Selected value quotes

1. The greatest science in the world; in heaven and on earth; is love.

2. A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.

3. I can't change the fact that my paintings don't sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture.

4. What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

5. Analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks believed. Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving? ... Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended.

6. Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

7. Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

8. The true worth of a man is not to be found in man himself, but in the colours and textures that come alive in others.

9. A book is simply the container of an idea-like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.

10. Only a fool thinks price and value are the same.

11. One hour of right-down love is worth an age of dully living on.

12. Education is the best provision for old age.

13. The trade of the petty usurer is hated with most reason: it makes a profit from currency itself, instead of making it from the process which currency was meant to serve. Their common characteristic is obviously their sordid avarice.

14. Voting is fundamental in our democracy. It has yielded enormous returns.

15. If I give you a good wine, you will see how it tastes and after you ask where it comes from.

16. A world where nothing is had for nothing.

17. If I have any justification for having lived it's simply, I'm nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There's some value in that.

18. Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.

19. The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that.

20. Hold on to me: Someday I may be quite valuable.

21. Why is my autograph so little in demand, except on checks?

22. My time is far too valuable for me to spend any of it trying to improve myself.

23. Unfortunately, it's possible to be able to do something extremely well that nobody ever wants done.

24. If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

25. The earth only has so much bounty to offer and inventing ever larger and more notional prices for that bounty does not change its real value.

26. There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.

27. Obsolescence and death, the reign of the archaic, the abandoned, and the corny: Really, if you saw Windows 3.0 on the sidewalk outside the building, would you bend over and pick it up?!?

28. All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

29. A day wasted on others is not wasted on one's self.

30. You play the hand you're dealt. I think the game's worthwhile.

31. Beauty like hers is genius.

32. A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.

33. Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.

34. A friend is worth all hazards we can run.

35. Every man should have a college education in order to show him how little the thing is really worth.

36. An ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.

37. We work to become, not to acquire.

38. When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

39. Human resources are the most valuable assets the world has. They are all needed desperately.

40. I took one Draught of Life - I'll tell you what I paid - Precisely an existence - The market price, they said.

41. As a nation today, we have not rejected the sanctity of human life. The American people have not had an opportunity to express their view on the sanctity of human life in the unborn. I am convinced that Americans do not want to play God with the value of human life. It is not for us to decide who is worthy to live and who is not. Even the Supreme Court's opinion in Roe v. Wade did not explicitly reject the traditional American idea of intrinsic worth and value in all human life; it simply dodged this issue.

42. Islam is dearer than what we imagine.

43. If women knew how much we missed them, they would leave sooner.

44. Nothing is more sacred than the facts.

45. If she undervalue me, What care I how fair she be?

46. Western field-work conjures up images of struggle on horseback [:]-toughing it out on one canteen a day as you labor up and down mountains. The value of a site is supposedly correlated with the difficulty of getting there. This, of course, is romantic drivel. Ease of access is no measure of importance. The famous La Brea tar pits are right in downtown Los Angeles. To reach the Clarkia lake beds, you turn off the main road at Buzzard's Roost Trophy Company and drive the remaining fifty yards right up to the site.

47. 'Genuine things are those to which commodities and other means of exchange can be reduced, particularly gold. But like gold, genuineness, abstracted as the proportion of fine metal, becomes a fetish.'

48. No amount of status or reward will compensate for your inadequacy as a human being.

49. To add to golden numbers golden numbers.

50. 'It was worth being born to have known Huxley.'

51. Speak but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.

52. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself ; waste nothing.

53. It is said that our paper is as good as silver, because we may have silver for it at the bank where it issues. This is not true. One, two, or three persons might have it; but a general application would soon exhaust their vaults, and leave a ruinous proportion of their paper in its intrinsic worthless form.

54. All is not gold that glisteneth.

55. This was a good week's labour.

56. Money will accomplish much in business, love and war but it isn't worth a cent in nature. You could plant all the doubloons lost in the Spanish Main on a New England farm and you would not raise a single ear of corn the more therefor. You could take the golden eagles of America and put them in the alfalfa fields of Indiana and you would not get a single blade more of grass. The moral is that nature has her own way of fixing valuation; and her valuation is the way of return made from the soil. She does not care the least what men may say, by way of trade and barter, that she is worth. Her worth in her own scales consists in her ability to produce something that will minister to the needs, the comforts and even to the luxuries of her children.

57. I hate plays. I've never seen the point of paying money to watch people shout a lot and pretend to die, and now that I'm the father of three young children I don't have to.

58. I want her more than diamonds, I want her more than gold. I want her more than anything anyone could hold.

59. Wagner: There were printers getting more than journalists! Milne: Yes, I know, but you make it sound as if the natural order has been overthrown. Fish sing in the streets, rivers run uphill, and the printers are getting more than the journalists. Okay - you're worth more than a printer. But look at some of this - 'We find the vanishing vicar of Lovers' Leap!' 'Sally Smith is a tea lady in a Blackpool engineering works, but it was the way she filled those C-cups which got our cameraman all stirred up!' It's crap. And it's written by grown men earning maybe ten thousand a year. If I was a printer, I'd look at some of the stuff I'm given to print, and I'd ask myself what is supposed to be so special about the people who write it - is that radical enough for you - Dick?

