Richard Ben Cramer

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

Stay at home in your mind. Don’t recite other people’s opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

If you are really thankful, what do you do? You share.

The poets aim is either to profit or to please, or to blend in one the delightful and the useful. Whatever the lesson you would convey, be brief, that your hearers may catch quickly what is said and faithfully retain it. Every superfluous word is spilled from the too-full memory.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

It’s all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another you. One’s enough.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

The years teach much what the days never knew.