"Why and How are words so important that they cannot be too often used."
– Napoleon
"If you don't want to work you have to work to earn enough money so
that you won't have to work."
– Ogden Nash
"I don't believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or to
make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel."
– Gloria Naylor
"Nobody really cares if you're miserable, so you might as well be happy."
– Cynthia Nelms
"Nobody believes the official spokesman... but everybody trusts an
unidentified source."
– Ron Nesen
"I don't like to discuss my marriage, but I will tell you something
which may sound corny but which happens to be true. I have steak at home.
Why should I go out for hamburger?"
– Paul Newman, from Paul and Joanne: A Biography of Paul Newman
and Joanne Woodward by Joe Morella and Edward Z. Epstein (1988), p. 157
"We don't see things as they are; we see them as we are."
– Anaïs Nin
"Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when
a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will
strangle you with his panic."
– Anaïs Nin
"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to
replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies
of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."
– Anaïs Nin
"A beautiful lady is an accident of nature. A beautiful old lady is a work of art."
– Louis Nizer
"Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly
because it means you don't have to try."
– Peggy Noonan
"Fashion is what everyone is doing. Style is what you're doing."
– Glenn O'Brien
"A laugh is a terrible weapon."
– Kate O'Brien
"If you are young and you drink a great deal, it will spoil your health,
slow your mind, make you fat — in other words, turn you into an adult.
– P.J. O'Rourke
"A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent.
I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita:
'I am become death, the destroyer of worlds!' "
– J. Robert Oppenheimer, on the first atomic explosion
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a
gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were
instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish
spurting out ink."
– George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946
"Life can be real rough ... you can either learn from your problems,
or keep repeating them over and over."
– Marie Osmond
"Nothing is more powerful than habit."
– Ovid
"I never kept up with the fashions. I believed in wearing what I thought looked
good on me."
– Bettie Page
"How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?"
– Satchel Paige
"What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is the dearness
only that gives everything value."
– Thomas Paine
"Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will
surprise you with their ingenuity."
– General George S. Patton, Jr.
"No poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it
by making other bastards die for their country."
– George Smith Patton
"Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices."
– Laurence J. Peter
"Speak when you're angry — and you'll make the best speech you'll ever regret."
– Laurence Peter
"There's only one thing worse than the man who will argue over anything,
and that's the man who will argue over nothing."
– Laurence Peter
"Two can live as cheaply as one — if they both have good jobs."
– Laurence Peter
"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once
we grow up."
– Pablo Picasso
"If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening."
– Marge Piercy
"About the only thing that comes to us without effort is old age."
– Gloria Pitzer
"...But when he [the people's champion] has disposed of foreign
enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from
them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order
that the people may require a leader."
– Plato
"Alcohol is a good preservative for everything but brains."
– Mary P. Poole
"I don't avoid pain by not remembering something; I try to remember....
Memory is empowering, and it's what gives you your sense of continuity
in the world."
– Melinda W. Popham
"People think that because a novel is invented, it isn't true. Exactly
the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true,
since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened.
The novel can do that."
– Anthony Powell
"It is enough that I am of value to somebody today."
– Hugh Prather
"Friends will keep you sane, Love could fill your heart, A lover can
warm your bed, But lonely is the soul without a mate."
– David Pratt
"A friend is the one who comes in when the whole world has gone out."
– Grace Pulpit