60. Living on Earth / Tell me, what's a black life worth? / A bottle of juice / is no excuse, the truth hurts!

61. If it don't make dollars it don't make sense.

62. Karabakh, as a landmass, what kind of benefit can it give to us...? All the world's most powerful governments pay millions of dollars for seas and deserts, 100's of acres of land bought for ownership, and improvement done for later benefit. Because it's land that is forever stable, money is just paper.

63. Workers, the most absolutely necessary part of the whole social structure, without whose services none can either eat, or clothe, or shelter himself, are just the ones who get the least to eat, to wear, and to be housed withal - to say nothing of their share of the other social benefits which the rest of us are supposed to furnish, such as education and artistic gratification.

64. One thing remaining, infallible, would be Enough.

65. What the poet has in mind . . . is that poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of imagination. The poet tries to exemplify it, in part as I have tried to exemplify it here, by identifying it with an imaginative activity that diffuses itself throughout our lives.

66. Other parks can have parades, they can have bands and thrill rides, and all that kind of stuff. But we have the Disney characters. Don't you realize how much they mean to people? A family comes into the park and they see one of our characters and they immediately have their child run over. They get their camera out and they take pictures of their little kids with Mickey or Minnie or Goofy or whoever happens to be there at the time. This is what people enjoy and this is what is important to us.

67. Of course it [football] is brutal. So is Homer brutal, and Tolstoi.

68. 'For washed in life's river, My bright mane forever Shall shine like the gold As Iguard o'er the fold.'

69. Why that's a hundred miles away. That's a long way to go just to eat.

70. I couldn't understand the language, I couldn't understand a word in the whole book, but it was somehow too eloquent to use for a fire.

71. How did money ever happen? What's it mean? What's it for?

72. There are 196 SCSU students that have Rec. passes that cost $27 per semester, which is a really good deal considering you could spend that in one night.

73. 'What was the price on his head?'

74. The mountain trees bring about their own demises [by being useful], burning oil exhausts itself in fire [when people use it in oil lamp]. The fruits of the cinnamon tree can be eaten, hence the trees are cut down; the varnish tree is useful, hence incisions are made in it. Everyone knows the usefulness of being useful, but no one knows the usefulness of being useless.

75. Each play worth seeing should be watched a second time on the faces of the audience.

76. Our losses should frequently be put on the credit side.

77. All my possessions for a moment in time.

78. The superfluous does not deserve to be enhanced.

79. The customer who calls or writes me is an invaluable asset. He deserves positive responses.

80. Profit is the consequence of a service rendered, not of a deal made.

81. It was signed, not stamped!

82. They say that the world rests on the backs of 36 living saints - 36 unselfish men and women. Because of them the world continues to exist. They are the secret kings and queens of this world... I've met a lot of kings, and emperors and heads of state in my time, Joshua. I've met them all. And you know something? I think I liked you best.

83. For Wits are treated just like Common Whores; First they're enjoy'd, and then kickt out of Doors.

84. You're such a wonderful person But you got problems

85. dreamtree,truthtree tree of jubilee:with aeons of (trivial merely)existence,all when may not measure a now of your treasure

86. Everything here is free Everything but you and me This painting never dries Stupidity tries

87. You can get dancers like this for 75$ a week

88. Suppose any person to be put in possession of a large estate of fruitful land, with rich beds of gold in its gravel; countless herds of cattle in its pastures; houses, and gardens, and storehouses full of useful stores; but suppose, after all, that he could get no servants? In order that he may be able to have servants, some one in his neighbourhood must be poor, and in want of his gold - or his corn. Assume that no one is in want of either, and that no servants are to be had. He must, therefore, bake his own bread, make his own clothes, plough his own ground, and shepherd his own flocks. His gold will be as useful to him as any other yellow pebbles on his estate. His stores must rot, for he cannot consume them. He can eat no more than another man could eat, and wear no more than another man could wear. He must lead a life of severe and common labour to procure even ordinary comforts; he will be ultimately unable to keep either houses in repair, or fields in cultivation; and forced to content himself with a poor man's portion of cottage and garden, in the midst of a desert of waste land, trampled by wild cattle, and encumbered by ruins of palaces, which he will hardly mock at himself by calling 'his own.'

89. One of the few lives precious to mankind. ~ Thomas Jefferson

90. She is god, not you She was the least of the gods, if you want to call them that. But then, at the end she was the greatest

91. It's a ... a ... Tru ... Value!

92. I'm a simple man myself.

93. All work undertaken should be useful - not just for a day, or a year, but useful in the sense that it affords permanent improvement in living conditions or that it creates future new wealth for the Nation.

94. Beauty is only skin deep, but it's a valuable asset if you're poor or haven't any sense.

95. Ability will never catch up with the demand for it.

96. Among my most prized possessions are the words that I have never spoken.

97. An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit.

98. 'I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.'

99. At the heart of that Western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man, the child of God, is the touchstone of value, and all society, all groups, and states, exist for his benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and the abiding practice of any Western society.

100. You knew that what is given or granted can be taken away, that what is begged can be refused; but that what is earned is kept. (12-10-1966)