Saturday Quote-a-thon: Words of Praise and the Like

Where's Rocket Scientist's blog, you might be wondering (if you had little or no life)? I'm comin', I'm comin'. Rome wasn't built in a day, you know, though of course that has nothing to do with cutting and pasting quotes from a file.

Still, I do want you all to be happy, so in honor of my happiness in the new way my blog looks (thanks to LadyJava), today it's all about praise and the like.

I can take any amount of criticism, so long as it is unqualified praise.
--Noel Coward

Live so that you can at least get the benefit of the doubt.
--Kin Hubbard

In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is very high; in reality, very low.
--Aldous Huxley

Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.
--Robert Green Ingersol

There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talent.
--Thomas Jefferson

He who praises everybody, praises nobody.
--Samuel Johnson

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
--Samuel Johnson

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people they think it's their fault.
--Henry Kissinger

Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.
--Joseph Wood Krutch

Heredity is a splendid phenomenon that relieves us of responsibility for our shortcomings.
--Doug Larsen

Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede -- not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above fourteen.
--George Lichtenberg

Any of us can achieve virtue, if by virtue we merely mean the avoidance of the vices that do not attract us.
--George Lichtenberg

Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.
--Abraham Lincoln

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

This is the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he is profoundly ignorant.
--Thomas Babington, Lord Macauley

Some persons are likeable in spite of their unswerving integrity.
--Don Marquis

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
--H.L. Mencken

That must be wonderful; I have no idea of what it means.
--Moliere

There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.
--Michel de Montaigne

Few persons have sufficient wisdom to prefer censure, which is useful, to praise which deceives them. --François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.
--Will Rogers

It's hard to say who gets criticized the most, the successful person, or the failure. But it's mighty close.
--Joe Moore

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
--George Orwell

He who dares not offend cannot be honest.
--Thomas Paine

If everyone is thinking alike then somebody isn't thinking.
--Gen. George Patton

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible.
--Bertrand Russell


With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.
--Arthur Schopenhauer

As long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.
--George Bernard Shaw