body.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
No love, no friendship can cross the path of our destiny
without leaving some mark on it forever.
- Francois Muriac
Mother's love grows by giving.
- Charles Lamb
If you get frustrated by some of your family,
focus on the good aspects of your relationship
and attempt to overlook the irritations.
Then give thanks for everyone who plays a part in your life.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Please sign up on the form below to receive
my Free Daily Inspiration - Daily Quotes email.
You can also search my large collection of Funny Quotes.
May the world be kind to you,
and may your own thoughts be gentle upon yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
All materials & writings are copyright © Jonathan Lockwood Huie, except for quotes and other specifically identified material which belong to their respective copyright holders if applicable.