The Gist of It - Scathing Quotations, Bitter Wisdom and Brutal Truths

literary quotations, philosophical quotations, quotes for cynics, darkly humorous quotes, quotations by E.M. Cioran, Albert Camus, F. Nietzsche, Samuel Beckett, H.L. Mencken, Christopher Spranger, Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain, other witty curmudgeons...

THE GIST OF IT
brutal truths. bitter wisdom. gallows humor.

Quotations for people who can laugh at the fact that nothing's really funny.

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The world was made for people who aren't cursed with self-awareness. - Bull Durham, screenplay by Ron Shelton

You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it. - Art Buchwald

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch. - Lily Tomlin

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave. - Quentin Crisp

Life is like a B-Grade movie. You don't want to leave in the middle, but you don't want to see it again.  - Ted Turner

The problem with the global village is all the global village idiots.   - P. Ginsparg

The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notiously unenlightened, misled by a mass media notoriously phony.    - Paul Goodman, as quoted in The Return of the Portable Curmudgeon

The whole world is a scab. The point is to pick it constructively.    - Peter Beard

I love mankind; it's people I can't stand.  - Charles Schultz

Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by the desire of changing his bed. One would prefer to suffer near the fire, and another is certain he would get well if he were by the window.   - Charles Baudelaire

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, pee in it, and serve it to the people that piss you off.   - Jack Handy, Deep Thoughts

One is born into a herd of buffaloes and must be glad if one is not trampled under foot before one's time. - Albert Einstein

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
Terror of the future is always grafted onto the desire to experience that terror.
If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.

This craving to revise our enthusiasms, to change our idols, to pray elsewhere...
The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.
                                     - E.M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.
- Cyril Connolly

Proverbs for Paranoids

1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immortality of the Master.
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.
4. YOU hide, they seek.
5. Paranoids are not paranoids because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Democracy is an abuse of statistics. - Jorge Luis Borges

The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success disgraceful.

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
- H. L. Mencken

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.
Liberty is being free from the things we don't like in order to be slaves of the things we do like.
- Ernest Benn

Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is a good thing. Fleas are interested in dogs.
- P. J. O'Rourke

A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five. - Unknown

Happiness : An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.
Hatred: A sentiment appropriate to the occasion of another's superiority.
Impiety, n. Your irreverence toward my deity.
Deliberation, n. The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on.
Day, n. A period of time of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.
Birth, n. The first and direst of all disasters.
LONGEVITY, n. Uncommon extension of the fear of death.

MAN, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.

LOGIC, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

HAPPINESS, n. An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.

YEAR n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.

LIFE, n. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay. We live in daily apprehension of its loss; yet when lost it is not missed.

APOLOGIZE, v.i. To lay the foundation for a future offence
OPTIMIST, n. A proponent of the doctrine that black is white.
- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Suffering is overated. - Bill Veeck

Equal opportunity means everybody will have a fair chance at being incompetent. - Laurence J. Peter

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.  - Gore Vidal

God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life.
- Jeff Magnum, Neutral Milk Hotel, "Two-Headed Boy Part 2," In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

You are free and that is why you are lost.
In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world.  -Franz Kafka

CLOV: Do you believe in life to come?
HAMM: Mine was always that.    - Samuel Beckett, Endgame

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
- Samuel Beckett, opening line of Murphy, the funniest novel ever written.

Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to remain silent, and solitude, that's what I've had to make the best of.
- Samuel Beckett, The Unamable

To live is to lose ground.
Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.
No one ever recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
Invalids of hope, we are all still waiting; and life is only the hypostatization of waiting.
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our own corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air.
- E. M. Cioran  (tr. Richard Howard)

pith... poetry, prose & art for people who know wine from ripple. click here.

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.    - Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes)

A pessimist is a man who has had to listen to too many optimists.
-Don Marquis

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people meaner.
- Karl Krause

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
Faith can be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurence of the improbable.
For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
- H.L. Mencken
Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.
- Jonathan Swift

It is a luxury to be understood.  - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have so much to do that I am going to bed.  - Savoyard Proverb

Love your neighbor, but don't pull down the hedge.  - Swiss Proverb

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

First get your facts; then you may distort them at your leasure.

Truth is the most valuable thing we have -- so let us economize it.
  - Mark Twain

The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those who have not got it. - George Bernard Shaw

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.   - Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens.
- Woody Allen

Our planet is the mental institution for the universe.   - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds.
The pessimist knows it.    -J. Robert Oppenheimer

What we call basic truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others. - Albert Camus
When one has no character one has to apply a method.
- Albert Camus, The Fall

Time is the best teacher. Unfortunately, it kills all its students.
Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.
  - Jean de la Bruyere

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.    - Aldous Huxley

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.  -Oscar Wilde

Life does not cease to be funny when people die anymore than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.    - G.B. Shaw

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.     - Lillian Hellman

The unknown is an exception, the known a deception.
Knowledge is an old error remembering its youth.
Only useless things are indispensable.
Vegetables are more serious than men and more sensitive to frost.
   - Francis Picabia, Poems and Aphorisms

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
- Albert Einstein

Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.    - George Santayana

Life is like an onion: you peel off layer after layer and then you find there is nothing in it.    - James Gibbons Huneker

If it was necessary to tolerate in other people everything that one permits in oneself, life would be unbearable. - Georges Courteline

At all times in history, and in all places on earth, the Bogus has been king.
It is not a way of life that a wise man proposes, but a way around life.
So much havoc has optimism wrought in this world that pessimism appears not only a legitimate way of looking at things but a moral duty.
Philosophers espouse freedom of thought; the wise, freedom from thought.
There is but one road to take if you intend to secure worldly power and success-- and it is paved with the flesh and blood of your fellow men.
Self-knowledge is a punishment which lucid men mete out to themselves.
After spending the day in solitude, you desire to go out in the evening with friends, and after going out in the evening with friends, to spend the rest of your days in solitude.
God does not have the monopoly on omnipresence: this is a privilege enjoyed by Injustice as well.
Every discovery decays into a certainty, and every idea into an ideology.
   - Christopher Spranger, The Effort To Fall

Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.
Man is the only animal which causes pain to others without any further purpose except to cause it.
Human life, like all inferior goods, is covered on the outside with a false glitter; what suffers always conceals itself.
The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.
- Arthur Schopenhauer

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
- Lily Tomlin

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.    -Thornton Wilder

The meaning of life is that it stops.     - Franz Kafka

Life is something to do when you can't get to sleeep.    - Fran Lebowitz

Life is a gamble at terrible odds -- if it was a bet, you wouldn't take it.
- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.
- Catherine Aird

Life is a zoo in a jungle.   -Peter De Vries

Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.   -Karl Kraus

Happiness, for Usnelli, was a suspended condition, to be lived holding your breath.
- Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves

I am an old man. Throughout my life I have worried about many things. Most of which never happened.    - Mark Twain

Thanks, for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks, for a nation of finks.
- William S. Burroughs

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