1001 Smartest Things Ever Said

"The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill . . . The canter that brings you to a standstill need not be only coming to rest. It cannot be, while you still live. For to live is to function. That is all there is to living."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., on his 90th birthday (March 31, 1931) and after more than a half-century as Justice of the the Supreme Court
"We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it-and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again-and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore."
-Samuel L. Clemens ("Mark Twain"), American author
"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations."
-Sir Winston Churchill, My Early Life, 1930
"We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes, but have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth like brothers."
-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., American civil rights leader