The Sweetest Strawberry:
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger.
He fled, the tiger after him.
Coming to a precipice,
he caught hold of the root of a wild vine
and swung himself over the edge.
The tiger sniffed at him from above.
Trembling, the man looked down to where,
far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him.
Only the vine sustained him.
Two mice, one white and one black,
little by little started to gnaw away the vine.
The man then saw a luscious strawberry near him.
Grasping the vine with one hand,
he plucked the strawberry with the other.
How sweet it tasted.
- Zen Koan
Overflowing Cup of Tea:
The Zen Master poured his visitor's teacup full, and then kept pouring.
The visitor watched until he could no longer restrain himself.
"It is overfull. No more will go in!"
"Like this cup," the Zen Master said,
"you are full of your own opinions and assumptions.
How can you learn truth until you first empty your cup?"
- Traditional Zen Koan
The Moon Cannot Be Stolen:
A thief entered the little hut of a Zen Master,
but discovered there was nothing to steal.
The Zen Master discovered the thief.
"You have come a long way to visit me," he told the prowler,
"and you should not return empty-handed.
Please take my clothes as a gift."
The thief was bewildered,
but he took the clothes and slunk away.
The Zen Master sat naked, watching the moon.
"Poor fellow," he mused,
"I wish I could have given him this beautiful moon."
- Traditional Zen Koan
Time to Die:
A Zen teacher had a rare and priceless teacup.
One day, his precocious student accidentally broke the cup.
Hearing the footsteps of his teacher,
the student held the pieces of the cup behind his back.
When the master appeared, he asked: "Why do people have to die?"
"This is natural," explained the teacher.
"Everything has to die and has just so long to live."
The student showed the shattered cup, saying,
"It was time for your cup to die."
- Traditional Zen Koan
What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping?
- Traditional Zen Koan
The True Path is the path on which
there is no coming and no going.
- Traditional Zen Koan
Sweetest Lord, make me appreciative
of the dignity of my high vocation,
and its many responsibilities.
Never permit me to disgrace it by giving way
to coldness, unkindness, or impatience.
- Mother Teresa
Why does a woman work ten years to change a man's habits
and then complain that he's not the man she married?
- Barbra Streisand
A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.
- W. C. Fields
A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.
- Benjamin Franklin
It's not as great a day for the bride as she thinks.
She's not marrying the best man.
- Anonymous
A man is a fool if he drinks before he reaches the age of 50,
and a fool if he doesn't afterward.
- Frank Lloyd Wright
I care not much for a man's religion
whose dog and cat are not the better for it.
- Abraham Lincoln
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
- Groucho Marx
Barf: I'm a mog: half man, half dog. I'm my own best friend!
- the movie Spaceballs (1987)
A man likes his wife to be
just clever enough to appreciate his cleverness,
and just stupid enough to admire it.
- Israel Zangwill
A man's friendships are, like his will,
invalidated by marriage -
but they are also no less invalidated
by the marriage of his friends.
- Samuel Butler
Getting divorced just because you don't love a man
is almost as silly as getting married just because you do.
- Zsa Zsa Gabor
I am a man of fixed and unbending principles,
the first of which is to be flexible at all times.
- Everett Dirksen
One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.
- Robert A. Heinlein
Men always want to be a woman's first love -
women like to be a man's last romance.
- Oscar Wilde
Do not marry a man to reform him.
That is what reform schools are for.
- Mae West
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
You never really know a man until you have divorced him.
- Zsa Zsa Gabor
No man is truly married until he understands
every word his wife is NOT saying.
- Anonymous
One cannot have everything the way he would like it.
A man has no business to be depressed by a disappointment,
anyway; he ought to make up his mind to get even.
- Mark Twain
There are two times when a man doesn't understand a woman -
before marriage and after marriage.
- Anonymous
Afraid? Me? A man who's licked
his weight in wild caterpillars?
Afraid? You bet I'm afraid!
- Groucho Marx
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
Whenever I date a guy, I think,
"Is this the man I want my children
to spend their weekends with?"
- Rita Rudner
Marriages don't last. When I meet a guy,
the first question I ask myself is:
is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?
- Rita Rudner
Don't marry a man to reform him -
that's what reform schools are for.
- Mae West
A man is incomplete until he is married.
After that, he is finished.
- Zsa Zsa Gabor
He's the kind of man a woman would have to marry to get rid of.
- Mae West
One man's remorse is another man's reminiscence.
- Ogden Nash
You can lead a man to Congress,
but you can't make him think.
- Milton Berle
The savage in man is never quite eradicated.
- Henry David Thoreau
Beauty is the bait which with delight
allures man to enlarge his kind.
- Socrates
A man is usually more careful of his money
than he is of his principles.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Books serve to show a man
that those original thoughts of his
aren't very new at all.
- Abraham Lincoln
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers,
looks around for a coffin.
- H. L. Mencken
The man who can smile when things go wrong
has thought of someone else he can blame it on.
- Robert Bloch
Stay hopeless and confused. Keep polishing those skills.
- the movie When a Man Loves a Woman (1994)
I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man,
and I hate people like that!
- Tom Lehrer
I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason.
- Stanley Baldwin
Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.
- Albert Schweitzer
Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.
- Albert Schweitzer
A little girl at the wedding afterwards asked her mother
why the bride changed her mind.
What do you mean? responded her mother.
Well, she went down the aisle with one man,
and came back with another.
- Anonymous
It appears to be a law that you cannot have
a deep sympathy with both man and nature.
- Henry David Thoreau
When I hear a man preach,
I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.
- Abraham Lincoln
Many a man owes his success to his first wife
and his second wife to his success.
- Jim Backus
An intellectual is a man
who takes more words than necessary
to tell more than he knows.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
If it keeps up, man will atrophy
all his limbs but the push-button finger.
- Frank Lloyd Wright
If a man smiles all the time,
he's probably selling something that doesn't work.
- George Carlin
You can always tell when a man's well informed.
His views are pretty much like your own.
- H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
Adventure is not outside man; it is within.
- George Eliot
I will far rather see the race of man extinct
than that we should become less than beasts
by making the noblest of God's creation,
woman, the object of our lust.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi
The man who says he is willing to meet you halfway
is usually a poor judge of distance.
- Laurence J. Peter
If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house
with the conscious design of doing me good,
I should run for my life.
- Henry David Thoreau
Man's nature is not essentially evil.
Brute nature has been known to
yield to the influence of love.
You must never despair of human nature.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi
I would never want to be a member of a group
whose symbol was a man nailed to two pieces of wood.
- George Carlin
The man who reads nothing at all
is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
- Thomas Jefferson
God must love the common man, he made so many of them.
- Abraham Lincoln
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth,
but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.
- Winston Churchill
Show me a sane man, and I will cure him for you.
- Carl Jung
Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because
he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong
only because he has remained silent.
- Winston Churchill
One man's "magic" is another man's engineering.
"Supernatural" is a null word.
- Robert A. Heinlein
Man tends to treat all of his opinions as principles.
- Herbert Sebastian Agar
The civilized man has built a coach,
but has lost the use of his feet.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Clothes make the man.
Naked people have little or no influence on society.
- Mark Twain
The man who does not read good books
has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
- Mark Twain
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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.